Breathe
By Leticia Robles de la Rosa, Excélsior columnist and reporter, assigned to cover the activities of the Mexican Senate since 2006. She has a 37-year professional career and is also a professor at UNAM.
When in December 2022 the voices of the Morenistas began to be heard regarding the position of the President of the Republic against the National Institute of Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data (INAI), most specialists and even the commissioners of the Institute were convinced that the presidential position would not go beyond criticism.
However, as the days passed, little by little the skepticism disappeared and the facts confirmed that the presidential animosity towards the INAI is so firm that the Morena senators should have obeyed the order not to elect the commissioners it needs to operate its plenary, even if by doing so they violate the Constitution they swore to keep and enforce on August 30, 2018, when they were sworn in as senators of the Republic.
The end of the ordinary period has arrived and those of us who were accused of exaggeration for having warned since December that INAI was in real danger, today reality proves us right.
The senators went on an unconstitutional vacation, because the recess period is not a vacation, but a period for the commissions to work and they take it as a four-month rest; they went to gloat over their decisions, regardless of the agony of an institution created by constitutional mandate and which was a demand of many social groups, among them current Moreno supporters who before, from the PRD and the PAN, considered the right to information, transparency and protection of personal data as a citizen conquest.
But INAI's problem is not limited to the inoperability of its plenary, which from my point of view is a de facto death.
The problem of INAI is that it is at risk of disappearing due to budgetary starvation, because Morena's plans are that since its plenary will not function properly during the months of April, May, June, July and August, it has no case to be considered in the 2024 Federal Expenditure Budget Bill, which the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit delivers to the Chamber of Deputies no later than September 8.
Thus, the budget cut to INAI is expected to be severe and when the senators arrive on September 1, the decision of not electing the commissioners will be maintained, so that they will be left with four and with the argument that no one can force them to do the impossible, the idea of the Morenistas is that even though the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) may demand that they comply with the constitutional mandate, nothing will happen to them, because they have the majority in the Congress of the Union and cannot replace them.
Each step that the Morenistas have planned is an advance in their logic that they are not obliged to comply with the Constitution, because they have the command of protection that they give themselves and that is headed by the President of the Republic.
The official supporters try to spread the false information that INAI refused to provide data on the Fobaproa or the names of those to whom taxes are condoned in order to try to strengthen the idea that the Institute "is useless".
It is false, because INAI did not exist then; it is false, because INAI does not provide information, but makes the obliged institutions provide it and it is false, because they who now have the management of that information, because they are government, have not found anything of what they invented to disqualify their adversaries; if they had found it they would have already filed complaints.
According to information provided by the Morenista senators themselves, the President's annoyance with INAI arose when the Institute clarified that it could not force a private individual, Carlos Loret, to show his salary or income, because the obligations of transparency and accountability are for public servants.
And the second reason is that the transparency of information has made it possible to document the level of corruption that exists in different areas of government and that throw overboard the white flag that indicated the end of corruption.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of Opinion 51.
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