Internet Accountability in Latin America and the Caribbean: State of Play and Outlook
An ISOC LIVE Summary
Author: Olga Cavalli Published: May 2026 Organization: European University Institute / Global Initiative for the Future of the Internet (Policy Report)
Overview
This report evaluates Internet accountability across Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) using the Internet Accountability Compass, a framework developed by the Global Initiative for the Future of the Internet that examines four interdependent dimensions:
Connectivity & Infrastructure (Access · Quality · Resilience)
Rights & Freedoms (Expression · Privacy · Rule of Law)
Responsibility & Sustainability (Ethics · Equity · Environment)
Trust & Resilience (Security · Governance · Stability)
Rather than measuring technical progress alone, the report asks whether governments, regulators, businesses, and other stakeholders are actually accountable for delivering an open, secure, inclusive, and rights-respecting Internet, and whether commitments made at global level — the Global Digital Compact, the Declaration on the Future of the Internet — translate into regional practice.
Its central conclusion is that LAC possesses many of the legal frameworks and policy commitments needed for effective digital governance, but implementation is frequently undermined by institutional weakness, uneven regulatory capacity, political instability, and persistent inequality. Accountability failures are therefore primarily institutional rather than technological.
Regional Context
The report stresses that Latin America and the Caribbean cannot be treated as a single digital policy environment. Conditions differ markedly between the Caribbean, Central America, the Andean region, Brazil, Mexico, and the Southern Cone, reflecting different political systems, economic development, and regulatory maturity. Brazil and Mexico are the region’s largest economies, with Mexico’s position shaped by its proximity to the United States. Underlying all of this, the report notes, is the fact that LAC remains the world’s most unequal region — an inequality reflected in wealth, service infrastructure, and other dimensions that act as barriers to Internet access and use.
Internet governance is increasingly shaped by competing external influences. European privacy and digital regulation have become important legislative models, particularly in data protection: Paraguay published Law No. 7593/2025 on 27 November 2025, its first general personal data protection law, aligned with EU and other Latin American frameworks. Honduras, Guatemala, and Venezuela still lack comprehensive personal data protection laws, relying on constitutional privacy guarantees and fragmented sectoral or access-to-information provisions. U.S. technology firms continue to dominate many digital services, while China has expanded its influence through investment in telecommunications infrastructure, 5G deployment, and technology supply chains. Countries throughout the region therefore face strategic choices that affect digital sovereignty as well as economic development.
The report also highlights the importance of an active multistakeholder community. Organizations from civil society, academia, the technical community, and the private sector — especially in Brazil, Mexico, Chile, and Argentina — continue to play an important role in promoting accountability and protecting digital rights.
Connectivity and Infrastructure
Connectivity and infrastructure are described as the foundation of an inclusive digital future, encompassing not only access but quality, resilience, and equity. Most LAC governments have adopted national digital strategies that place connectivity at the centre of development plans, including Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago; Peru’s National Policy of Digital Transformation runs to 2030. Regional initiatives seek to coordinate these efforts across borders: ECLAC’s eLAC digital agenda and the Ministerial Conference on the Information Society, the CARICOM Single ICT Space, the MERCOSUR Digital Agenda Action Plan, and the Andean Digital Agenda covering Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.
Mobile, 5G and fibre. Regional Internet penetration in Latin America reached 78% in 2022, above the global average, with wide variation between and within countries. Chile leads at 90% (up from 55% in 2012), followed by Argentina at 87% (from 56%), Brazil 84% (from 49%), Mexico 77% (from 40%), and Colombia 76% (from 49%). In 2024, mobile connectivity rates stood at 112% in South America, 103% in Central America and Mexico, and around 84% in the Caribbean, and more than 85% of the populations of Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Jamaica, and Uruguay were online. Approximately 70% of mobile subscriptions in the region run on 4G. As of April 2024, ten Latin American countries had commercial 5G services.
By 2030 the regional 5G market is expected to be worth over USD 28 billion annually, driven by enhanced mobile broadband revenues and fixed wireless access. Wider economic benefits — improved access to healthcare and education, advanced manufacturing, public safety, safer driving, reduced pollution — are expected to exceed USD 60 billion in 2030, equivalent to 0.9% of regional GDP, with around 43% generated in services and 29% in manufacturing through applications such as smart factories, smart cities, and smart supply networks. A table traces the launch of 5G services from Brazil and Colombia in 2020 through to a 2025 cohort that adds Ecuador and Paraguay alongside Argentina, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Costa Rica.
Fixed infrastructure has improved alongside mobile deployment. Fibre-to-the-home accelerated after the COVID-19 pandemic: between 2016 and 2021 households passed by fibre quadrupled and subscriber numbers increased tenfold, reaching approximately 27% of households — around 46 million — by end-2021, with projections suggesting 60% by 2030. Competition from smaller ISPs deploying fibre has pushed the top operator groups’ share of fibre-to-the-premises households from 44.2% to 48.5%.
Submarine cables. Undersea cables carry over 95% of international data. As of late 2022 there were 57 active submarine cables connecting the region, with further projects announced. Increased competition has already lowered costs: bandwidth prices on U.S.–Latin America routes fell by an average of 24% compounded annually between 2018 and 2021. The report profiles Deep Blue One (2,000 km, operational 2024), TAM-1 (7,000 km, Florida to Central America and the Caribbean), Google-led Firmina (U.S. East Coast to Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay), Mistral (Florida to the Pacific coast of Chile, operational 2021), and Humboldt.
Humboldt receives particular attention. At more than 12,000 km, the route is promoted by Google in partnership with the Chilean state company Desarrollo País and will provide direct connectivity between South America and Asia-Pacific, reducing latency, granting greater autonomy and resilience to Latin American telecommunications, and consolidating Chile as a regional digital hub. The report presents it as an example of innovative public-private governance. According to Analysys Mason, Google’s submarine cables across five countries in the region will generate a cumulative GDP increase of USD 178 billion between 2017 and 2027 — an annual GDP increase of 1.08% — and create approximately 740,000 additional jobs by 2027. The Curie cable alone increased Chile’s international outbound capacity by 30% and is expected to contribute USD 19.2 billion and 67,000 jobs between 2020 and 2027.
Affordability and inequality. Affordability remains one of the report’s central concerns. Data is still too expensive for the poorest 20% of the population. An entry-level fixed broadband plan can exceed 10% of gross national income per capita in countries such as Belize, far above the 2% target set for 2025 by the ITU’s Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development. Only 46.4% of the poorest households have a fixed Internet connection, compared with 84.6% of the richest, and only 35.8% of rural households have Internet access against 74.8% of urban households. Even for those who can afford service, quality is a barrier: about 55% of users report low-quality connections and nearly 40% are affected by frequent power outages. The report argues that the challenge has shifted from announcing digital strategies to ensuring they contain measurable targets, effective oversight, and enforceable universal service obligations.
Community networks, IXPs and technical governance. Community networks have emerged as an important complementary response for remote and Indigenous communities that commercial providers do not reach, though they frequently face regulatory obstacles — including non-recognition as legitimate service providers and spectrum restrictions — alongside limited funding and technical resources. The report names AlterMundi in Argentina, Rhizomatica in Oaxaca, Mexico, and the Indigenous-led Telecomunicaciones Indígenas Comunitarias (TIC AC), also in Mexico. It lists Internet para Todos in Peru alongside these, though that initiative is a carrier-led collaboration between Meta, Telefónica, and other partners rather than a community-owned network.
At the infrastructure governance level, Internet Exchange Points have helped improve connectivity and reduce costs, with Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador serving as models; CABASE in Argentina created the first Network Access Point in Latin America and has inspired similar projects. LACNIC manages IP addresses and Autonomous System Numbers under a participatory policy development model, promotes CIDR and DNSSEC adoption, and conducts educational activities on Internet governance. Recent LACNIC-hosted discussions have examined proposed network cost allocation models — “Sending Party Pays” and “Fair Share” — which the report notes could burden content providers and lead to unequal access for end users.
LEO satellites. Low Earth Orbit constellations promise to extend connectivity to the Amazon, the Andes, and remote Caribbean islands, with latency of roughly 20–40 milliseconds enabling services for schools, health centres, and public institutions. Starlink, OneWeb, and Amazon’s Project Kuiper are expanding coverage, but high terminal and subscription costs remain a barrier for low-income households, and providers must navigate differing spectrum rules, landing rights, and import taxes. The report notes that no competitive LAC companies are currently developing satellites for this market, raising long-term questions of dependency and digital sovereignty.
Shutdowns. Shutdowns are notably less frequent in LAC than in other regions: Access Now’s Shutdown Tracker Optimization Project (STOP) recorded only four incidents across four countries, including Cuba and Suriname. Targeted disruptions nonetheless remain a concern. Cuba has imposed Internet and electricity cuts in response to protests, Colombia experienced social media interruptions during the 2021 protests, and Venezuela has seen a gradual degradation of its Internet infrastructure. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has condemned such measures, while Fundación Karisma in Colombia and Derechos Digitales in Chile document and resist them.
Rights and Freedoms
Latin America possesses one of the world’s strongest normative foundations for digital rights, reflected in constitutional safeguards, Inter-American jurisprudence, comprehensive data protection laws, recognition of access to information as a fundamental right, and net neutrality principles. Implementation, however, increasingly fails to match these commitments, and the gap between rights on paper and rights in practice is widening.
The report draws on three benchmarks: Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net, which covers 72 countries; the Freedom in the World index; and the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index. Together these show strong normative commitments alongside significant implementation gaps. Notably, people in 21 of 23 LAC countries surveyed by the World Justice Project believe that top government officials use misinformation to shape public opinion — an erosion of the rule of law that directly conditions whether legal protections can be invoked and enforced.
Internet freedom. Freedom on the Net 2025 assessed 10 of 22 LAC countries. Chile and Costa Rica were assessed for the first time and recognised as global leaders, ranking third and fourth worldwide with scores of 87 and 86; Argentina also falls in the “Free” band at 71. Brazil (65), Colombia (64), Ecuador (63), and Mexico (61) are rated “Partly Free,” while Nicaragua (38), Venezuela (26), and Cuba (21) fall in the “Not Free” band. Internet diminishment in the region takes the form of DNS blocking, IP address blocking, URL filtering, and Deep Packet Inspection. (See NOTES on a scoring discrepancy within the report.)
Freedom of expression. Journalists, activists, and opposition voices are frequently targeted through online harassment, coordinated disinformation campaigns, and strategic litigation. Some governments have expanded criminal defamation laws, vague cybercrime provisions, or “fake news” regulations usable against legitimate dissent. Many countries are experiencing a decline in democratic indicators, compounded by freedom-restricting measures adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Remedies and jurisprudence. The Inter-American system provides an important institutional reference point. In its 2023 ruling in Members of the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers’ Collective (CAJAR) v. Colombia, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights recognised informational self-determination as an autonomous right under the American Convention, found that surveillance victims had been denied effective remedy, and ordered Colombia to establish mechanisms allowing individuals to access and contest data held in intelligence archives. Earlier rulings, including Ivcher-Bronstein v. Peru and Olmedo Bustos v. Chile, established that indirect restrictions on expression also violate the Convention. The IACHR’s Special Rapporteurship for Freedom of Expression has complemented this case law with thematic reports on digital surveillance and precautionary measures for journalists targeted by spyware. Compliance with Court orders nonetheless varies across the region.
Privacy and surveillance. Surveillance practices justified in the name of public security raise concerns about proportionality and oversight, particularly where judicial independence is weak. Access Now has raised concerns about biometric surveillance deployment in LAC, noting that many governments and companies lack transparency about their practices and human rights impacts, and that these technologies disproportionately affect marginalised groups. The organization’s framing — that digital rights are human rights — is presented as especially relevant in a region where structural social issues often overshadow digital rights discussions, and where technical concepts need translation into language that resonates with lived experience.
Inequality and platform governance. Women, LGBTQ+ individuals, Indigenous peoples, and human rights defenders are disproportionately exposed to online violence and intimidation with limited access to effective remedies. Content moderation decisions are often opaque and poorly adapted to local linguistic and cultural contexts, meaning formal legal protections do not reliably translate into safe and open online environments.
Responsibility and Sustainability
The report identifies responsibility and sustainability as the dimension where accountability is most underdeveloped relative to the pace of digital change. Policymaking has largely prioritised connectivity and economic growth, with less attention to ethical, environmental, and distributive implications. Global technology firms dominate regional digital markets while local innovation ecosystems struggle to compete and labour protections for platform workers remain weak.
Data protection. Approximately 40% of LAC countries have established privacy and data protection laws, and Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru recognise privacy and data protection as constitutional rights. Argentina was the first in the region to enact data protection legislation in 2000 and is updating it toward GDPR alignment; Colombia operates under Law 1581 of 2012; Chile is revising its framework to introduce new rights for data subjects; Mexico has had a federal law since 2010; Peru operates under Law No. 29733; and Costa Rica’s PRODHAB oversees data handling. Paraguay became the latest to adopt comprehensive legislation in November 2025. Honduras, Guatemala, and Venezuela remain without comprehensive frameworks. Cross-border transfer rules are often inadequate or poorly enforced, and the report warns that imported regulatory models may not address local institutional and social contexts.
Platform accountability. There is currently no regional framework requiring platforms to report on content moderation, data requests, or compliance with local law in ways comparable to the EU’s Digital Services Act. Meta and Google publish global transparency reports, but these are not consistently disaggregated in ways that enable meaningful oversight by national regulators or civil society. The IACHR’s Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression has noted the absence of shared regional content moderation standards, with the Inter-American framework providing normative principles but no enforcement mechanism for platform conduct.
Artificial intelligence governance. National AI strategies exist in only seven countries — Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, and the Dominican Republic — against a global context in which nearly 30% of countries have such instruments. Brazil developed its National Artificial Intelligence Strategy in 2021, recently updated to address transparency and responsibility. Chile stands out as a global model, having been the first country to complete UNESCO’s Readiness Assessment Methodology; fourteen countries in the region are now implementing AI readiness assessment policies, most following the UNESCO framework. A comparative regulatory mapping conducted by TrustLaw with Access Now and regional law firms — covering Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay — finds LAC initiatives increasingly influenced by European frameworks, with a broadly homogeneous approach to international alignment that could enable closer regional coordination in global forums. Implementation constraints include talent scarcity, difficulty retaining AI specialists, and significant gender gaps in the technology workforce.
Net neutrality, digital trade and data flows. Net neutrality implementation remains uneven: Chile and Peru have led on protections, while Venezuela has engaged in censorship and proposed content controls and Cuba’s state control over connections facilitates blocking. The Data Free Flows with Trust framework, proposed during the 2019 G20 Japan presidency, has drawn participation from Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico as OECD members, with Argentina, Brazil, and Peru in accession. The WTO e-commerce agreement approved in July 2024 involves Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, and Panama. The region nonetheless lacks a unified regulatory system for cross-border data flows, hindering a single digital market and limiting competitiveness.
Consumer protection and digital inclusion. Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru have developed online consumer protection initiatives aligned with OECD recommendations, with Brazil’s Consumer Protection Code and Chile’s SERNAC as examples; harmonisation efforts are underway in CARICOM and among the Pacific Alliance. Enforcement remains weak, particularly for e-commerce. Access divides map closely onto education divides: approximately 84% of households headed by someone with tertiary education have fixed Internet connections, against only 50% for those with primary education. Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, and Panama are implementing digital skills training programmes.
Environmental sustainability. The expansion of data centres, network infrastructure, and consumer devices contributes to rising energy demand and electronic waste, yet comprehensive policies on green ICT, recycling, and lifecycle management remain rare. Brazil’s ANATEL has been involved in discussions about reducing data centre carbon footprints, Chile has initiated energy efficiency programmes, and some countries are beginning to address data centre water consumption. The Environmental Alliance of America hosts the region’s first eco-labelling standards programme, supported by the UN Environment Programme through German funding. The Caribbean and parts of Central America are particularly vulnerable, as climate impacts intersect with the fragility of digital infrastructure. The report points to the CARICOM Single ICT Space and the EU–Latin America Digital Alliance as frameworks for integrating digital policy with sustainability goals.
Trust and Resilience
Trust in digital systems and institutions remains fragile. Public confidence is undermined by corruption, weak accountability mechanisms, and recurring incidents: data breaches involving government databases, social programmes, and electoral systems have exposed deficiencies in cybersecurity capacity. Institutional trust is further strained when emergency powers, expanded surveillance, or content controls introduced during crises are not rolled back.
Misinformation. The World Justice Project documents distrust and growing authoritarianism across 26 LAC countries. The Reuters Digital News Report notes rising news avoidance and escalating concern: over 60% of respondents in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Argentina reported exposure to completely made-up news within a week, with 85% in Brazil expressing concern about distinguishing real from fake news online. Generative AI intensifies the challenge. Countermeasures include participatory fact-checking — Chequeado in Argentina, El Sabueso / Animal Político and Verificado in Mexico, La Silla Vacía in Colombia — technical provenance standards from the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), UNDP Accelerator Labs active in Argentina, Colombia, and Peru, and media literacy curricula such as DigiMENTE, designed for Latin American students aged 12–17. Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico have initiated legislative measures, though Brazil’s Fake News Bill (Bill 2630) has raised concerns about freedom of speech and mandatory identification on social media accounts.
Cybersecurity. The region has seen a sharp rise in cyberattacks, especially against financial institutions and essential services, with the pandemic expanding the attack surface. The 2024 ITU Global Cybersecurity Index shows substantial gaps across national policy, cyber culture, education and training, legal frameworks, and technological standards; Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay have relatively advanced regimes while others lag considerably. The projected annual cost of cyberattacks in the region could surpass USD 90 million.
The report treats the Costa Rica ransomware attack as its central case. On 17 April 2022, an attack attributed primarily to the Conti group targeted multiple government institutions including the Ministry of Finance, with a USD 10 million ransom demand. Over 30,000 medical appointments were rescheduled, tax payments were halted, and international trade operations were disrupted, causing estimated losses of around USD 125 million within the first 48 hours. President Rodrigo Chaves declared a national emergency on 8 May 2022 — the first country to do so in response to a cyberattack — and refused to pay, with Costa Rica subsequently receiving technical assistance from Microsoft and the U.S. government. In September 2023, a major ransomware attack in Colombia directly affected 20 public entities, with a further 78 public entities and 762 private companies indirectly affected across Latin America.
Institutional frameworks. Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Uruguay lead on strategy maturity. Argentina established its second National Cybersecurity Strategy in 2023; Brazil operates a Department of Information and Cyber Security within its presidency; Colombia runs a National Digital Security Coordinator and an Inter-Ministerial Committee on Cybersecurity; Peru participates in the OAS Inter-American Strategy. Critical gaps persist: only 20 of 32 Latin American countries have Computer Security Incident Response Teams, and only seven of 32 have established plans to safeguard critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. International cooperation offers partial remedy through the OAS Inter-American Committee against Terrorism (CICTE) Cybersecurity Programme, the EU CyberNet LAC4 regional competence centre in Santo Domingo, and growing engagement with the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime.
Regulatory independence. Most LAC countries have established formal regulatory agencies for telecommunications and data protection rather than housing oversight within ministries. However, political appointment of agency heads, budget dependence on the executive, and broader institutional pressures have limited practical autonomy in several cases. An OECD assessment found that e-communications regulators in the region perform relatively well on formal independence arrangements but score lower on effective scope of action — meaning that even formally independent bodies may have limited powers to enforce their mandates. Data protection authorities face comparable constraints from limited resources and restricted sanctioning powers.
The multistakeholder ecosystem. A relatively active multistakeholder community operates in the larger countries — Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina — playing a critical role in shaping policy and holding governments and companies accountable. The ecosystem is nonetheless concentrated: smaller and lower-income countries remain underrepresented, and meaningful participation risks being limited to well-resourced organizations in major cities. The report treats regional governance forums as accountability mechanisms in their own right, highlighting NETmundial, held in São Paulo in April 2014, which produced a Multistakeholder Statement of shared principles, and NETmundial+10, organised in São Paulo in April 2024 to revisit digital governance challenges including AI and IoT. LACIGF, established in 2008, had its 2024 edition coordinated by the Colombian organization COLNODO as the forum’s new secretariat. Annex A lists a fuller set of regional and national forums.
Conclusions
The report concludes that Internet accountability in Latin America and the Caribbean is no longer constrained primarily by technology or infrastructure. Instead, the principal barriers are institutional. Four cross-cutting capacity challenges are identified: regulatory fragmentation across 33 national regimes at varying stages of digital maturity, which allows actors to exploit gaps between jurisdictions; institutional capacity, where regulators lack technical expertise, independence, and sustainable funding; data and measurement gaps, with publicly accessible and comparable data unavailable or methodologically inconsistent on AI deployment, content moderation, government surveillance, and environmental impacts; and geopolitical dependencies in infrastructure, regulatory models, and technology supply chains.
The author argues that future progress depends on strengthening independent institutions, improving regulatory coordination, making policymaking more genuinely multistakeholder, expanding meaningful oversight, and ensuring that investments in infrastructure are matched by investments in governance. The core challenge is not to choose between digital innovation and accountability, but to ensure that digital progress is anchored in people-centred, rights-based, and future-oriented governance — and that commitments become observable, enforceable, and meaningful to citizens.
AUTHOR
Olga Cavalli has served since early 2024 as Dean of the National Defense Faculty of Argentina, where she is developing programmes focused on cyber defence. She previously served as Argentina’s National Director of Cybersecurity and National Undersecretary of Information Technology. She is co-founder and academic director of the South School on Internet Governance and co-founder and director of ARGENSIG, and co-edited Internet Governance and Regulations in Latin America. Appointed by the UN Secretary-General to the IGF Multistakeholder Advisory Group for 2025, she previously served on the MAG from 2007 to 2014. She served on the Internet Society Board of Trustees between 2016 and 2021 and is President of the ISOC Argentina Chapter, recognised by ISOC as a “Game Changer.” She is currently a ccNSO Council member at ICANN, having previously co-led Work Track 5 on Geographic Names at the Top Level and served as Vice Chair of the Governmental Advisory Committee.
RESOURCES
Internet Accountability in Latin America and the Caribbean: State of Play and Outlook — the full policy report, open access under CC-BY 4.0
Internet Accountability Compass — the four-dimension framework the report applies
Global Initiative on the Future of the Internet (GIFI) — the EU-funded programme at the EUI Robert Schuman Centre that publishes the series
Olga Cavalli — Internet Society — profile of the author, an ISOC Board of Trustees member from 2016 to 2021
Freedom on the Net 2025 — Freedom House’s index of 72 countries, the source of the report’s internet freedom scores
World Justice Project: Rule of Law Surveys, Latin America and the Caribbean — the finding that 21 of 23 surveyed countries believe officials use misinformation
Future of Privacy Forum on CAJAR v. Colombia — analysis of the 2023 ruling recognising informational self-determination
Access Now: Shutdown Tracker Optimization Project (STOP) — the shutdown dataset cited for the region
LACNIC — the regional Internet address registry and its participatory policy development process
Announcing Humboldt: the first cable route between South America and Asia-Pacific — Google’s announcement of the Desarrollo País partnership, and the source of the report’s GDP and jobs estimates
Índice Latinoamericano de Inteligencia Artificial (ILIA) — the CAF-backed AI index behind the seven-national-strategies figure
LACIGF — the Latin American and Caribbean Internet Governance Forum, now secretariated by COLNODO
NOTES
Freedom on the Net 2025 scores — internal discrepancy in the source. The report’s narrative paragraph on Freedom on the Net 2025 gives country scores that differ from those shown in its own accompanying map and bar chart, for nine of the ten assessed countries. The prose gives Costa Rica 85, Argentina 78, Brazil 58, Colombia 55, Ecuador 54, Mexico 52, Nicaragua 47, Venezuela 22, and Cuba 21; the map and chart give Chile 87, Costa Rica 86, Argentina 71, Brazil 65, Colombia 64, Ecuador 63, Mexico 61, Nicaragua 38, Venezuela 26, and Cuba 21. Only Cuba matches.
Checked against Freedom House’s published Freedom on the Net 2025 data, the map and chart figures are correct — Chile scored 87 and ranked third globally behind Iceland (94) and Estonia (91). The narrative figures appear to be erroneous. This summary uses the map and chart values.
The discrepancy is consequential for one classification. The report’s prose places Nicaragua at 47 and groups it among “Partly Free” countries; at its actual score of 38, Nicaragua falls within the “Not Free (0–39)” band defined by the report’s own legend, alongside Venezuela and Cuba.