Maricarmen Sequera

Maricarmen Sequera is the Asunción-based co-founder and Executive Director of TEDIC, the Paraguayan civil-society organisation working on digital rights and free culture she has led since co-founding it in 2012 (see Person entry for affiliations, recognitions, and biographical structure). Tracked here as a Voice because the decade-plus arc at TEDIC has produced a sustained public analytical register — that privacy and data-protection infrastructure are not technical or procedural matters but preconditions for democratic sovereignty over the state apparatus, especially as that apparatus deploys AI and biometric systems with minimal public accountability — carried across TEDIC's own research publications, external venues including La Silla Vacía, and international civil-society advocacy conferences including RightsCon, the AI Action Summit (Paris, February 2025), and the AI Impact Summit (Belém, 2026). The corpus carries no other Paraguayan Voice entry, and Sequera's output is the primary public-facing register through which TEDIC's years of constitutional-litigation, transparency-demand, and civic-technology work on facial recognition, metadata retention, and AI governance has been analytically articulated beyond the organisation's own research output.

"Far more powerful tools than ring-binders, cameras, and wiretapped phones"

The foundational register Sequera anchors at TEDIC — and which the organisation's work has carried since the 2014–2015 Pyrawebs campaign — is a democratic-stakes argument about state surveillance: that the analytical and operational capabilities conferred by modern digital surveillance on governments represent not a continuity with historical authoritarian surveillance but a structural discontinuity. The October 2016 co-authored regional report — produced with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and TEDIC partner organisations across Latin America, with Sequera as TEDIC lead — frames this directly: a hypothetical modern-day Stroessner or revamped Operation Condor would have far more powerful tools at hand than just ring-binders, cameras, and wiretapped phones. The report documents that these tools are not theoretical — many governments are already using them — and that existing Latin American surveillance laws, designed around older wiretapping methods, lack the scope to constrain them. The solution Sequera's analytical output consistently advocates is a human-rights-standards framing: oversight mechanisms that are necessary, adequate, and proportionate.

The Paraguayan case study at the centre of this framing is the Pyrawebs campaign, which Sequera led as TEDIC's executive from 2014 through the bill's dual parliamentary rejection in 2015 — a campaign against a Senate bill that would have required ISPs to retain twelve months of communications metadata and location data on every Paraguayan internet user. TEDIC's framing positioned Pyrawebs as a test of whether Paraguayan democratic institutions would apply international human-rights standards to which they were nominally committed, not as a technical dispute over data-retention periods. The unanimous rejection by both chambers is treated in TEDIC's institutional retrospective as the foundational proof of concept for the organisation's subsequent posture across digital-rights campaigns.

"No con mi cara": facial recognition as sovereignty question

The most concentrated campaign in Sequera's post-Pyrawebs decade is TEDIC's long-running effort to document, challenge, and mobilise against Paraguay's state-deployed facial-recognition surveillance — branded as "Con mi cara no" (Not With My Face). The December 2023 campaign report — produced after a year-long project beginning November 2022 — documents TEDIC's finding that the Interior Ministry and National Police had deployed facial-recognition surveillance through 27 CONATEL contracts funded via Paraguay's Universal Service Fund, without public debate, impact assessment, or procurement transparency. A filtration of 400GB of Paraguayan police data exposing four million facial images was part of the evidentiary record. TEDIC's three named public demands — suspension of facial-recognition use until a robust personal-data-protection law is enacted, investigation of USF public-funds misuse, and guaranteed public access to all contracts and procurement records — position the campaign as a transparency-and-accountability demand within democratic institutions, not a blanket anti-technology position. The civic-technology strand of the campaign — a facial-recognition simulator and a public camera map made available to citizens — carried the analytical argument into a practical form that communities could use to understand and scrutinise the systems in their immediate environment.

In her March 2026 La Silla Vacía column — "Reconocimiento facial: entre la ilusión de seguridad y el control de los cuerpos" — Sequera extends this analysis into an external regional publication venue, framing facial-recognition systems as vulnerable by design: biometric models trained on incomplete or biased databases produce systematic errors, particularly for people who do not fit the demographic profile the system was built around. The article's title makes explicit the normative argument the campaign has carried throughout: the "illusion of security" that facial-recognition surveillance claims to provide is the justification for "control of bodies" — and the public conversation should be held on that explicit trade-off.

Prior regulatory frameworks, not ethics guidelines

Sequera's August 2021 analysis of AI in Paraguay's judiciary — examining a proposal to apply the Prometea AI system (designed for Argentine administrative tax cases) to constitutional decisions by Paraguay's Supreme Court — established the anti-technosolutionist register she has carried into the broader AI governance debate. Her argument is that deploying AI in high-stakes judicial contexts without prior human-rights regulatory frameworks is categorically different from applying efficiency technology to administrative operations: the "black box" property of neural networks — where inputs and outputs are visible but the computational process is not — makes judicial accountability impossible without prior mechanisms for algorithmic auditability, traceability, and explainability. The article positions ethical guidelines as insufficient: what is needed before any AI deployment in consequential contexts is a prior regulatory framework with measurable results and accountability mechanisms, focused on protecting individuals rather than on efficiency or national security interests.

Her February 2024 analysis of AI and academic plagiarism extends this register into the education context, making explicit the structural-power argument she brings to AI governance generally: drawing on Kate Crawford's framing of AI as "a certificate of power" — designed to serve existing dominant interests — Sequera documents how plagiarism-detection tools trained primarily on English-language text systematically misidentify writing by non-native English speakers as AI-generated, deepening existing academic inequalities rather than resolving integrity concerns. The argument treats AI governance not as a question of deploying the right algorithms but as a question of which communities bear the costs of algorithmic error.

"Inclusion without power": Global South AI governance

The most recent register in Sequera's public output is a structural critique of global AI governance processes, developed through her participation at the AI Action Summit in Paris (February 2025) and crystallised in her March 2026 analysis of the AI Impact Summit in Belém. The critique has two components. On process: the summit promoted multistakeholder inclusion but civil society and academia had limited decision-making authority despite their presence — a structure that produces participation without binding power. On substance: summit declarations establish convergence of principles without committing governments to legally binding regulatory obligations, making them ineffective instruments for addressing the power asymmetries between Global North technology producers and Global South populations most exposed to algorithmic governance with least input into its standards. The article reproduces Lula da Silva's framing of concentrated algorithmic power as "not about innovation, but about domination" — a framing that Sequera's broader output has been building toward from the Paraguayan scale, where a small national civil-society organisation building infrastructure from scratch has named the same asymmetry at the country level for more than a decade.

Her 2025 international advocacy — at the AI Action Summit, the Commission on the Status of Women 69, RightsCon 2025, and the Big Tech and Journalism Forum in São Paulo — carried this critique into simultaneous international venues, positioning TEDIC's Paraguayan vantage as a Southern Cone anchor in the regional coalition of civil-society organisations arguing that genuine Global South inclusion in AI governance requires structural change in how governance instruments are developed, not merely in who is invited to be present.

Why this is a Voice entry

A Voice entry is created here, rather than additional structure on the Person entry, because Sequera's analytical and advocacy output is itself the load-bearing object the corpus needs to track: the Paraguayan / Southern Cone register that frames privacy-and-surveillance accountability as a prerequisite for democratic sovereignty — and that has extended this framing, across more than a decade of TEDIC leadership, from the Pyrawebs metadata-retention campaign through the "No con mi cara" facial-recognition campaign and into the AI anti-technosolutionism and Global South governance-exclusion registers that have become central to the region's digital-rights discourse. The corpus carries several Latin American digital-rights voices — voice-joana-varon.md (Brazil), voice-juan-carlos-lara.md (Chile), voice-jacinta-gonzalez.md (US Latinx), voice-carolina-botero.md (Colombia) — but carries no Paraguayan or broader smaller-country Southern Cone national-jurisdiction voice. Sequera's entry closes that gap and brings into the corpus the vantage point of building civil-society digital-rights infrastructure in a country without the institutional density of Brazil or Mexico — relying more heavily on regional coalition and international networks — that the corpus's Latin American coverage has so far lacked. Affiliation, prior roles, recognitions, and biographical structure are recorded on the linked Person entry per the corpus's Person/Voice split.