Derechos Digitales

Derechos Digitales is a Santiago-headquartered Latin American non-profit whose mandate is the defence and promotion of human rights in the digital environment across the region. Founded in 2005 in Chile, the organisation is one of the longest-standing Latin American digital-rights organisations and has expanded from a Chile-focused academic project into a regional structure with staff distributed across more than ten countries — Chile, Brazil, Paraguay, Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, Costa Rica, Argentina, and Peru among them. Its work combines legal research, public-policy advocacy, technology analysis, communications outreach, and digital-security training, and it sits at the strategic centre of a Latin American digital-rights field that the corpus otherwise does not capture.

Founding and leadership

Derechos Digitales was founded in 2005 in Santiago as a small Chilean civil-society organisation focused on copyright, freedom of expression, and access-to-knowledge questions in the early digital-rights landscape. Co-founders included Claudio Ruiz, Alberto Cerda Silva, Daniel Álvarez, and María Paz Canales, several of whom remain associated with the organisation as board members or alumni; Alberto Cerda Silva subsequently moved to a programme-officer role in the Ford Foundation's Technology and Society Program, and Maria Paz Canales served as Executive Director for the bulk of the organisation's first two decades.

The current structure is a co-executive-director model — Juan Carlos Lara, a Chilean human-rights lawyer with a Berkeley LL.M., and Jamila Venturini, a Brazilian journalist and activist with more than fifteen years in Latin American civil society. The board is chaired by Flavio Tapia (President), with Roberto Cerda as Treasurer and Claudio Ruiz as Secretary. Department leadership comprises Camila Lobato (Finance and Operations), Catalina Balla (Communications), Miguel Flores (Technology), Paloma Lara Castro (Public Policy), and Rafael Bonifaz (Latin American Programme for Digital Security and Resilience), with regional-advocacy coordination by Debora Calderón and public-policy coordinators Lucía Camacho and Marina Meira.

Programme areas

Derechos Digitales' published programme areas span freedom of expression and digital security, privacy and data protection, gender and the digital economy, protection of at-risk communities, internet governance, migration and surveillance technology, accessibility, and an explicit AI-impact and AI-governance line. Its mode of operating combines original research and report-writing, regional advocacy at multilateral fora (the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the UN Human Rights Council, UNESCO), participation in national policy processes, public-education courses, and direct digital-security support to journalists, defenders, and at-risk groups across Latin America. The organisation also runs emergency-response funds for the regional digital-rights field and acts as fiscal sponsor for coalition infrastructure (see § Coalition role below).

AI-and-human-rights work

The corpus's interest in Derechos Digitales is anchored in its AI-and-human-rights programme, which has expanded steadily since 2018 and now constitutes one of the most developed Latin American civil-society research-and-advocacy lines on the topic. Three programme threads stand out.

The first is empirical research on the use of automated and AI systems by Latin American states. Derechos Digitales has produced a comparative regional study, Decisiones automatizadas en la función pública en América Latina, covering AI/automated decision-making in social interventions in Chile, justice administration in Colombia, job-allocation systems in Brazil, and public-health management in Uruguay. The Chile case study, IA e inclusión: Sistema Alerta Niñez, examines the Chilean Ministry of Social Development and Family's predictive-risk algorithm intended to anticipate violations of child rights — raising concerns about the underlying training data drawn from the Civil Registry, the Ministry of Education, and the Chile crece contigo programme, the risk of replicating administrative biases, and the absence of effective informed consent. The framing of the case-study series is that automated decision-making in Latin American public services is being deployed faster than regulatory and rights-protection capacity, and that grounded empirical research is the precondition for democratic deliberation about whether and how to use these systems.

The second is its participation-and-AI-strategy work — a 2022 comparative report by Laura Hernández, María Paz Canales, and Michel Roberto de Souza on the participatory processes (or lack of them) in the design of Latin American national AI strategies. The report's contribution is to apply the corpus's own working principle — are people outside AI being engaged in shaping AI? — to a region-by-region audit of who has been consulted in the design of national AI policy frameworks.

The third is a feminist-AI line developed with the f<A+I>r project's Latin America and Caribbean Hub. The 2022 guide Towards a feminist framework for AI development: from principles to practice interprets the day-to-day experience of seven women working in AI and data science in the region against existing feminist statements on technology, and the Latin America in a Glimpse 2024 edition tracks how Latin American social movements are themselves thinking about, using, and developing AI from outside the dominant extractivist frame. The work has been continued through workshops and toolkits with the A+ Alliance.

In April 2025 Derechos Digitales led the drafting of the Latin American civil-society contribution to the 192nd session of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights' regional hearing on artificial intelligence and human rights — a collaborative effort involving seventeen Latin American organisations. The organisation also participates in UNESCO's Global Civil Society Organizations and Academic Network on AI Ethics and Policy and has filed UN-level submissions on the use of AI by Latin American states to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Coalition role: Al Sur and the Global Network for Social Justice and Digital Resilience

Derechos Digitales sits at the centre of two pieces of regional and global digital-rights infrastructure. It is a founding and core member of the Al Sur coalition — a consortium of eleven Latin American and Caribbean civil-society organisations and academic centres (ADC, CELE, Coding Rights, Derechos Digitales, Karisma, Hiperderecho, IDEC, IPANDETEC, InternetLab, R3D, and TEDIC) whose thematic areas explicitly include artificial intelligence alongside access, surveillance, personal data, cybersecurity, and intermediary liability. Derechos Digitales acts as the coalition's fiscal sponsor; the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation's July 2023 $200,000 grant to Al Sur was made with Derechos Digitales as the formal grantee organisation, covering July 2023 through June 2025.

It is also one of seven inaugural member organisations of the Global Network for Social Justice and Digital Resilience, a Ford-Foundation-anchored global-south digital-resilience network established in 2021 and publicly launched at the Internet Governance Forum in 2023. Alongside Co-Creation Hub (Nigeria), CIPESA (Uganda), Fundación Acceso (Costa Rica), NUPEF Institute (Brazil), SMEX (Lebanon), and SocialTIC (Mexico), Derechos Digitales receives Ford Foundation Technology and Society Program support through the network's seed funding and ongoing capacity-building remit. The network was established with Ford's $15 million social-bond-financed commitment.

Posture in the movement

Within the corpus's frame, Derechos Digitales is a regional anchor of the non-AI publics engaging with how AI is built on-ramp at the Latin American scale — its theory of change is that empirical research on state and corporate AI deployment, translated into multilingual public-facing materials and routed into Inter-American and UN human-rights mechanisms, equips Latin American civil-society organisations, journalists, parliamentarians, and constitutional courts to subject AI systems to democratic accountability before national policy frameworks are settled. The organisation's distinctive contribution to the broader make-AI-good movement is that it does this from a Latin American epistemic position — explicit about data colonialism, extractivism, and the asymmetry between the Global North-headquartered AI industry and the Global South publics whose lives are increasingly shaped by it — rather than reproducing US and European framings into Spanish and Portuguese. The 2024 Latin America in a Glimpse framing, that the region is "at the forefront of the assessment of impacts caused by artificial intelligence and data colonialism", is the organisation's own self-description of that posture.