Fundación Vía Libre

Fundación Vía Libre is a Córdoba-headquartered Argentine civil-society organisation whose work is the defence and promotion of fundamental rights in environments mediated by information and communication technologies, with a programme line on the social impacts of artificial intelligence that has, since the early 2020s, become one of the corpus's principal anchors on the Spanish-language Latin American AI-and-human-rights field. Founded in 2000 as a free-software public-policy NGO and steadily reoriented over its first two decades into the broader digital-rights and human-rights space, the organisation is the corpus's first Argentine entry and the second Southern Cone anchor alongside Chile-headquartered Derechos Digitales.

Founding and leadership

Vía Libre was founded in 2000 in Córdoba by a small circle of free-software advocates — Federico Heinz and Enrique Chaparro are named in the foundation's own materials and external coverage as the foundational organisational figures — with an initial mandate centred on free-software public policy, dissemination of knowledge, and sustainable development across Latin America. The foundation became an official observer at the World Intellectual Property Organization in 2008, the structural fact that has anchored its long-running policy work on copyright, patents, and access to knowledge at the multilateral level.

Beatriz Busaniche, who joined the foundation in 2003, is its current president and the public face of the organisation. A social-communication graduate of the Universidad Nacional de Rosario with a master's in intellectual property from FLACSO, Busaniche teaches at the University of Buenos Aires, Torcuato Di Tella, and FLACSO, co-founded the Argentine chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation in 2007, and is a long-standing member of the Creative Commons Argentina team — a trajectory that places Vía Libre at the intersection of the Argentine free-culture, free-software, and digital-rights traditions rather than at any single one of them. The organisation reports through its 2025 year-in-review that its team has expanded significantly over the past several years, supported by Ford Foundation, Heinrich Böll Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Luminate Foundation, IDRC (channelled through Derechos Digitales and the fAIr Network), American University, and New Venture Fund grants.

Programme areas

The foundation's publicly listed programme structure covers Free Software and Access to Knowledge; Privacy, Surveillance, and Public Security Policies; Civil and Political Rights and Electoral Technologies; Information Security; Social Impacts of Artificial Intelligence; and Freedom of Expression and Internet Regulations, with gender-and-diversity and environmental-sustainability framings running transversally across the portfolio. The public-facing programme grid on the home page condenses this to six headline areas — Artificial Intelligence, Electronic Voting, Free Speech, Information Security, Intellectual Property and access to culture, and Privacy. Across the portfolio the foundation's recurring move is to pair research-grade technical and legal analysis with capacity-building and litigation support, and to channel the resulting evidence into Argentine parliamentary and judicial fora as well as multilateral mechanisms (WIPO, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the UN human-rights treaty bodies).

AI-and-human-rights work

The corpus's interest in Vía Libre is concentrated in the artificial-intelligence programme that has crystallised since around 2020 around two anchor projects and a steady stream of policy intervention.

The first anchor is EDIA — Stereotypes and Discrimination in Artificial Intelligence, an open-source toolkit developed by Laura Alonso Alemany, Luciana Benotti, and Beatriz Busaniche — the first two affiliated with the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba's Faculty of Astronomy, Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science (FAMAF) — to let non-technical users with lived experience explore, characterise, and audit biases and stereotypes in word embeddings and large language models. The codebase is MIT-licensed, supports English (bert-base-uncased) and Spanish (dccuchile/bert-base-spanish-wwm-uncased) base models out of the box, and is documented in a 2022 arXiv paper titled A tool to overcome technical barriers for bias assessment in human language technologies (doi: 10.48550/ARXIV.2207.06591). EDIA was selected in 2024 as one of five Mozilla Data Futures Lab Infrastructure Fund awardees and continues to be developed within the f<A+I>r Feminist AI project cohort alongside Coding Rights and Derechos Digitales, and won the 2025 Mozilla Festival audience-vote impact award. The project's distinctive contribution is that it treats stereotype-and-bias audit as a participatory task — datasets are built by communities representing the stereotypes they live under, rather than supplied top-down by the model auditor — and is one of the few well-developed Spanish-language LLM-bias toolkits in the field.

The second anchor is HESEIA, described on the foundation's own home page as "a community-based dataset for evaluating social biases in large language models, co-designed in real school settings in Latin America". HESEIA pairs the technical infrastructure of EDIA with a teacher-training programme: in June 2024 Vía Libre launched a FAMAF-and-Córdoba-Ministry-of-Education extension course, Tools to Explore Biases and Stereotypes of Artificial Intelligence in the Classroom, which attracted more than 500 registrants — 34.1% of them from outside the provincial capital and 55.6% with no prior AI-tool experience — under the instructional lead of Luciana Benotti and Emilia Echeveste. The HESEIA / EDIA pairing was accepted at EMNLP 2025, and a related paper was recognised at ICLR 2026, evidence that the foundation's hybrid civil-society / academic position has become a genuinely research-productive line rather than an advocacy-only one.

On 7 March 2025 Beatriz Busaniche spoke at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights' regional hearing on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights on behalf of a four-organisation Argentine coalition — Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS), Democracia en Red, Fundación Vía Libre, and the Observatorio de Derecho Informático Argentino (ODIA) — raising concerns about the Argentine state's adoption of predictive-algorithm surveillance technologies in the absence of adequate legislation, accountability mechanisms, or public deliberation. The hearing sat within the wider regional civil-society effort whose drafting Derechos Digitales led, and against which seventeen Latin American organisations co-signed; Vía Libre's contribution was the Argentine sub-case material.

Buenos Aires facial-recognition campaign (SRFP)

Vía Libre's most consequential litigation-adjacent campaign to date is the multi-year challenge to the City of Buenos Aires's Sistema de Reconocimiento Facial de Prófugos (Fugitive Facial Recognition System, SRFP), launched by the city government in 2019 to scan public-space CCTV against a CONARC fugitive database. In December 2020 the Observatorio de Derecho Informático Argentino (ODIA) filed an amparo — a constitutional-protection lawsuit — against the City Government; Vía Libre joined the case as friend of the court and contributed technical and human-rights arguments alongside CELS, the Asociación por los Derechos Civiles, and others.

The case made public a set of facts the city had not previously disclosed: the system had been used to make more than 9.4 million biometric queries against a fugitive database of only around 35,000 active entries, that seventeen anonymous "admin" accounts had unrestricted access to the biometric data of millions of city residents, that no data-protection impact assessment had been performed, and that documented wrongful detentions of one to three hours had occurred when the system returned false-positive matches. On 7 September 2022 a first-instance court declared the SRFP's implementation unconstitutional; the Court of Appeals of the City of Buenos Aires confirmed that ruling on 28 April 2023 and conditioned any reinstallation of the system on a full audit, the establishment of regulatory control mechanisms, and a privacy impact assessment. The case is widely cited in the regional digital-rights field as a precedent for judicial review of public-space algorithmic surveillance in Latin America.

Posture in the movement

Within the corpus's frame, Fundación Vía Libre occupies the non-AI publics engaging with how AI is built on-ramp at the Argentine national scale, but with two features that distinguish it from its regional peers. The first is the hybrid civil-society-and-academic position — the EDIA and HESEIA programmes are co-produced with the FAMAF computer-science faculty at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, and the project team's published outputs (arXiv 2022, EMNLP 2025, ICLR 2026) sit in the natural-language-processing literature rather than only in the civil-society policy literature, evidence that the foundation has built a working interface between Argentine NLP research and Argentine digital-rights advocacy that the corpus's other Latin American organisational anchors have approached more cautiously. The second is the unusually long arc of free-software, electronic-voting, and intellectual-property work that gives the foundation a structural argument — accumulated across a quarter-century — about why the open and democratically-accountable shape of digital infrastructure matters before the AI conversation begins. In the corpus's regional shape, Vía Libre pairs with Derechos Digitales as the Chilean and Argentine Spanish-language poles of Southern Cone digital-rights work, and with Coding Rights as the Brazilian Portuguese-language transfeminist-tech counterpart in the wider Latin American feminist-AI cohort.