Do you know what happened in Latin America? Monthly Bulletin from the ALERTA Latam Observatory – May 2026
The Inter-American System under maximum pressure: a record that serves as a diagnosis
The IACHR’s 2025 Annual Report, presented to the OAS in April, reveals a figure that sums up the state of the region: in 2025, the Commission received 1,969 requests for precautionary measures, 40% more than the previous year, surpassing the record set in 2018, when 1,618 were recorded in the context of repression in Nicaragua. These requests mainly concern individuals facing risks to their lives, personal integrity and health in contexts of deprivation of liberty, as well as missing persons, human rights defenders and situations of human mobility.
The sharpest increases by country were recorded in: El Salvador (+208%), Cuba (+166%), Argentina (+113%) and the United States (+111%). The record is not merely statistical. It is a sign that national protection mechanisms are not working, or do not exist, and that an increasing number of people see the IACHR as their only recourse. In parallel, the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression published its 2025 Annual Report with an analysis of the shrinking of the space for information in the Americas, which completes the picture.
Colombia: structural racism and conflict, two crises fuelling each other against the backdrop of a complex electoral landscape
Following an eleven-day visit to Bogotá, Quibdó, Cartagena and Cali, the UN International Mechanism of Independent Experts on Racial Justice and Equality concluded that structural, systemic and historical racism persists in Colombia. Despite official recognition by the State, the Mechanism indicated that this racism continues to generate violence, exclusion and deep mistrust of institutions among communities of African descent. The most alarming findings centre on the interaction of people of African descent, particularly young people, with law enforcement: racial profiling and the excessive and lethal use of force. In areas of armed conflict with a high proportion of people of African descent, the experts documented displacement, threats, forced recruitment and restrictions on movement.
The report adds to a context already documented in the April monthly bulletin of the Observatorio Alerta Latam: Colombia had recorded 48 massacres so far in 2026 and 34 social leaders murdered between January and March alone. Structural racism is not a problem separate from the conflict: it is part of its logic. The communities most exposed to violence are, consistently, the very same ones that the state has historically abandoned.
Mexico: the IACHR publishes its report on disappearances
The IACHR has just published the report ‘Disappearance of Persons in Mexico’, which assesses the Mexican state’s policies since 2018 and includes 40 recommendations. The document highlights the efforts of search groups, mostly led by women, but identifies persistent structural gaps. These include a lack of institutional coordination, a shortage of resources for forensic identification, and the criminalisation of those searching for their relatives.
The report comes a month after the Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED) invoked Article 34 of the Convention for the first time to refer Mexico’s situation to the General Assembly, an unprecedented step in which more than 132,000 registered cases were presented, with a 98% impunity rate.
Ecuador: criminalisation of environmental defenders
The Centre for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) and the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), alongside other national and international organisations, have called on Ecuador’s National Court of Justice to guarantee due process for Guilberto Talahua, Fausto Arechua and Wilfrido Escobar, three community leaders facing criminal prosecution for their defence of the land and the rights of nature. Independent UN experts had already raised the alarm about this pattern in March, warning that the judicial persecution of indigenous and environmental leaders is part of a deliberate strategy to neutralise community activism.
The case fits into a regional pattern: criminalisation does not seek convictions, but rather exhaustion. Years of legal proceedings, stigmatisation and financial costs discourage community organisation and isolate leaders from their grassroots supporters. In Ecuador, the pattern is exacerbated by securitisation: a state that has responded to the security crisis with a heavy hand which, in practice, is also applied against those who defend the environment and the collective rights of indigenous peoples.
Argentina: public universities as a battlefield
On 13 May, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in Buenos Aires and other cities across Argentina to demand compliance with the university funding law. Not only did Milei’s government fail to implement the law: as soon as it was passed, he vetoed the legislation and, following the rejection of the veto by supermajorities in both Houses, the president attempted once again to repeal the law in the 2026 budget, but Parliament voted against it once more. Even so, the law was not implemented: by decree, its “enforcement was suspended until the National Congress determines the sources of its funding”.
In the face of the government’s repeated failure to comply, the universities took legal action at the end of 2025. At first and second instance, the courts issued interim injunctions so that, whilst the substantive issue is being resolved, the Executive would begin to pay the increases provided for in the law for lecturers’ and staff salaries, as well as for student grants. But recently the government publicly confirmed that it would not do so, referring the decision to the Supreme Court. From the universities’ perspective, the diagnosis of the higher education crisis is stark: no budget – with a cumulative fall of 45.6% since 2023 and the lowest level recorded since 1989 – no supplies, and lecturers leaving the system at a rate of one every two days due to the loss of more than a third of their purchasing power.
The cut to public education is not an isolated measure. The logic is consistent: defund the public sector, and criminalise those who defend it. What is at stake is not just the university budget, but the model of state that Argentina aspires to be.
Nicaragua: eight years on, the same repression
Eight years on from the start of the 2018 protests, the IACHR notes that the human rights crisis in Nicaragua has not abated. The organisation condemns the ongoing violations, demands the immediate release of all those detained for political reasons, and urges the State to restore the rule of law and put an end to widespread impunity. Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua remain the three cases under special monitoring, countries to which the IACHR cannot gain access for political reasons.
What makes the situation in Nicaragua particularly serious is its duration. It is not an acute crisis with a peak and a resolution: it is sustained, institutionalised repression that has been going on for almost a decade without any real consequences for the Ortega regime. Every anniversary of the 2018 protests brings renewed international statements. None has changed the situation on the ground.
Venezuela: PROVEA Annual Report 2025
On 14 May, PROVEA presented its 2025 Annual Report on the human rights situation in Venezuela, the most systematic analysis available from Venezuelan civil society on a year marked by the post-election political crisis. The report documents a context of selective repression, restriction of civic space and deterioration of economic and social rights, which the collapse of basic services has steadily exacerbated.
Venezuela, like Nicaragua and Cuba, is under special monitoring by the IACHR, which is unable to visit the country. This lack of access is not a technicality: it is in itself an indicator of the state of freedoms. The fact that it is precisely Venezuelan civil society organisations, such as PROVEA, that continue to document violations under risky conditions says everything about where the state stands and where its citizens stand.
