A key but sometimes overlooked way for governments to ensure a reliable flow of information across their nations is to provide citizens, including journalists, access to official documents such as public contracts and budgets. Access like that is crucial to holding leaders and governments accountable, especially when it comes to abuses of power.
Unfortunately, Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, is failing the access test only weeks into her administration. She agreed with the Mexican Senate’s decision late last month to shut down an independent body that was set up two decades ago to give Mexicans access to public records.
Over the last 20 years, the Associated Press reports, citizens have filed more than four million freedom-of-information requests with that body. In the first nine months of 2024, 275,000 requests had been submitted for various government files.
Former President Andrés Martines López Obrador, no fan of the media, first pushed Mexico’s Congress to close the freestanding National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information, and Protection of Personal Data (INAI). Sheinbaum is following his lead by hailing the Senate-passed constitutional amendment. A majority of Mexico’s 32 state legislatures now must approve the measure, which is considered likely since Sheinbaum’s party, Morena, controls most legislatures. (At the same time senators voted to end INAI, they similarly abolished several more autonomous bodies that dealt with the energy industry and other aspects of Mexican society.)
There had been some hope that President Sheinbaum would follow a slightly different course on information flows and the larger role of the media in her country. Her support for abolishing INAI, which had the power to force various departments to hand over information to citizens making requests, is hardly a positive start.
To be sure, she argues that the shuttered agency has not produced enough results. Moreover, she and other supporters claim, its work will carry on in other parts of the federal bureaucracy.
Those assertions are not convincing Mexicans committed to a free flow of information across their nation. “There’s no concrete proposal on the table for secondary law reforms, for the laws derived from the Constitution itself, and that obviously creates enormous uncertainty regarding access to information,” Leopoldo Maldonado, regional director of Article 19 for Mexico and Central America told the Latin American Journalism Review.
Mexican journalist Zedryk Raziel recently explained to that same journal how the transparency system had provided him important documents about corruption within Mexico. He and two colleagues gained information from the independent agency that led to their groundbreaking investigation into money laundering under former Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. Their work included reporting on Nieto and his wife living in a $7 million mansion that a state contractor built.
In other words, the information they gathered produced results. Raziel credits INAI for granting his team access to items like bank transfers and government deposits that revealed a money-laundering operation.
What happens next in Mexico is unclear. Spreading the independent agency’s work among federal agencies is asking government to guard itself, which often doesn’t go well. The great risk is a lack of accountability, which led Mexican reformers to create INAI in 2003 just after multiparty democracy was established in the nation.
It’s also unclear how citizens might file information requests in the future. Today, they can use the National Transparency Platform to seek records and documents from any of the more than 8,000 government institutions. What will happen once the system for requests is decentralized?
Similarly, who will handle appeals if the government denies requests under the new arrangement? The odds of a government ruling in favor of an appeal that it previously denied are not great.
The blow to public accountability could extend to individual states, too. The constitutional amendment making its way across legislatures would end independent information agencies at the state level as well.
President Sheinbaum promises that transparency will not end. “On the contrary, we are going to be much stricter in transparency,” she claims.
Democracy advocates, however, remain understandably concerned about INAI’s dissolution. Spreading information requests around to other parts of the government represents “the loss of a guarantee to the citizen,” independent investigative journalist Zorayda Gallegos told the New York Times.
That’s the real shame here: Citizens facing roadblocks as they seek information about their government. A democracy requires openness to thrive, not impediments to transparency.
