Between March 10th and 14th The Transparency Week takes place in the Mexican Senate\u2019s venue. The main guideline under which working sessions are focused is the Open Government Partnership (OPG), an international initiative whose purpose is redefining the relationship between society and its elected representatives in order to have accountability as a tool that will build the needed institutional trust of democratic life within nations. Nevertheless, when reviewing the Mexican case, the legislative power\u2019s reluctance for being subject to transparency controls represents a major obstacle. A recent reform to the 6th Constitutional article, where Congress is forced to yield to the information access regime, also enforces the inclusion of political parties and trusteeships to such regime. This apparently closes the gap regarding the potential loopholes where involved stakeholders tend to submit an amparo application in order to avoid their responsibilities of providing accountability with regards to public resources used by them. Over coming months, legislative chambers ought to approve the General Law of Transparency, the judicial framework that will regulate federal and local bodies on the aforementioned matter. Its content will determine the efficiency of accountability in Mexico.
\nAlthough the Legislative Power has commissions that attend transparency matters \u2013 for example, the Senate has the Committee for Guaranteeing Information Access (COGATI) \u2013 opacity remains the rule in most of the relevant issues within government. The main evidence is the confidential nature of the resolutions made by the Administration Council, the legislative body where decisions of resource allocation to parliamentary groups, commissions, allowances and operational expenses are made, In later years, the case of the trusteeship responsible for supervising the construction and implementation of the controversial new venue of the Senate in Paseo de la Reforma street certainly stands out. As it is well known, the location was inaugurated before it was finished \u2013 due to political reasons \u2013 and presents several faults that could have endangered the security of Congressmen working in there (impractical spaces, insufficient mobility as well as civil protection hazards). In addition, there is a dispute between conflicts of interests over the acquisition of venue\u2019s land. It is not a minor issue, given that it cost around 2.6 billion pesos of taxpayers\u2019 money (almost a billion more than what was originally budgeted, according to the Senate\u2019s Administration Commission).
\nOn the other hand, the money that is allocated discretionally by political parties for electoral purposes is still an issue where stakeholders do not have any incentives to make more transparent. It should be said that Congresses worldwide have special allocations that are aimed for these purposes. However, the scandal is not the fact itself, but its amount and extortion-related issues. The \u201cmoches\u201d case, revealed a few weeks ago, was evidence of the latter. The impunity demonstrated for this is certainly worrisome because it gives the appearance of being a common practice. Are legislators willing to strengthen the controls over this kind of behavior? In addition to incentives, the lack of promptness and opportunity of the transparency and accountability mechanisms do not allow for an improvement of the situation. The Mexican Chief Audit Office disseminates the results of the analysis of public accounts with a two-year delay, which leads to an evasion of responsibilities and, sometimes, the possibility for legislators to shield themselves using jurisdictional protection (by the way, the concept of Constitutional protection is a reform that has been blocked in Congress for several months).
\nIn short, is the commitment of Congress towards OPG a mere simulation? Society usually advocates for decreasing the number of legislative seats because it believes that elected representatives are far too many for the amount of work they end up doing. What is true is that this is not an issue dealing with size rather than efficiency and transparency in the allocation of resources from taxpayers. Mexican democracy will not be consolidated if this detail remains overlooked.<\/p>\n
CIDAC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Between March 10th and 14th The Transparency Week takes place in the
\nMexican Senate\u2019s venue. The main guideline under which working sessions
\nare focused is the Open Government Partnership (OPG), an international
\ninitiative whose purpose is redefining the relationship between society
\nand its elected representatives in order to have accountability as a
\ntool that will build the needed institutional trust of democratic life
\nwithin nations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4656,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[30],"class_list":["post-3524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-weekly-political-analysis","tag-political-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3524"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4233,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3524\/revisions\/4233"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}