Reforms Concerning Autonomous Agencies: The Elimination of the National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Personal Data Protection (INAI)

More than forty years have passed since Mexico established a national system for transparency and access to information. The first constitutional amendment related to this occurred in 1977, with the norm: “The State will guarantee the right to information.”  

This was a response to a regime that failed to comply with democratic principles when the hegemonic party ruled the country for seventy years.  

However, when it gained the presidency again, the same party thoroughly pushed forward the improvement of the constitutional and legal guarantees for the right to information and the right to know. This is a possible explanation, considering Molinar J. (1996) and several authors' explanations of how one-party and noncompetitive elections political systems remain stable through continued adaptation processes. (Lijphart and Waisman, 2018) 

It is well known that constitutional autonomous agencies were created during the last decade of the twentieth century as a reaction to several public problems that still need to be solved. Although INAI was born in 2015, its precedent was set with the creation of legislation by the Federal Transparency Institute (IFAI, for its acronym in Spanish). 

By 2013th, it became evident that the state legislation on transparency raised unequal mechanisms for compliance.  Then you have local entities like Guerrero, which historically had severe security problems where the information requests had to be submitted in person. It also became clear that several agents, such as unions, benefited from public resources and were out of the scope of the transparency legislation. Finally, there was undoubtedly an issue of opacity in municipalities. Finally, in 2014th, the Mexican constitution created an oversight body for transparency and access to information.  

For the past six years, there have been several attempts to limit the functioning of INAI through the omission of the legislative to designate three of the transparency commissioners that the collegiate governing body needed for deliberations and resolutions, while at the same time, the president used a significant amount in his morning press conferences to denigrate INAI’s work. On November 21st, the chamber of deputies approved the dictamination that the Senate is now reviewing for the disappearance of INAI. The reform proposes that the public institutions (obliged subjects to a regime of transparency that is being dismantled) themselves promote, protect, and guarantee the right to information and personal data protection.   

Further, it complements that the Secretariat of Public Function (SFP) will oversee the right to access information and the protection of personal data, which is a big challenge considering the lack of independence, specialization, and technical capacities regarding these human rights, even though the relevant functions the SFP develops relate to its faculties.  

The analysis of eliminating INAI and other constitutional autonomous agencies obliges us to review the academic literature on democracy. The executive has argued that these agencies should not operate as checks and balances for the other powers elected by popular vote since this is the origin of its legitimacy. Two issues to consider are: 1) The judiciary has yet to be elected in Mexico, and 2) the commissioners were designated by the Senate and passed by the executive approval, both public powers of the Union elected by vote.  

However, the statement that the mentioned reforms were proposed by “the people” is false since many Mexican citizens are opposed to these, and decision-making has not considered the premises of deliberative democracy.  Reason-giving, reflective reason, and understanding are some of the cores of deliberation, as deemed by Bächtiger and Parkinson (2019). Concerning the title of this blog, I recuperate Andreas Schedler's category of “electoral authoritarianism.” The author argues that elections can result in two opposite situations. The first possibility would be “democratic governance,” while the second could be an “instrument of authoritarian control.”  

Without open, deliberative forums, the possibility of governance is stretched. According to Ruhanen L. Ritchie B. and Tkaczynsk (2010), governance includes at least accountability, transparency, “involving structure,” and effectiveness. These results are based on the analysis of 53 published government studies.  

Regarding the National Transparency Platform, the destiny of nearly 15,000 million registers will be transferred to the executive secretariat (to be determined) that will oversee protecting the right to information. 

After the new amendments, it is impossible to know how the government will guarantee the right to information (RTI) in 2024. The right-to-information reforms are regressive due to their unproportionality and lack of an accurate diagnosis. 

How soon would Mexican citizens have accurate mechanisms to monitor the actions of government agencies? This is the question to solve.  

Bibliographic References 

Bächtiger, A. and Parkinson J. (2019). Mapping and Measuring Deliberation: Towards a New Deliberative Quality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Molinar J. (2018). Changing the Balance of Power in a Hegemonic Party System: The Case of Mexico. Lijphart and Waisman (Eds.). Institutional design in new democracies (pp-137-160). Routledge Taylor and Francis Route. New York, London.  

Przeworski, A. (2010), Qué esperar de la democracia. Límites y posibilidades del autogobierno, Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. 

Ruhanen, L., Scott, N., Ritchie, B. and Tkaczynski, A. (2010), "Governance: a review and synthesis of the literature," Tourism Review, Vol. 65 No. 4, pp. 4-16. https://doi.org/10.1108/16605371011093836 

Schedler, A. (2004). Elecciones sin democracia. El menú de la manipulación electoral. Estudios Políticos, (24), 137-156. Recuperado de: 

https://revistas.udea.edu.co/index.php/estudiospoliticos/article/download/1367/1469/