Democracies Under Pressure: key messages

• Latin America and the Caribbean is the most democratic region in the developing world: more than 4 in 5 people live in democracy. This is the region's primary asset for facing the future.
• This strength coexists with a growing tension. Rather than abrupt ruptures, gradual processes of democratic weakening prevail: questioning of elections, erosion of electoral authorities, concentration of power in personalist leaderships, and weakening of checks and balances.
• Democracy does not only organize access to power — it interacts with other spheres of social life, forming an inseparable triangle: democracy, the State, and human development. When they reinforce each other, democracy is strengthened. When they become disconnected, it weakens.
• Since the democratic transitions, democracies have operated on fragile foundations. The region's structural deficits — political inequality, weak representation, and fragmented state capacities — do not operate in isolation: they reinforce each other.
• New pressures operate on top of these fragilities and intensify them: political polarization, transformation of the information ecosystem, expansion of organized crime, human mobility, and the triple planetary crisis.
• What the emerging pressures have in common is that they redistribute power: who holds it, how it is exercised, and how it shapes public life.

• The report issues a call to action focused on one strategic priority and five critical nodes:

  Guarantee electoral integrity

  1. Rebuild the foundations of political representation
  2. Restrain the influence of economic power
  3. Recover state control
  4. Revitalize deliberation and the information ecosystem
  5. Reinforce institutional checks and balances
• The future of democracy in the region will depend on the capacity of its societies to transform pressure into renewal and promises into results. A strong democracy is one that turns votes into legitimate decisions, institutions into results, and development into trust.