View a slide show of the notable countries in this year's report
In a year that saw an overall rollback in democracy and human rights in the world, the most shocking decline may have taken place just south of the U.S. border, according to the most widely cited index of global freedom. Freedom House's annual Freedom in the World index, released on Thursday, shows overall global freedom declining for the fifth year in a row -- the longest period of continuous decline in the index's nearly 40-year history.
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Freedom House scores 194 countries and territories around the world on their levels of political rights and cultural liberties, assigning each a designation of free, partly free, or not free. This year, Mexico and Ukraine dropped from free to partly free while Ethiopia and Djibouti fell to not free. In total, 25 countries showed significant declines in their scores this year while only 11 improved.
But the decline of Mexico, which 10 years ago emerged from decades of one-party rule following the election of Vicente Fox, may be the biggest surprise on the list. Mexico's fall is all the more unusual because it results not from repressive measures by the government, but from the state's failure to "protect ordinary citizens, journalists, and elected officials from organized crime," as the report puts it. Freedom House's director of research, Arch Puddington, described the decline in freedom due to Mexico's drug violence as nearly unprecedented.
"Our report measures conditions on the ground," he said. "If you've got an insurgency or out-of-control crime or acts of God, it can affect your score. My sense is that Mexico's response has been ineffective and not always prudent. We don't sit in judgment given the immense challenges they face, but they can't bring the violence under control and it affects the day-to-day freedom that the Mexican people experience."
Ukraine's fall into the "partly free" category means that outside the Baltic countries, there are now no free countries left in the former Soviet Union -- a grim milestone, 20 years after the fall of Soviet communism. Freedom House's decision was based not on the election of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, which Puddington described as a "good election," but on crackdowns on foreign-funded NGOs and media outlets that have taken place since he came to power. Ukraine was also the last of the "color revolution" countries -- which experienced democratic upheavals in the mid-2000s -- to fall from the free category. It should be noted that all three countries -- Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan -- are, despite their flaws, still classified as "partly free," while nearly all their neighbors are still very much "not free."
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