On August 28, the Board of Directors of the Inter-American Defense Board – represented by Major Brigadeiro do Ar Flavio Luiz de Oliveira Pinto (Brazil), Director General of the IADB Secretariat, General Marco Antonio Álvarez Reyes (Mexico), President of the Council of Delegates, and General Richard Heitkamp (United States), Director of the Inter-American Defense College – participated in the 2024 edition of the South American Defense Conference (SOUTHDEC 2024), organized by the United States Southern Command and held in Chile.
SOUTHDEC 2024 focused on the theme “How to Take Advantage of New Technologies for the Defense of Hemispheric Sovereignty,” an area in which the IADB has been providing important contributions to its Member States, both in the area of Cybersecurity and in the so-called New Technologies.
As an example of actions carried out in 2024 in these relevant areas, last March the Inter-American Defense Board held the launch meeting of the “Cyber Shield” project, whose objective is to train knowledge multipliers in cyberdefense among the member states and observers of the IADB, as well as the podcast “Frontiers of Technology”, through which important topics in the current technological context of interest to the fields of security and defense are addressed, such as artificial intelligence, cybernetics, quantum computing, drones, blockchain and much more.
The IADB is a member entity of the Organization of American States (OAS) and its main purpose is to provide the Organization and its member states with technical, advisory and educational services on matters related to military and defense issues in the hemisphere, in order to contribute to compliance with the OAS Charter in its four pillars: democracy, human rights, integral development and multidimensional security.
In the photos, the leadership of the IADB appears alongside the participants of SOUTHDEC 2024 and the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of Chile, Vice Admiral Pablo Niemann Figari.
Inter-American Defense Board – Promoting and Strengthening Hemispheric Confidence and Security.
