norms regulate everything that is considered valuable to the community. We could examine that the regional laws are an expression of the social region order with a normative function; the importance of the regional laws is that they express legally he organized community. These laws should be valuable as “spaces of a legal decision by adopting particular solutions to local problems” (Vado, 2008: 228). A fundamental question in that sense would be: What are the characteristics of regional legislations, and how they link with the reality in which are elaborated?

The legal frame is a fundamental feature of the media and social communication systems. Hallin & Mancini (2004) recognize seven types of common laws on media in democratic States: 1) defamation, privacy, and right of reply laws, 2) hate speech laws, 3) professional secrecy and journalists’ conscience laws, 4) access to government information laws, 5) concentration, property, and competence of media laws, 6) regulation laws on the electoral campaigns and the politic communication and 7) licenses and concessions of broadcasting laws. All of these are in Mexico, in the federal approach, and most of them in the subnational entities legislations.

On the other hand, media development is the concept used by UNESCO to link the quality of the media system in the States with other aspects considered in the general evolution of democracy and prosperity (UNESCO-IPDC, 2010). Under the frame of this organism, media development has been evaluated in some countries, for example, in Maldives (Mendel, 2009), Bhutan (Ministry of Information and Communications, 2009), Timor-Leste (Mendel, 2011b), Egypt (Mendel, 2011a), Croatia (Peruško, 2011), Uruguay (UNESCO, 2014) and Bolivia (Torrico & Villegas, 2016). In these works, the logic was to create a review on how indicators presented by UNESCO were; making a balance on their performance.

Media development has had its critics; Berger (2010), as well as Enghel & Wilkins (2012) point that time is ambiguous and contradictory when using it interchangeably as means (a unit of conditions to get to status) and as an aim (a level which it has achieved). However, over time it has raise sounding, there are groups of academics that are already organized by this term as an element that articulates their scientific work1.

This article considers that the category related to the legal frame evaluation of the UNESCO indicators for media development is an instrument that allows using extern criteria for the aims of this study. Here it is used as an instrument to extrapolate it from its construction to evaluate the national States and used in the legislation analysis on communication in the subnational space. UNESCO divides the legal frame category of the media development into; a) legal and political frame, b) system to regulate media, c) laws on defamation and other legal restrictions on journalists, and d) censorship.