MEXICO CITY (CN) — Mexico’s national transparency agency INAI has gone over 90 days without legally being able to process public information appeals after the Senate failed to appoint a new commissioner in late March.
The shutdown has resulted in a growing backlog of over 6,300 petitions, according to INAI chief commissioner Blanca Lilia Ibarra.
The INAI’s seven-person executive board must have a quorum of four commissioners and the commission president in order to legally carry out certain functions. The Senate neglected to fill a seat on the board that went vacant on March 31, while two other seats have been empty for over a year.
Ibarra denied multiple requests for interview or comment, but said in a tweet Wednesday that “democracies aren’t attained once and for all, they are not permanent; in order to survive, they must constantly be constructed. In order to achieve that, citizen’s rights and liberties must be guaranteed.”
She also included figures that illustrate the situation: “89 days without quorum, 6,363 pending appeals, 12 plenary sessions that did not take place.”
While she and other INAI employees describe the situation in terms like “paralyzed,” the institute’s functions are not at a complete standstill. It and other state and federal government departments can fulfill public information requests as they please and the INAI is still accepting information appeals.
What it cannot do without quorum is conduct plenary sessions, during which the results of the appeals are announced. Citizens can initiate an appeal any time they feel the law was not followed in the processing of a public information request.
A hamstrung INAI is no accident, according to Gabriel Espinoza, head of the institute’s department of data protection analysis.
“There is a deliberate intention to paralyze the institute,” said Espinoza in an interview.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has touted his administration’s transparency and integrity while criticizing the INAI as corrupt. His reproofs date back to before he took the presidency in December 2018. On the campaign trail the year before, he accused the institute of covering up several corruption scandals.
López Obrador vetoed two Senate appointees to the INAI’s board of commissioners in March, two weeks before the third seat became vacant.
In April, less than two weeks into the INAI freeze, a leaked audio recording reportedly featured then Interior Secretary and 2024 presidential hopeful Adán Augusto López telling senators from López Obrador’s ruling Morena party that the president wanted a “period of impasse” for the INAI.
“He told me, and here I am telling you all: ‘I think that what’s best for us is for there to be a period of impasse,’” López can be heard in the recording. “Now, yesterday I told him that I was coming here and that surely one of the topics we would discuss would be the institute, and well, the answer is the same: we are in an ideal world. We’re in no hurry to have anyone appointed at this time.”
His office did not respond to a request for comment.
Courthouse News contacted Senator Citlalli Hernández, who also serves as Morena’s secretary general, for comment, but she also did not respond.
Political analysts stressed the gravity of this deliberate inaction on the part of the executive and legislative branches as Mexico gears up for what promises to be a heated presidential race next year.
“The government is actively acting against the autonomous institution in charge of guaranteeing the right of citizens to information,” said Carlos Bravo Regidor, a political analyst and journalism professor at the Mexico City-based government think tank CIDE.
“This is the government deliberately preventing citizens from knowing how the government works, and you can only guess why they would be interested in doing this,” he continued. “What is it that they’re doing that they want the transparency institute to be not working, particularly a year ahead of a presidential election? It really makes you wonder.”
The INAI said in a statement shared with Courthouse News that it is not completely paralyzed and that it can still carry out several of its duties. But these functions are relatively minor in comparison with its ability to force government agencies to release information it would rather hold onto.
“As long as they can’t do that, the institute is really damaged in terms of its capacity to do what it’s supposed to do,” Bravo said.
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.
