Red en Defensa de los Derechos Digitales (R3D)

R3D (Red en Defensa de los Derechos Digitales — Network in Defense of Digital Rights) is a Mexico City-headquartered Mexican non-profit whose mandate is the defence and promotion of human rights in the digital environment in Mexico. Founded in 2014 as the first Mexican civil-society organisation dedicated specifically to digital-rights research, advocacy, and litigation, R3D combines policy research, strategic litigation, public advocacy, and communications campaigns across four programme areas — privacy, access, freedom of expression, and free knowledge — and sits at the centre of a Mexican digital-rights field that the corpus's wider Latin American coverage otherwise reaches only through regional bodies. The organisation's distinctive register inside the make-AI-good movement is the multi-year civil-society response to AI-and-surveillance practices by the Mexican state — Pegasus mercenary spyware, biometric mass-surveillance infrastructure, and automated decision-making in public services — coupled with a recent expansion into AI-and-human-rights advocacy at the Inter-American level.

Founding and leadership

R3D was founded in 2014 by Luis Fernando García Muñoz, a Mexican human-rights lawyer with a Universidad Iberoamericana law degree and a Lund University LL.M. in international human-rights law, who led the organisation as Executive Director for eleven years before closing his cycle in May 2025 in a planned leadership transition. Until R3D's founding, there was no Mexican civil-society actor dedicated specifically to studying and contesting state digital-rights violations; the organisation has positioned itself in that gap from the outset.

The current Executive Director is Paulina Gutiérrez, a Mexican attorney and researcher who joined R3D from an eleven-year tenure at ARTICLE 19 specialising in digital rights, freedom of expression, non-discrimination, and gender equality. The current senior staff names a small full-time team — Ana Gaitán (attorney, human-rights specialist), Fernanda Macías (Institutional Strengthening Director), Pepe Flores (Communications Director), Santiago Narváez (researcher, privacy and surveillance focus), Vladimir Chorny (associated researcher), and several others across communications, art, and operations roles — supplemented by collaborating attorneys, researchers, and consultants on specific casework and investigations.

#GobiernoEspía and the Mexican Pegasus campaign

R3D's principal multi-year campaign is the civil-society response to the deployment of Pegasus mercenary spyware against Mexican journalists, human-rights defenders, and anti-corruption activists. On 19 June 2017 R3D, together with Article 19 Mexico and Central America Office, SocialTIC, and the Citizen Lab, launched the #GobiernoEspía investigation — a coordinated public report documenting seventy-six Pegasus infection attempts against twelve Mexican journalists and human-rights defenders between January 2015 and July 2016 during the Peña Nieto administration. Documented targets included Mario Patrón, Stephanie Brewer, and Santiago Aguirre of the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Center for Human Rights (Centro Prodh); journalist Carlos Loret de Mola; Juan Pardinas and Alexandra Zapata of the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness (IMCO); Salvador Camarena and Daniel Lizárraga of Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity; and Carmen Aristegui, Rafael Cabrera, and Sebastián Barragán of Aristegui Noticias, alongside Aristegui's then-teenage son Emilio. The investigation framed the documented targeting as a systemic pattern of state surveillance against critics — anti-corruption journalism, judicial proceedings against state forces, and human-rights documentation — and demanded an exhaustive, impartial, and transparent federal investigation and prosecution of the intellectual and material authors.

The campaign has since become R3D's longest-running thread. In October 2022 R3D and the Citizen Lab published the Ejército Espía (Spying Army) investigation, documenting the use of Pegasus by the Mexican armed forces against human-rights defender Raymundo Ramos (documenting military violations in Tamaulipas), journalist Ricardo Raphael, and an Animal Político journalist — contradicting President López Obrador's 2019 public undertaking that state surveillance had ended ("we don't do that, and we don't do it because it is a matter of principle"). A subsequent October 2023 Citizen Lab and R3D update extended the documented victim record to include the opposition lawmaker Agustín Basave Alanís and characterised the deployment pattern as intermittent rather than ended. The Mexican Pegasus campaign places R3D inside the international Pegasus Project investigative coalition and the global civil-society spyware-accountability field anchored by Access Now, Amnesty International, and the Citizen Lab.

Algorithmic public administration and biometric surveillance

R3D's domestic register beyond the Pegasus campaign anchors on contesting the deployment of biometric and algorithmic infrastructure in Mexican state administration. Long-running casework includes civil-society litigation against the Padrón Nacional de Usuarios de Telefonía Móvil — the Mexican federal government's mandatory biometric mobile-phone-user registry — and against the increasing use of facial-recognition systems in public-space surveillance across Mexican states. The substantive register that R3D carried into its 2025 Inter-American intervention (below) — that automated systems deployed by states in intelligence, law enforcement, and public services "deepen structural inequalities" through mass surveillance, data exploitation, and discrimination, and that facial-recognition video surveillance and biometric identification in migration contexts should be prohibited categorically — is the consolidated framing of the organisation's domestic surveillance-litigation portfolio.

AI-and-human-rights advocacy: the IACHR hearing

R3D's most recent expansion of register has been into AI-and-human-rights advocacy at the Inter-American level. R3D was one of the twelve registered civil-society speakers at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights' fifth regional thematic hearing on artificial intelligence and human rights at its 192nd Period of Sessions on 7 March 2025. R3D's intervention, delivered by attorney Francia Pietrasanta, demanded the prohibition of AI in video surveillance with facial recognition for identifying persons in public spaces, the prohibition of the massive deployment of sensors for mass collection and aggregation of personal data, and the prohibition of biometric identification technologies in migration contexts — anchoring those demands on the Mexican facial-recognition deployment as a regional case-study and on the inter-American standards of necessity, proportionality, and suitability for assessing state automated-decision-making. Pietrasanta also addressed corporate platform content-moderation, naming the inadvertent amplification of extremist narratives by Facebook, Instagram, and X content-moderation systems as a parallel rights-affecting AI deployment requiring a human-rights-compatible regulatory framework. The hearing intervention places R3D inside the working seventeen-organisation Latin American civil-society coalition that Derechos Digitales coordinated the joint technical contribution for, and inside the multistakeholder-recommendations track the Commission has continued to feed since.

Coalition role: Al Sur and KeepItOn

R3D sits inside two pieces of regional and international civil-society infrastructure. It is a member of the Al Sur consortium — the eleven-organisation Latin American and Caribbean digital-rights consortium (ADC, CELE, Coding Rights, Derechos Digitales, Karisma, Hiperderecho, IDEC, IPANDETEC, InternetLab, R3D, and TEDIC) whose six thematic areas explicitly include artificial intelligence alongside access, surveillance, personal data, cybersecurity, and intermediary liability. Within Al Sur, R3D is the Mexican national anchor, complementary to Derechos Digitales's Chilean / regional-advocacy anchor and Coding Rights's Brazilian feminist-tech anchor. Al Sur's pre-existing AI working group supplied much of the coordination infrastructure that the Latin American civil-society IACHR coalition drew on. R3D is also named in the founding coalition of Access Now's KeepItOn global civil-society campaign against government-imposed internet shutdowns, contributing the Mexican national-level monitoring of internet-disruption events to the coalition's annual #KeepItOn STOP reports.

Posture in the movement

R3D is the Mexican national anchor of the corpus's broader Latin American digital-rights field. Inside the corpus's working frame, its theory of change is that grounded empirical investigation of Mexican state-AI deployments (Pegasus, biometric mass-surveillance, facial-recognition in public space, algorithmic public administration), translated into Spanish-language strategic litigation and public advocacy and routed both into Mexican federal courts and the Inter-American human-rights system, equips Mexican civil-society organisations, journalists, lawyers, and parliamentarians to subject AI-and-surveillance systems to democratic accountability. R3D's distinctive contribution to the make-AI-good movement is that it does this from a Mexican national-grassroots position — explicit about the asymmetry between the AI-and-surveillance industry's commercial supply chain and the affected publics of journalists, defenders, and politically targeted communities whose lives are shaped by the technology — and that it has carried that position into the regional Inter-American coalition record without dissolving into the regional vocabulary. The continued documentation of the post-Peña-Nieto Pegasus campaign under the López Obrador administration is the corpus's clearest documented Latin American case of multi-year civil-society spyware-accountability advocacy operating across changes of governing party — a substantive evidence-base on which subsequent Mexican and Latin American civil-society advocacy on AI-and-surveillance continues to draw.