For a democracy, public access to information is like oxygen–it keeps the system alive by holding governmental institutions and leaders accountable. One reason why democratic institutions generally are so stunted in Latin America is that secrecy and deception–with dollops of corruption–have persistently eroded public trust in government.
That’s what makes the release last week by the Mexican government of nearly 700 pages of its indictment against former President Luis Echeverria a watershed event in the democratic development of the country. It likely will resonate in Latin American nations that are just beginning to grapple with freedom of information.
Secrecy is assumed to be a prerogative of power in Latin America. Records of prosecutions of government officials are usually sealed–when there are records at all. Practically all aspects of the military are beyond scrutiny. It is a cherished tradition in Mexico that when a president leaves office he disappears from the eyes of the law and the media, except for the occasional tabloid photo of him and his family skiing the Alps or sunning in Sardinia.
Echeverria, 82, has been indicted for his alleged role in the 1971 killing of 25 student protesters by an officially sanctioned hit squad called the Falcons. The indictment effectively breaks two taboos–prosecuting a former president and releasing the details of the proceedings.
The latter is the result of a Freedom of Information law signed by President Vicente Fox in 2002. It created an independent panel that oversees the implementation of the law. The panel is a key actor in the process, because few FOI claims would survive if they got tangled in the often corrupt Mexican judiciary.
Indeed, in Echeverria’s case neither the Fox administration nor the attorney general were eager to release the information. It took seven months of legal wrangling with the freedom-of-information panel before they did so.
The group allegedly created by Echeverria is but one in a series of Mexico’s horror stories–the Dirty War, the massacre of dozens of protesters on the eve of the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City–that have been locked in the national attic.
Kate Doyle, director of the Mexico Project of the National Security Archive, said the release of the Echeverria documents was unprecedented for Mexico and the rest of Latin America. Though some countries have conducted truth-and-reconciliation probes after dictatorships or civil wars, according to her only three others have instituted formal freedom of information mechanisms comparable to Mexico’s.
There is little chance the elderly Echeverria will ever see the inside of a jail. The mere fact that he is being prosecuted under public scrutiny, though, should strengthen the faith of the Mexican people in democratic institutions and make future leaders think twice before committing such atrocities.
