Mexico City.- President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s six-year term has failed to deliver on its promise of freedom of expression and access to information, said the organization Article 19, which documented a 62.1 percent increase in attacks against the press.
He also reported the concentration of official advertising, the dismantling of the Commission for Assistance to Victims, the attacks on the INAI, the lack of information on social programs and even the failure of special commissions for access to justice on issues such as the Dirty War.
“The government that called itself ‘transparency’ was not such. On the contrary, access to information suffered clear setbacks. The greatest expression of this contraction was the paralysis to which the ruling party majority in the Senate subjected the National Institute of Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data (INAI), by failing to appoint three commissioners, even to this day,” the organization concluded in its document “Pending Rights. Six-year Report on Freedom of Expression and the Right to Information in Mexico.”
Between December 1, 2018, and March 31, 2024, he said, there have been 3,408 attacks against the press, one every 14 hours, including the murders of at least 46 journalists and four disappearances.
This represents an increase, compared to the government of Enrique Peña Nieto, of at least 2,502 attacks against the press, 46 murders of journalists and four disappearances.
The report highlights the Mexican State as one of the main aggressors against the press, even above organized crime, with 1,559 attacks from institutions, 45.75 percent of the total, compared to 280 cases of criminal groups or 8.22 percent.
Mexico City, he warns, is the epicenter of the attacks with 582 and 179, that is, 30.76 percent occurred during López Obrador’s morning press conferences.
“What is happening in the Las Mañaneras space is a strategy of misinformation and stigmatization against critical media outlets that are categorized as ‘adversaries’, ‘sellouts’ or ‘conservatives’, and any public scrutiny is considered an ‘attack’ against the government,” the study states.
Less than three months before the end of the Government, Article 19 also considers the purchase of official advertising to have been a failure, since although the budget was reduced compared to the previous six-year term, 10 of 916 media outlets received 47.08 percent of the resources.
“The arbitrary distribution of official advertising has an inhibitory effect on freedom of expression and is a form of subtle and indirect censorship,” the study says.
Article 19, a London-based organization dedicated to the defense of freedom of expression and the right to information, highlights that while during the entire Peña Nieto administration, citizens challenged 42,631 information responses through the INAI, between December 2018 and last March, the Government has received 82,047 or 92 percent more.
Not to mention, he adds, that the López Obrador government tried to hide information about the Mayan Train and the Trans-Isthmus Corridor by declaring them national security projects.
The opacity of the six-year term even affects the beneficiaries of social programs, such as Sembrando Vida, in which citizens cannot know the reason why they were not elected.
The Ministry of Welfare has not provided a breakdown by state of the 36 billion pesos budget it has managed for that program.
The report “Pending Rights” also denounces the freezing of the investigation and the punishment for the use of the Pegasus spy program against 25 journalists and activists during the previous administration, despite the promise made at the beginning of the administration.
In October 2022, once it was proven that the program in the hands of the Army was still being used, even against the then Undersecretary of the Interior, Alejandro Encinas, the report adds, the President validated it.
“President López Obrador defended himself by saying that ‘it is not true that journalists or opponents are spied on’, but that the surveillance corresponded to ‘intelligence work, not espionage’ in order to, in his own words, ‘confront criminals’. In other words, he confirmed that Pegasus was still operating, but was unaware or concealed that the armed forces were using the malware to selectively spy on innocent people,” the study states.
Article 19, directed in Mexico by Leopoldo Maldonado, concludes that the opacity has had repercussions even in the National Search System, since the Government cut the budget of the National Commission of Victims, dismantled the National Center for Human Identification and ordered its own census of missing persons, in charge of the Ministries of Welfare and the Interior, which do not have the authority.
“The census lacked transparency, public methodology and consultation with families and society. It is symptomatic that this initiative and the government’s opacity occurred in an electoral context, which is interpreted as an attempt to manipulate the figures of missing persons, minimize the seriousness of the situation and deny that López Obrador’s six-year term has the highest rates of disappearances,” he says.
The organization, which has also been attacked by López Obrador, highlighted the failure of the special commissions that the President created to find the truth and justice in the Dirty War or the disappearance of the students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School, since the Army refused to provide information.
“The President came up against the Army and its responsibility in the events,” he explains, “an entire six-year period without knowing the whereabouts of the young people, in addition to the impunity guaranteed to the military institution. Here, the political project of the Obradorist six-year period that is about to end was clearly evident: co-government with the Army.”
#AMLOs #sixyear #term #fails #freedom #expression
