Ley Olimpia — Mexico's Digital & Image-Based Sexual Violence Law

Ley Olimpia takes its name from Olimpia Coral Melo, a young woman from Puebla whose intimate video was shared without her consent in 2014. Melo led a grassroots campaign that produced Mexico's first state-level law against digital sexual violence in Puebla in 2018. In June 2021, the reform was written into federal law, amending the Federal Penal Code and the General Law on Women's Access to a Life Free of Violence to criminalise the recording, reproduction or distribution of intimate content without consent, with federal penalties of three to six years in prison plus fines of 500–1,000 UMA.

The law aims to criminalise digital and image-based sexual violence — the non-consensual recording, reproduction or distribution of intimate content — and to give victims a criminal-justice route against this form of gender-based violence, addressing a harm INEGI estimated affected 10.6 million Mexican women through cyberstalking in 2024.

Since the 2018 Puebla statute and the 2021 federal reform, implementing legislation has been enacted in 29 of Mexico's 32 federal entities, with some states (Oaxaca, Tamaulipas) setting harsher penalties of four to eight years. The model has also been adopted abroad, with Argentina passing comparable legislation in 2023 and Panama in 2024, and further bills advancing in Colombia, Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia and Honduras.

Mexico's National Data Bank on Violence against Women recorded 2,515 digital-violence cases between January 2022 and May 2023, and more than 9,000 case files for non-consensual distribution of intimate content have been opened nationally. Enforcement, however, lags far behind reporting: press accounts based on official figures put the number of secured convictions under Ley Olimpia at only about eight by early 2024.

Ley Olimpia's legislative adoption across Mexico and, increasingly, Latin America has been rapid and broad, but the gap between thousands of opened case files and a handful of convictions is a well-documented weakness in the law's real-world enforcement.