Even With the World's Best Transparency Law, Mexico Has a Terrible Record on Transparency Ana Campoy - Quartz
go to original October 15, 2016

Mexico can boast having one of the world’s best right-to-information laws. But that means little in practice, journalists and activists say, because authorities regularly skirt the spirit of the well-regarded law - starting, it is alleged, with the government agency charged with upholding it.

The National Institute for Transparency, Access of Information and Personal Data Protection, or INAI for its Spanish acronym, this week was accused of censoring data out of a new online archive it helped build to document massacres and other egregious acts of violence committed in Mexico over the past five decades.

The archive, dubbed “Memory and Truth,” (link in Spanish) was co-produced with civil groups including Article 19, an international nonprofit that advocates for freedom of expression. The idea was to present all publicly available information about particularly flagrant human rights violations so that citizens could learn about them and hold authorities accountable. But less than two days before its Oct. 11 launch, INAI decided to strip out a big portion of the archive’s content in an attempt to water it down, Article 19 says.

“The institute didn’t really measure the impact of the project and later got cold feet,” said David Mora, an Article 19 spokesman. “It has demonstrated to us that it is not politically independent.”

INAI said that the information was removed to protect personal data, its other key responsibility. “This institute categorically denies that there’s any type of censorship,” it said in a press statement.

Censored or not, the Memory and Truth project exposes the limits of Mexico’s freedom-of-information apparatus.

Read the rest at Quartz

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