10. Alignment with the UNESCO Guidelines from a Regional Perspective

The cross-sectional analysis of the normative and institutional framework of Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Panama, the Dominican Republic and Mexico reveals marked contrasts. Although all these countries share a solid constitutional design that prohibits prior censorship and protects freedom of expression with a technology-neutral approach, the effectiveness of these guarantees clashes with profound regulatory vacuums. Thus, while constitutions are aligned with what international law demands, in practice there are clear challenges and barriers.

The UNESCO Guidelines emphasize that digital governance must be based on an ecosystem of multiple stakeholders, safeguarding human rights and demanding strict due diligence from platforms. However, the region operates mostly under sectoral approaches and with evident fragmentation in the regulatory framework. In no few cases, approaches are reactive and punitive, still focusing on the behavior of citizens online and not on the entire system as a whole. This departs from the model of co-responsibility, proactive transparency and citizen empowerment that the international standard demands.

In terms of freedom of expression and protection of civic space, the Guidelines recommend that any restriction imposed by States pass a rigorous test of legality, legitimate purpose, necessity and proportionality. While Costa Rica and Mexico courts formally apply this test in their jurisprudence, the operational reality in the region is restrictive, in some cases severely so.

In El Salvador, the prolongation of the Exception Regime has legalized unrestricted state surveillance that encourages self-censorship and silences public debate. In Honduras and Panama, the retention of defamation and libel crimes in the criminal sphere facilitates judicial harassment of journalists through strategic lawsuits (SLAPPs), directly contravening the international call to decriminalize speech. This suffocation of civic space is aggravated by the documented use of espionage technologies against the press and human rights defenders in several countries in the region, undermining the safe environment indispensable for the free flow of information.

With respect to platform governance, the UNESCO Guidelines establish the need for legal frameworks that grant conditional responsibility to intermediaries (such as safe harbor schemes) in exchange for unavoidable statutory obligations of transparency, due process for users and periodic human rights impact assessments. In the region there are few examples of such legal frameworks, and if they exist, they are not comprehensive.

Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic lack modern laws that define the role of digital platforms and frameworks that require this type of conditional responsibility, or if you will, that guarantee conditional immunity. In the face of this vacuum, States resort to consumer protection laws or criminal codes, which discourages platforms from implementing appeal mechanisms that guarantee due process to citizens in the protection of their rights and freedoms against content moderation decisions.

Although Panama and Mexico contemplate certain safe harbor figures for e-commerce and copyright respectively, the entire region fails to impose cross-cutting mandates that require large technology companies to make transparent the functioning of their algorithms or to ensure that automated content moderation is sensitive to linguistic diversity and local cultural context, as UNESCO emphatically requires.

One of the most acute divergences from the UNESCO model lies in institutional design and the requirement of full regulatory autonomy. The Guidelines ask that bodies responsible for regulating the digital ecosystem must be strictly independent of political and government control. However, in most of these countries, the relevant authorities often respond directly to the mandates of the Executive Branch. In Mexico, even if there have been relevant legislative changes that contain elements that align better with the Guidelines, the truth is that recent structural reforms have reduced or eliminated the constitutional autonomy of key regulators in telecommunications and government transparency, concentrating power in the central administration and dismantling basic institutional safeguards to prevent arbitrary state intervention.

The asymmetry of power facing corporate data extraction is sharpened by deficiencies in privacy and digital literacy, elements that UNESCO considers enablers of citizen empowerment. Except for Panama and Mexico, which have comprehensive legislation applicable to the private sector, the rest of the countries rely on the constitutional figure of Habeas Data, regulations exclusive to the public sector or laws disproportionately focused on specific areas (such as credit histories in the case of the Dominican Republic).

Additionally, tolerated commercial practices such as zero rating in countries like Honduras and El Salvador fragment network neutrality, locking users into social media bubbles that limit access to the open internet. This technical limitation can potentiate the spread of misinformation, which clashes head-on with UNESCO's recommendation to provide populations with robust national Media and Information Literacy policies to foster critical thinking and with the requirement of international human rights instruments and national constitutions to actively work to guarantee the right to freedom of expression and in particular, access to information.

Finally, in the area of democratic integrity, the UNESCO Guidelines urge States and platforms to conduct systemic risk assessments for human rights, but none of the countries has legislation or at least national or regional guidelines that would allow this.

This is also particularly relevant regarding risk mitigation that could affect electoral integrity. The tools to protect electoral processes from algorithmic manipulation do not appear sufficient in the countries of the region in an environment that is today more complex than before.

The leap from political propaganda to the virtual sphere has exceeded the legal capacity of almost all authorities in the region. Panama stands out as a regulatory pioneer in updating its Electoral Code to require transparency in digital advertising financing, prohibit the use of inauthentic accounts and criminalize the malicious use of artificial intelligence. In contrast, in Costa Rica, Guatemala and Mexico, electoral authorities have had to operate through voluntary agreements or precautionary measures lacking long-term coercive force.

The most paradoxical omissions fall on El Salvador, which successfully enabled remote electronic voting but maintains an absolute legal vacuum to monitor digital propaganda, and the Dominican Republic, whose authorities acknowledge their technical inability to audit foreign advertising microsegmentation, leaving the region's electoral processes exposed to the power of technology corporations and to the specific risks that have emerged after the digitization of electoral processes and that is already beginning to face particular risks derived from the use of generative artificial intelligence, in addition to those already identified in relation to algorithmic mediation on digital platforms.

The joint analysis of the seven countries studied shows that the region is at a critical regulatory and democratic crossroads. While the solid constitutional foundation of the region represents an undeniable strength, the slowness in translating these principles into modern and articulated legal frameworks means that the digital ecosystem is tied to fragmented, asymmetric and, all too often, reactive or punitive governance.

To achieve true alignment with UNESCO's vision for a trustworthy internet through its Guidelines, it is imperative that States transcend the temptation of government surveillance and the user-focused punitive approach, evolving toward a model of systemic co-responsibility anchored in the articulation of regional cooperation and where local and regional contexts are fully taken into account.

This requires an inescapable commitment to establish truly independent regulatory authorities, close gaps in electoral oversight and compel transnational technology platforms to exercise active transparency, conduct impact assessments and apply due diligence in matters of human rights. Only through comprehensive governance sustained in dialogue among multiple stakeholders can civic space on the internet be protected, systemic risks mitigated, including those brought by new developments in artificial intelligence, and ensure that the internet operates as an equitable enabler of freedoms and human rights, and not as a barrier, for the democratic development of the region.