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Latin America is going through what a new report describes as “a generation of laws” designed, in theory, to bring order to how civil society organizations (CSOs) operate, but which in practice have ended up eroding their capacity to operate, raise funds, and take part in public life. That is the argument put forward by “Una generación de leyes que bloquean el espacio cívico en América Latina” (A Generation of Laws Blocking Civic Space in Latin America), a study in Spanish published by Fundamedios (the Andean Foundation for the Observation and Study of Media) carried out in partnership with TrustLaw, the pro bono legal network of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, with support from local law firms in each country analyzed.
The report compares the regulatory frameworks of Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Peru, and Venezuela, and concludes that, far from being isolated measures, a consolidated regional trend is underway. What stands out is that states are expanding their administrative discretion over CSOs and normalizing suspicion toward organized civil society, weakening due-process guarantees along the way.
Key Findings
According to the study, the dominant trend in the region is the increase in state discretion to suspend or revoke an organization’s legal status without effective judicial oversight, a pattern the report identifies with particular force in Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and, to a lesser extent, Ecuador.
The main vehicle for these restrictions is the use of vague, undefined legal concepts. Notions such as “public order,” “national security,” or “social interest” appear again and again in the laws analyzed, without precise definitions, making it possible to sanction organizations without having to prove any specific unlawful conduct.
Compounding this is a phenomenon the report calls the stigmatization of international cooperation, driven by “foreign agent” laws, special registries for donors, or additional requirements for receiving funding from abroad, present in at least five of the ten countries studied.
At the same time, anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing frameworks (known as AML/CFT) are applied expansively against CSOs, even though the evidence shows a low actual incidence of money laundering in the sector. In several countries organizations are treated as “high-risk” by default, simply because of what they are, rather than on the basis of any evidence-based analysis.
The most serious consequence of this web of rules, the report warns, is that the revocation of legal status has become the harshest and most frequently used administrative sanction, imposed even for merely formal noncompliance, with a deep chilling effect on freedom of association and expression. The organizations most exposed to this risk are not the ones handling the largest sums of money, but those working in human rights, freedom of expression, journalism, and anti-corruption, precisely because of their watchdog role vis-à-vis those in power.
The report sums up these patterns as three regional risks: the normalization of administrative deregistration of CSOs as a tool of political control, the entrenchment of security and anti-money-laundering rhetoric as justification for restricting international cooperation, and a gradual erosion of civic space that requires no explicit bans, advancing instead through administrative burdens, excessive financial controls, and indirect sanctions.
Nicaragua and Venezuela, the Most Severe Cases
Among the countries analyzed, Nicaragua is singled out as the most extreme case. The closure of organizations has accelerated since 2018, and according to figures cited in the study, more than 5,562 had been shut down by 2025, close to 80% of those that had been registered.
Law 1115 (2022) and its subsequent reforms concentrate registration, oversight, sanctioning, and deregistration powers in the Ministry of the Interior, and when an organization is shut down on grounds such as “promoting destabilization campaigns,” its assets are transferred to the state.
In Venezuela, the report describes a progressive narrowing of civic space in recent years. Although the right to freedom of association is formally enshrined in the 1999 Constitution, the report identifies the Law on Oversight, Regularization, Operation, and Financing of Non-Governmental Organizations and Nonprofit Social Organizations (2024) as the current regime’s central instrument, describing it as “broadly restrictive” for expanding the state’s supervisory and sanctioning powers.
The report also details a system of intensive oversight, with periodic reporting obligations, broad powers to demand information, inspect, and audit, and tightened controls on foreign funding that, it notes, “can be applied at the authorities’ discretion,” generating regulatory uncertainty and undermining the operating capacity of Venezuelan organizations.
The Recommendations
What can be done about this? The study recommends reforming these legal frameworks to eliminate discretionary administrative powers to deregister organizations and replace them with clearly defined grounds subject to effective judicial review; it also calls for repealing or amending provisions that rely on ambiguous concepts such as “public order” or “national security” as a stand-alone basis for sanctions, as well as ensuring that any severe sanction is subject to due process and to judicial appeal with suspensive effect.
Finally, it calls for mandatory public consultations with CSOs before adopting any reform that affects freedom of association, expression, or international cooperation.
The report also stresses that this is not merely a legal problem: how a state regulates its civil society is, in its words, “a key indicator of democratic health.” But the regional trend is not irreversible; less restrictive, workable alternative models already exist, such as those of Argentina and Colombia, where registration is based on objective criteria and judicial review acts as a genuine safeguard, proof that regulating CSOs without suffocating them is, above all, a political choice.
*** Fundamedios (the Andean Foundation for the Observation and Study of Media) is a nonprofit non-governmental organization founded in Ecuador in 2007 that defends freedom of expression, press freedom, freedom of association, and independent journalism throughout the Americas.
