Residents of Colombia will soon be able to use an updated version of their digital national identity card — known as La Cédula Digital Colombiana — stored on their Apple or Android smartphone as a passport when travelling to eight other South American countries.

The upgrade to the Cédula Digital “complies with high international standards” and will enable Colombians to verify their identity when travelling to Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay, Colombia’s national director of identification Didier Chilito has announced in a video posted on Twitter.

Colombia originally launched the Cédula Digital in 2020, enabling residents to create a digital version of their national ID card on their smartphone by downloading an app from the National Registry of Civil Status, scanning a QR code and authenticating their identity using facial recognition.

Updating the Cédula Digital for use as a digital passport for cross-border travel comes as Colombia has also revealed plans to further extend its digital identity infrastructure and to introduce a digital identity standard across the Latin American and Caribbean region.

“Colombia, being a leader and promoter of these identification issues, wants to promote a digital identity standard for Latin America and the Caribbean. We hope to be able to integrate all the peer entities of civil registration and identification in the same objective,” Chilito told a recent meeting of the Latin American and Caribbean Council of Civil Registry, Identity and Vital Statistics (CLARCIEV).

“The digital ID will continue to advance in the country. In the coming months, a campaign is planned so that citizens throughout the Colombian territory can process this document; more integrated service stations will be installed, so that all the country’s municipalities can count on this technology and, of course, also the consulates abroad.”

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