In this article, we argue that efforts to internationalize higher education that do not
make visible the colonial legacy in the higher education space become catalysts that
intensify and reproduce the power asymmetries among countries, universities, and
ways of knowing. To support and illustrate our argument, we carried out an analysis
of two of the largest international scholarship programs implemented by Latin
American countries, namely, the Brazilian ‘Science without Borders’ and the Chilean
‘Becas Chile’ programs. Our analysis shows that Brazil and Chile, aiming to enhance
their position in the so-called ‘knowledge economy’, implemented strategies of
internationalization that assumed, naturalized, and possibly biased the intrinsic
benefits of internationalization at the expense of local needs and realities. We also
found that Brazil and Chile embrace a concept of internationalization equated with
academic mobility to (almost exclusively) Western/European industrialized countries
of the global North.