Breathe
By Adela Navarro Bello
Governments, regardless of their ideology or color of origin, invariably tend to control everything that means public resources, from who administers them, who allocates them, to whom they are assigned, for what concept, for what period of time and under what conditions. This has been systematically evidenced, generally, from journalistic, citizen, organization or opposition investigations.
From the last PRI governments in the nineties, when Pemexgate was discovered, when funds from the oil union were used for the presidential campaign of the candidate of the tricolor party; the Toallagate in the six-year term of Vicente Fox Quesada or the construction of the presidential cabins in the same administration; not to mention the cases of the ABC Day Care Center in Hermosillo, Sonora in the government of Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, or the construction of his very expensive Estela de Luz.
With Enrique Peña Nieto they were served in abundance, both by governors and in the Presidency of the Republic, whose paradigmatic cases are La Estafa Maestra, La Casa Blanca and the conflict of interest with Grupo Higa.
The arrival of an administration that assumes itself to be leftist did not mean a radical change in terms of corruption and discretional management of resources. The same passions about the excesses that characterized the governments that preceded it, meant the administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador: the fraud in Segalmex, the houses of Manuel Bartlett, the conflict of interests in which not one, but several of his sons were involved with accusations of favoritism when granting concessions to friends and relatives; the tithe of Delfina Gómez in the State of Mexico, the unexplained enrichment of Rocío Nahle, Mario Delgado, the Monreal family, among others.
In the incipient government of Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, cases of excesses and corruption have not yet been unveiled, but the foundations have been laid to hide them, to minimize them, so that the presidential word prevails over reason and responsibility.
With the limitations to the Judicial Power first, and the elimination of the autonomous bodies later, two important government actions that may result in corruption have been padlocked: the now uncontroversial reforms to the Constitution, carried out unilaterally, without consensus and considering the ruling legislative bloc as an amorphous mass that consumed individual thought and put an end to the maxim "The President proposes and the Congress disposes" and access to information has been violated with the disappearance of the National Institute for Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data (INAI).
In Mexico, times of darkness are looming, given that now the government itself will be in charge of providing the information requested by society and any of its sectors for the sake of transparency and accountability. Like López Obrador, Sheinbaum sets herself up as judge and party, with the premise that corruption no longer exists only because such officialist concept persists in her narrative.
With INAI, accountable subjects, not only the Government of the Republic, but also unions, political parties and other branches of government, had established periods to deliver the information requested by citizens and had to comply with the establishment of specialized areas of transparency and access to information available to all.
That will no longer happen. Now access to information will be in charge of the government, about which there is doubt; in an Anticorruption secretariat subordinated to the will of the head of the Government of the Republic, and, therefore, of every secretariat or agency that integrates it.
The ruling bloc in the Legislative Power decided to vote for the elimination of autonomous bodies because the Presidency of the Republic requested it, and without listening, without consulting, probing or pondering reasons in any other sense, they pleased the President of Mexico, and the citizens were left without the guarantor body of access to information.
The President, who has not gone through her own individual transformation to seal the personality of her government in a carbon copy of her teacher, guru and predecessor, wielded that the disappearance of INAI is due to the excesses, internal acts of corruption and the onerous expense they represent, without giving rise to corrective actions to preserve access to information in an interested third party and without ties to the government.
In the morning conference that also copied in tone, format and atmosphere to her predecessor, Sheinbaum commented: "There will be more transparency now, but there will be no corruption; then, the disappearance of INAI as an autonomous body, what it does is to end this (corruption and excesses in the Institute). But the functions are incorporated to the Anti-Corruption Secretariat and personal data will be safeguarded, we are going to generate mechanisms of obligatory transparency of all the secretariats, where citizens can easily review the functions, the expenditure, everything that the Mexican Government does. But I am surprised, and it must be said, because the entire commentocracy today says that the country is being put at risk, transparency must be there, and it is one of the substantive obligations of the governments: accountability, transparency and protection of personal data, but what will no longer be there, is a billion pesos that were destined for this (corruption and excesses in the Institute)".
The reality is that corruption cannot be eradicated with rhetoric, even if it comes from the National Palace. There are the excesses committed in the immediate past presidency. It is also true that that government, like the previous ones, systematically denied information to be accountable to the citizenry's request, reserved information for up to five years -allocating it the label of national security- and have done everything they could to close the doors of accountability.
What is coming for the country is a citizen struggle, another one to demand information from governments that do not even grant interviews, that do not answer public questions and act in the dark with public resources, the concession of works, the delivery of programs, the execution of projects and so many other actions that they control for themselves, their party and their own.
What is coming for the country is a very serious time of darkness, with a government that is seen as increasingly authoritarian and indifferent to crime in all its forms.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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