GDPR and engineering teams in South America

Hi,

I run a US company who controls and processes data of EU citizens.

My legal counselor advised me that my engineering team in South America (Chille, Brazil) cannot access my production database, as GDPR does not allow to export data to these countries (and if they access production database, the data will be streamed to their local machine).

I'm not looking for legal advice - just curious if anyone else has heard the same thing? If so, what do they do about it?