Brazil Doesn't Like Palantir
A look into how an election can make a government stop using Foundry, and how it's affecting the country
Palantir famously got their first ICE contract under the Obama administration, which engaged in the deportation of 5.3 million people during his 8-year tenure as POTUS. Homeland Security selected Palantir in 2011, which of course evolved into what we now have under the Trump administration: ImmigrationOS.
What I’m saying is that no matter the color of the administration, the United States has been expanding its reliance on Palantir software (specifically Gotham) for its security and protection.
That’s not the case with Brazil.
I began finding links based in Brazil back in 2021, with the 26th entity in my DataBase being “Atomic”, a codename that belonged to a government entity. Soon after, other branches of the executive began adding Foundry to their stack and we closed 2022 with the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Finance having access to Foundry for some specific functions.
Then came a change of government and a wave of deactivations began, wiping out almost the entire Foundry platforms that were built to support the functioning of those parts of the government. Even some commercial endeavors were suspended, and I’m not talking about small companies, I’m talking about the biggest private employer in the country.
Carrefour has been the number one retailer in Brazil for 9 consecutive years, with 60% growth since 2021 and over 11% market share. The company started their Foundry journey in 2022 and has seen tremendous numbers ever since.
A couple of years later, the link was suspended.
Even if the vast majority of the links in the region have been deactivated, some still do function. That’s the case for the Secretariat of the State of São Paulo for the Economy and the Butantan Institute, a branch of the Secretariat of the State of São Paulo for Health, considered one of the greatest health research institutions in the world.
It’s no coincidence that the State of São Paulo is governed by a conservative party that directly opposes the ideological beliefs that govern the whole of the nation, which under president Lula da Silva have shifted more to the left.
The State of São Paulo has consistently performed better than the whole nation in terms of economic and health indicators since adopting Foundry in 2022.
As it seems, Brazil’s dependency on Foundry was not deep, and the political headwind is strong enough so that a return while Lula governs is unlikely. Hopefully this was not a politically motivated change of attitude towards a platform that may very well save thousands of lives, as they are doing within the NHS in the United Kingdom or with dozens of hospitals in the United States.
The links are gone. Let’s hope we see them come back online soon. I’ll be here to let you all know.