MEXICO CITY (CN) — Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Monday that he plans to present a bill to eliminate the country’s national transparency agency, INAI, which processes public information requests, among other data protection tasks.
While answering a reporter’s question about fiscal reform, López Obrador called the INAI a “useless” agency “at the service of the minorities,” and said it and other agencies must be cut to complete his mission of governmental austerity.
“We can’t think of fiscal reform before we finish tightening up the government,” he said. “The government must be austere in its totality. There can’t be a rich government while the people are poor.”
A spokesperson for the INAI did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication, but political analysts and public administration specialists broadly condemned the president’s proposal as dangerous to democratic institutions in Mexico.
“The fact is these are not necessarily agencies at the service of minorities,” said Carlos Bravo Regidor, a political analyst and journalism professor at the Mexico City government think tank CIDE. “These are agencies at the service of public interest, or at the service of citizenship, and in many cases what they provide is actual access to the exercise of rights.”
The president’s party currently lacks the qualified majority in the Congress to enact the constitutional reform necessary to give the INAI the boot. However, as with his initiative to elect Supreme Court justices by popular vote, analysts believe that López Obrador is setting up the pieces of his agenda so that they fall his way in the event that his ruling Morena party sweeps next year’s congressional and presidential elections.
"This is AMLO paving the way for the presidential succession with Claudia Sheinbaum, clearly," Bravo said, referencing former Mexico City Mayor and Morena candidate, "and to have a more propitious institutional context for her to be able to carry out his agenda without the nuisances of having autonomous organs that require a lot more technical competence in public administration or that represent restrictions to his decision making power.”
Critics have called out López Obrador for his efforts to place political allies in high-ranking government positions during his term, from Supreme Court justices to the head of Mexico’s national human rights agency.
Similar to his campaign against what he calls Mexico’s “rotten” judiciary, López Obrador and Morena legislators have conducted a campaign to weaken the INAI during his term. In late March, Morena legislators’ refusal to appoint new INAI commissioners led to a lack of the quorum of five commissioners necessary to conduct its plenary sessions.
Information request appeals — where those who have been denied information in other departments can request the INAI to force the government to release it — are reviewed in the plenary sessions. The months-long lack of quorum led to a massive backlog of appeals, affecting the right of journalists and citizens to demand transparency from the federal government.
Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled in August that the INAI could temporarily conduct plenary sessions with a quorum of four commissioners until the Senate finally appoints new ones. Three of the seven seats on the board have been empty since March.
The agency has been able to clear that backlog and return to business as usual in the succeeding months, according to Gabriel Espinoza, head of data protection analysis at the INAI. But the order from the high court is not a permanent solution.
“They still haven’t settled the issue of the lack of nominations,” he said in a phone interview. “There is room for improvement, yes, but it won’t be resolved by the extinguishing of the institute.”
Eliminating the INAI would be “an enormous step backwards in terms of human rights,” Espinoza said. “Access to information has an impact on other rights.”
Journalists in Mexico got a taste of what the country would be like without its transparency agency during the deadlock earlier this year. In May, over 185 journalists and 80 civil society groups signed a letter demanding that the Congress put the INAI back to work.
López Obrador also said Monday that he would present bills to eliminate Mexico’s Federal Telecommunications Institute and the Federal Economic Competition Commission, calling them and the INAI “superfluous expenses.”
Follow @copycopeland
Subscribe to Closing Arguments
Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.
