From a Colombian air base to 40 universities across Latin America, his mission is to turn financial education into a shield against scams — and a bridge between communities that no border, and no language, can divide.
By Paul K.
A single meeting bridged two continents and two languages. Across a table in Bogotá sat Santiago Guzmán — founder of Crypto Latin Fest, the event he built in 2017 to protect his community from the wave of Bitcoin scams sweeping Colombia. Facing him was myself, three months into a journey across Latin America before returning to New York. Between us sat the real-time translator of SconChat (sconai.com), turning his Spanish into my English and my English into his Spanish, sentence by sentence. And the tool itself had been built neither in New York nor in Colombia — but in Korea. We were seated at the same table, but what truly placed us in the same room was the language that flowed between us.
It was a fitting way to begin. Because if there is one wall Santiago has spent his life trying to break, it is the one built from language itself.
There are no more borders. Now, with the internet, with blockchain, with Web3 — people used to be able to move only within their own country. Not anymore.
I asked him where it all started. His answer surprised me. Before crypto, before the conferences, Santiago was a specialist in helicopters and airplanes, working for five years with the Colombian Air Force on combat aircraft, presidential planes, and combat helicopters. When Colombia signed its peace process, the defense work dried up, and the company that depended on war fell into crisis.
"It sounds ironic," he told me. Out of that crisis came an opening. Trained also as a graphic designer, Santiago and his wife built the first Crypto Latin Fest website in 2017 — never imagining it would grow into one of the largest crypto gatherings in Latin America.
If I didn't do it with my community, the scammers did it quietly. They joined people's groups, promised them huge profits, and took their money.
What pulled a helicopter engineer into the crypto world was not the price of Bitcoin. It was watching people around him lose everything. In Colombia and across Latin America, he explained, many people have no access to education — and that makes them the perfect victims. Fast money, promised returns, pyramids and multilevel schemes. Farmers, retirees, students. He watched neighbors lose their savings, and decided that if scammers were going to reach these communities, so would education.
So he took it to them. Free courses in the Colombian countryside for farmers with barely any internet. Talks in schools and universities in Bogotá, Cali, Medellín, Cúcuta, Barranquilla, Cartagena — then Mexico, Peru, Chile. More than forty universities across Latin America, speaking about blockchain, Web3, and the technology behind the headlines.
But Santiago's version of education goes far beyond charts and wallets. He teaches financial literacy, the history of money, the emotional management of money — even health and lifestyle. "What good is having Bitcoin," he asked me, "if your health is poor, if you eat badly?"
When I suggested that education might be most powerful when it helps people build something — not just avoid losing — he lit up. Because he already had the stories.
A retired police officer, nearly scammed out of his pension, learned to trade, founded a traders' academy, hired more traders, and built a Bitcoin advertising media company. A student in rural Colombia learned programming and now works remotely for a company in Estonia, earning $3,000 a month and supporting his family and grandmother. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Santiago's team ran live streams on YouTube, Instagram, Zoom, and GitHub — and people who had lost their jobs learned trading, development, even Bitcoin-themed clothing design, finding new income instead of falling into depression.
When a community is educated, opportunities for growth begin to emerge. Developers, programmers, content creators, media. When they discover the true information, they start doing big things.
This, I told him, is the real conversation we should be having across cities. Wherever I travel, I see communities that stay isolated — the English-speaking crypto world talking only to itself, the Spanish-speaking world talking only to itself. What's missing is the node that connects them.
Santiago's ambition, it turns out, runs exactly along that line. Crypto Latin Fest is no longer just Colombia. He has ambassadors in the United States (his brother, in Los Angeles), in Argentina, in Spain. He has spoken and covered events as a partner across the region — Bitcoin Las Vegas, Blockchain Summit Latam, blockchain events in Mexico, Peru, Panama, and Argentina. Editions have been held in Honduras, where 15,000 people gathered in 2024, and in El Salvador in 2021. His working team spans Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Panama — and, through his great friend Juanpon, a connection to Korea.
This community became a family. No matter what country you're from, they receive you with affection — because you bring opportunities. And we take care of each other.
We talked about the inequality hidden inside global work — how a Colombian developer might be seen as "cheap labor" simply because the peso is weak against the dollar. Santiago pushes back on that framing in his teaching. Colombia has enormous young talent, he insists; the goal is fair prices, not cheap ones — a good employee for the company, and the right amount for the person.
Then there was the subject I care about most, and the one too many overlook: the elderly. Around the world we celebrate young people entering the digital age, but rarely ask what happens to those who retire with a pension and a lifetime of wisdom — and who become, as Santiago put it, "the best victims for the scammers." His team has built separate, gentler education tracks for children, adults, young people, and the elderly. Some of his 60-year-old team members now help teach in universities.
The idea we arrived at together felt like a small blueprint. The elderly retire with decades of expertise — doctors, air force veterans, police officers, the wisest people in any field. What if they didn't just receive technology education, but gave it too? Teaching what they know with love, while learning technology in return, so they can live what Santiago called "a quiet old age" — useful, included, and earning.
Now it's a mix: they teach what they learned all their lives, and we teach them about technology, so they can live a quiet old age.
Next year, Crypto Latin Fest turns ten. The anniversary edition will move to the beach in Cartagena — a celebration at the edge of the sea. But the vision has already outgrown its own name. It is no longer only about cryptocurrencies, Santiago says. The next decade is about the entire digital era: blockchain, investment, education, and above all, massive adoption — pulling young people out of gangs and poverty and toward the digital world as gamers, streamers, developers, and educators, with English as a critical skill.
By the end of our conversation, the translator between us had done more than swap words. It had become proof of the very thing Santiago builds his life around — that the barrier is never the technology, and never the person across the table. It is only the language in between, and that can be broken. Perhaps the fact that this proof arrived through a tool made neither in New York nor in Bogotá, but in Korea, was the quietest possible argument for the borderless world Santiago describes.
Before we parted, he made me a promise: the next time we meet, he'll speak English, and I'll answer in Spanish. And in August — the 27th and 28th — if I'm still in Colombia, there's an event waiting. The year after that, there's a beach in Cartagena. We took a photo together.
bcdW will continue to follow Santiago Guzmán and Crypto Latin Fest as they build their family across borders — one community, one language at a time.
