RECENT DEVELOPMENT OF TRANSPARENCY AND ACCESS TO INFORMATION AT THE FEDERAL LEVEL IN MEXICO Issac Armando Arteaga Cano Department of Political Science McGill University, Montreal August 2007 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master in Arts © Issac Armando Arteaga Cano, 2007. 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Canada ABSTRACT Transparency and access to information have become important elements of the Mexican political transition. The goal of this study is to contribute to the debate on those fields by: first, providing a theoretical framework that helps to understand the notions of transparency and access to information and their linkage to a democratic regime; second, by offering an account of the institutions that preceded the enactment of this norm; and third, explaining the legislative work that led to the approval of the Transparency and Access to Governmental Information Federal Law (LFTAIPG) in Mexico in 2002. This thesis/paper argues that the LFTAIPG can be seen as the result of the liberalization of the Mexican regime, and as a product of the political transition by promoting accountability in the federal government. RESUME La transparence et l'acces a l'information sont devenus des elements importants de la transition politique mexicaine. L'objet de mon memoire est de contribuer a l'etude de ces sujets, premierement, en etablissant un cadre theorique qui nous permettra de comprendre les notions de transparence et d'acces a l'information, ainsi que leur relation avec la democratic, deuxiemement, en presentant les institutions qui ont precede l'adoption de ces normes et, troisiemement, en expliquant le travail legislatif qui a mene a l'adoption de la loi federate de transparence et d'acces a l'information gouvernementale du Mexique (LFTAIPG) en 2002. Mon memoire soutient que la LFTAIPG est le resultat de la liberalisation du regime mexicain et un produit de la transition politique qui rehausse la responsabilite politique du gouvernement federal. u ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my parents, Haydee and Armando, and sister, Vania, for their support and encouragement during my stay in Montreal. This and all my achievements are for and because of them. I am also grateful to my friends in Montreal and Mexico for helping me to deal successfully with postgraduate studies In Montreal: to the Mexican Gang, Julian Durazo, Bethel Hernandez, and Monica Trevino, for their time and hours of chatting; to my new friends, Elizabeth Barona, Ivan Pinzon, and Mark Daku, for making life in Montreal easier; and the trio, Mila Francisco and Lucia Madariaga, for the mutual help in the "thesis" sessions on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. And in Mexico, first, to my close friends, almost my sisters, Atzimba Baltazar and Daniela Zepeda for always being there; and to Gerardo Maldonado and Gabriela Perez, for guiding me in winding paths of the graduate school. And to Erika Hernandez and Pilar Zazueta, for their friendship. I am in debt to the faculty of the Department of Political Science of McGill University, whose classes helped me to view Mexican Politics from a more objective perspective. Special mention is owed to Profs. Juliet Johnson and Filippo Sabetti: their insights were extremely useful for the development of this study. Last but not least, I will always be grateful to Prof. Philip Oxhorn not only for his patience in guiding the construction and development of this document, but also for sharing with me, as with many other students of Latin American, his encyclopedic knowledge about the region. Finally, the writing of this thesis was possible only due to a research assistantship of the Centre for Developing-Area Studies and his director, Prof. Oxhorn; and by the Secretaria de Education Publico, of Mexico, through the Programa de Becas Complementarias para Mexicanos que Realizardn Estudios de Posgrado en el Exterior. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION 1 2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK * 5 2.1. Accountability in historical perspective 6 2.2. Transparency and Access to Information: operational concepts and definitions 17 2.3. Transparency and Access to Information and its linkage to democracy 27 2.4. Final Remarks 33 3. ACCESS TO INFORMATION AND TRANSPARENCY IN MEXICO BEFORE 2001 35 3.1 The Mexican Political System: A General Overview 37 3.2 Recent Antecedents of Transparency and Access to Information in Mexico ..44 3.3 Transparency and Access to information in the Governmental Transition of 2000-2001 50 3.4 Final Considerations 55 4. BUILDING TRANSPARENCY AND ACCESS TO INFORMATION IN MEXICO 57 4.1 The PRD's Alternative: Transparency in the Federal Public Administration59 4.1.1 Objective and Main Arguments of the Proposal 60 4.1.2 Definitions of Transparency and Access to Information 61 4.1.3 Comprehensiveness: Structures Covered by the Bill 63 4.1.4 Contradictions in the Bill 64 4.2 Fox's Proposal: Formalizing Transparency and Access to Information 66 4.2.1 Objective and Tools of the Proposal 66 4.2.2 Definitions of Transparency and Access to Information 67 4.2.3 Comprehensiveness: Structures Covered by the Bill 70 4.2.4 Contradictions in the Bill 71 4.3 Building Bridges in the Opposition: PRI, PRD, PT and Convergencia's Proposal 72 iv 4.3.1 Objective and Tools of the Proposal 73 4.3.2 Definitions of Transparency and Access to Information 75 4.3.3 Comprehensiveness: Structures Covered by the Bill 76 4.3.4 Contradictions in the Bill 77 4.4 Generating Consensus in Congress? The Final Configuration of LFTAIPG..78 4.5 Final Remarks 89 5. CONCLUSIONS 90 6. BIBLIOGRAPHY 95 6.1 Articles and Books 95 6.2 Executive Branch Documents 108 6.3 Legislative Information 108 6.4 Information in the Official Diary of the Federation 110 6.5 Federal Laws Ill 6.6 Internet Documents Ill 6.7 Internet Sites 112 7. APPENDIX: CHRONOLOGY OF THE MEXICAN PRESIDENTS: 1934- 2006 113 v 1. INTRODUCTION As Francis Adams notes, "Governing elites are unlikely to advance the public interest or respect the rule of law unless they are held accountable for their actions".1 In this context, Mexico's authoritarian governments under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI, Partido Revolucionario Institutional) developed formal mechanisms to promote "transparency" and "access to information" in the public sector, but the policies were ineffective and limited. The PRI regime used them as a mechanism to remain in power and to delay the transition. The authoritarian system provided incomplete social and economic indicators in very specific documents: the annual reports that the presidents of Mexico, governors and municipal presidents have to present to the legislative bodies, as well as the yearly activities reports that the secretaries of the executive branch have to elaborate. These reports constituted for decades the only information provided by the government, the only source of data about its functioning, and the only mechanism for ensuring, somehow or other, the accountability of public servants.2 In this context, the corporatism of the Mexican political system under the PRI eliminated any possibility of establishing effective "horizontal and vertical accountability systems".3 The absence of these mechanisms allowed the emergence and expansion of corporatism, clientelism and patronage in the public sector, that is to say, the extensive corruption that has characterized the Mexican government.4 For that reason, when the opposition political parties began to win political positions at the subnational level, they used accountability, transparency and access to information to differentiate themselves from the PRI-regime, which 1 Francis Adams, Deepening Democracy. Global Governance and Political Reform in Latin America, Westport, Praeger Publishers, 2003, p. 132. 2 David Corrochano, "Social Capital and Democracy in Mexico: The Social Limits of Political Change", in Social Forces 84(1), 2005, pp. 1-16 3 Cfr. Guillermo A. O'Donnell, Horizontal Accountability in New Democracies, in Journal of Democracy 9(3), 1998, pp. 112-113. 4 Stephen D.