Rule of Law in Latin America: Declining Institutional Strength Amid Democratic Erosion Blog Post
by Victoria Chertorivski
The 2025 World Justice Project (WJP) Rule of Law Index confirms a consistent weakening of institutional authority and government accountability across Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). This year’s regional average dropped to 0.51 out of 1.00—continuing an 11-year trend in which the region has declined almost annually since 2011. While Uruguay (0.72) and Costa Rica (0.68) continue to rank among the top 30 countries globally, the majority of Latin American countries now sit at or below the global median. The index reflects notable democratic erosion, a growing incapacity of justice systems, and increasing levels of state and organized violence across the region. This decline is structural, not episodic: even high-performing systems reveal cracks, and moderate improvements in a handful of states pale in comparison to broader regional deterioration.
The Rule of Law Index measures adherence across eight factors: constraints on government power, absence of corruption, open government, fundamental rights, order and security, regulatory enforcement, civil justice, and criminal justice. The region performs particularly poorly in the domains of corruption control and criminal justice, while showing only marginal advantage in the area of open government relative to the global average. Although some narrower improvements occurred—for instance, in the Dominican Republic or in transparency sub-scores in Southern Cone democracies—such cases remain exceptions that do not meaningfully shift the overall picture. These findings should be considered within broader geopolitical and economic contexts, including the rise of populist and illiberal governments, widespread organized crime, and declining public trust in state institutions.
This article outlines the overall regional trends shown in the 2025 index, with particular attention to the sub-index results that reveal a dual reality: while countries like Uruguay demonstrate that democratic institutions still provide resilient backbones for the rule of law, many others—including Mexico, El Salvador, and Nicaragua—have experienced steep institutional decay. The piece concludes with a comparative analysis of selected cases to illustrate the dynamics between institutional capacity, political will, and societal conflict, as seen through the lens of divergent WJP outcomes.
Regional Overview: Divergence Amid Decline
A closer look at the regional distribution of scores underlines this widening divergence. Among 32 Latin American and Caribbean states included in the 2025 index, fewer than one-third improved their overall score. Uruguay remains the strongest performer at 0.72, followed by Costa Rica (0.68), Chile (0.66), and Barbados (0.66). Conversely, Venezuela (0.26) ranks last not only regionally but globally; it has registered the world’s lowest score in six consecutive editions of the index. There is a growing polarity between high-performing small island democracies in the Eastern Caribbean and large countries facing systemic institutional crises.
Perhaps most striking is the Dominican Republic, the only Latin American state listed among the top 10 global improvers in 2025, having advanced 2.1% to a score of 0.50. However, most of the region is trending in the opposite direction. Mexico declined by 2.8%, while El Salvador and Colombia dropped by 2.7% and 1.8% respectively. While scores can fluctuate based on country-specific political cycles, the consistent downward drift among the region’s major economies serves as an indicator of a broader governance crisis rather than localized or temporary disruption.
The steepest declines have been observed among countries affected by dual forces: the concentration of executive authority and the breakdown of judicial independence. El Salvador, for example, exhibits notable improvement in its order and security sub-index following mass incarceration policies under President Nayib Bukele, but its overall rule of law score continues to fall due to sharp declines in constraints on government power (0.35) and respect for fundamental rights (0.41). Meanwhile, Mexico’s 2.8% drop signals the erosion of accountability mechanisms across several sectors of the justice system, even amidst claims of progress in public procurement transparency.
Sub-Index Analysis: A Geography of Weakness
The 2025 index’s disaggregated data shows pronounced variation across the region’s performance in each of the WJP’s eight rule of law dimensions. The regional average in “Constraints on Government Powers” stands at 0.52, with Uruguay (0.76) and Costa Rica (0.75) outperforming the global mean.⁷ At the opposite end, Venezuela’s score of 0.18 is the lowest worldwide, reflecting institutionalized executive dominance and the collapse of checks and balances. This uneven distribution reflects the extent to which democratic safeguards are not merely formal but correlate with enforceable limits on power.
The “Absence of Corruption” indicator represents the region’s most consistent weakness, with a LAC average of 0.47—below both global and middle-income country averages. Uruguay again tops the region, with a score of 0.74, while Bolivia (0.23), Haiti (0.24), and Venezuela (0.26) record the lowest scores.⁸ The fact that 25 of 32 countries fall below the global average in corruption control highlights the depth of the challenge. Even in relatively democratic strongholds like Argentina and Brazil, scores remain stuck near the middle of global rankings, suggesting that institutional and legal frameworks are insufficient to uproot corruption entrenched at multiple state and federal levels.
Latin America outperforms the global average in “Open Government,” where transparency portals, access to public information laws, and civil society participation have become defining features of several democracies. Uruguay and Costa Rica again rank highest, at 0.73 and 0.69, respectively. However, high transparency does not always generate accountability. Mexico offers a case in point: with an “Open Government” score of 0.56—above both the global and regional averages—it nevertheless ranks 134 of 143 globally in “Absence of Corruption.”⁹ This tension reveals what analysts have called “transparency without enforcement,” a factor that may explain why public trust in democracy continues to decline despite formal openness norms.
The region’s most deleterious scores are found in “Criminal Justice” and “Order and Security.” The regional averages—0.43 and 0.66, respectively—mask alarming fragility in several countries. Bolivia (0.19), El Salvador (0.20), and Mexico (0.25) all rank among the lowest 15 performers in criminal justice globally, signaling widespread impunity, politicization of legal systems, and human rights abuses within detention and court systems.¹⁰ Parallel to this, Haiti (0.43) remains one of the most insecure countries in the world, while insecurity surged in Ecuador, which marked a double-digit rise in violent crime over the last two years.¹¹
These sub-index patterns reveal that the region’s rule of law crisis is both multidimensional and entrenched. Although problems manifest differently across political and social contexts, the data suggest three recurrent burdens: weak accountability over the executive, entrenched corruption, and failing justice systems unable to mitigate widespread violence or prosecute crimes effectively.
Case Studies: Diverging National Trajectories
The broad regional dynamics of democratic stagnation, criminal violence, and institutional weakness manifest in diverse forms within individual national contexts. Four cases—Mexico, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Uruguay—illustrate the range of institutional outcomes across Latin America: from deep erosion to modest renewal to enduring consolidation.
Mexico represents an extreme version of the regional rule of law crisis. Its overall score fell to 0.40 in 2025, a decline of 2.8% from 2024, placing it 121 globally and 26 of 32 regionally.¹² Mexico fares especially poorly in “Absence of Corruption” (0.27, ranked 134 worldwide) and “Criminal Justice” (0.25, ranked 135), signaling persistent impunity in cases of human rights violations, political violence, and organized crime.¹³ Perhaps more troubling for long-term institutional resilience is its score of 0.41 in “Constraints on Government Powers,” which reflects sustained weakening of judicial independence and concentration of executive authority under recent political leadership.¹⁴ The lone area where Mexico performs above the regional average is “Open Government” (0.56), reflecting progress in transparency reforms—but this advantage is neutralized mainly by a lack of enforcement capacity. Mexico thus exemplifies a system in which public access to government data coexists with institutional impunity, underscoring the disjunction between transparency and accountability.
In contrast, the Dominican Republic represents one of the region’s few modest success stories. In 2025, it recorded a 2.1% overall improvement—making it the most improved country in the region and one of the 10 most improved worldwide.¹⁵ Its gains are moderately distributed across multiple sub-indices, including “Regulatory Enforcement” and “Fundamental Rights,” suggesting progress in accessible justice and bureaucratic oversight. Yet even with improvement, its overall score of 0.50 remains only at the regional average.¹⁶ The Dominican Republic’s experience emphasizes the incremental nature of institutional progress: reform is possible, but it remains fragile and reversible in the absence of broader judicial and political transformation.
El Salvador exemplifies rapid institutional deterioration amid a broader paradox of improved public security. Although the country's “Order and Security” factor improved significantly in recent years (now 0.71), its plunge in other institutional dimensions offsets any gains. The country’s score in “Constraints on Government Powers” (0.35) and “Fundamental Rights” (0.41) fell sharply following President Nayib Bukele’s suspension of constitutional norms, militarization of public life, and widespread detention policies under emergency powers.¹⁷ El Salvador challenges the traditional assumption in rule of law analysis that state security and institutional strength are mutually reinforcing. Instead, the 2025 data show that rapid and coercive territorial control may coexist with institutional collapse, leading to a fragile equilibrium that is unlikely to prove sustainable.
Finally, Uruguay continues to be the region’s most stable model for adhering to the rule of law. With a score of 0.72, it ranks twenty-third globally and first in Latin America in every sub-index except “Order and Security,” where it ranks second to Barbados.¹⁸ Uruguay’s strength is not its immunity to external pressures but the resilience of its institutional design: it consistently scores above 0.70 in constraints on government powers, absence of corruption, open government, civil justice, criminal justice, and fundamental rights.¹⁹ Even here, however, its slight decline from 0.73 in 2024 to 0.72 in 2025 underscores that rule of law systems in Latin America are not isolated from broader global trends of democratic fatigue and rising polarization.
Conclusion
The 2025 World Justice Project Rule of Law Index paints a sobering picture for Latin America and the Caribbean. The region’s 11-year decline reflects a structural crisis of state legitimacy, driven by intersecting governance failures: the erosion of constitutional checks, persistent corruption, dysfunctional justice systems, and heightened insecurity. While isolated gains in states like the Dominican Republic offer guarded hope, they do not outweigh the broader pattern of erosion, especially in large middle-income countries with outsized regional influence such as Mexico, Colombia, and El Salvador.
These findings underscore a key analytic insight: the rule of law is less a static condition than a dynamic equilibrium that depends on maintaining mutually reinforcing pillars. Transparency cannot compensate for impunity, elections cannot substitute for institutional oversight, and improvements in security cannot legitimize suspensions of fundamental rights. Without sustained, multipronged reform and a renewed political commitment to the constitutional order, the region risks further entrenchment of a model that pairs democratic formalities with increasingly authoritarian governance—a model incompatible with the deep tradition of the rule of law that the index seeks to measure.