- Only 5% of people in Latin America live in countries that fully guarantee their basic freedoms.
- Intensifying repression and restrictive laws are shrinking civic space across the region and putting human rights defenders at risk.
- With elections approaching in eight countries, urgent action is needed to safeguard hard-won rights and resist authoritarian backsliding.
Democracy is far more than casting a ballot every few years. It is not just an electoral procedure but a set of rules and practices designed to ensure that people can take part in the decisions that shape our shared lives. In Latin America, these rights and responsibilities were won through decades of struggle. Today, even if it is not always visible, they are in jeopardy.
Venezuela offers the starkest warning. Elections in the country have been hollowed out into political theater, stripped of legitimacy and exposed time and again by international observers for widespread irregularities. This assault on the popular will only serves to undermine faith in democratic institutions.
Still, the erosion of democratic institutions does not always manifest in the same way. In El Salvador, repression has become the preferred tool, sustained by a state of emergency that has been renewed forty times since March 2022. Dissenters face harsh reprisals as a direct consequence of this deterioration. The Central American country is not the exception but the strongest representation of a trend threatening to gain ground across the region.
This is not an exaggeration. At least three out of ten people in Latin America live in countries where civic space is restricted or under pressure, according to CIVICUS Monitor data. Only 5% of the population lives in countries that fully guarantee essential freedoms.
The trend is visible in many national contexts. A paradigmatic case is the “APCI law” in Peru, which restricts and criminalizes the work of civil society organizations. This is just the latest emergence of a regional trend already present in countries like Bolivia, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Paraguay. While this threat takes different forms in each legal framework, the effect is always the same: restricting social protest, weakening freedom of expression, and ultimately controlling civil society.
The effects of this democratic erosion are not just theoretical; they are evident on the ground. In Bolivia, data from the UNITAS observatory in 2024 shows that violations of democratic institutions and human rights rose by 19% in a single year.
This authoritarian drift is not accidental. It is fueled by profound social discontent: disenchantment with traditional political parties, persistent inequality, lack of quality public services, and structural corruption. Added to this is growing citizen disengagement, leading many to see strong, centralizing leaders as a “quick fix” to state inefficiency.
What is at stake is not only how NGOs operate but also the civil rights of all citizens. As is often the case, the most vulnerable are the first to pay the price. With fewer defense mechanisms and no ability to find allies to amplify their voices, neo-authoritarian governments more easily trample their rights.
The time to act is now.
At least eight countries in the region will go to the polls in the coming months. This is the most basic step in defending democratic vitality and should mark a starting point for the actors involved in this conversation.
The challenge is that even these elections are overshadowed by frustration after years of low economic growth and little progress in social conditions. The way forward, however, lies not in returning to the harmful practices that have scarred much of recent history, but in building a future-oriented vision. Economic crisis and social discontent must not be allowed to become fertile ground for greater authoritarianism.
Defending human rights is a daily task that knows no borders.t demands both global reach and global strength. The expansion of mining, oil, and fishing extractivism, in a symbiotic relationship with the erosion of democracy, jeopardizes the enormous natural wealth of these countries. Where the state fails to act, the first to suffer will be rural and Indigenous communities living in nearby territories, but the global community will also suffer from an increasingly damaged environment.
The recent challenges to the Inter-American Human Rights System in Peru, with the official attempt to withdraw from the San José Pact, are just another compelling reason to raise our voices regionally.
Democracy is not measured by a state’s ability to control society, but by people’s ability to organize, speak out and demand justice without fear of reprisal. In Latin America today, defending the right to protest and freedom of expression is more urgent than ever. Settling for a democratic façade - only open polling stations without the rest of the conditions - is not a real option. We cannot take a step back.
