Public data getting harder to find in Mexico, civil rights group says

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Public information in Mexico is becoming more difficult to access under President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a civil rights group said on Wednesday as it showed that scores of government databases are no longer updated.

More than 70% of databases on the website for the national transparency institute, which hosts public information, have not been updated for at least two years, Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity (MCCI) found.

The group found that the total number of statistics made public by hundreds of government entities it reviewed declined by 36% between 2018, when Lopez Obrador took office, and 2022.

“Transparency is going backwards,” the group said in a statement.

The presidency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The National Institute of Ecology and Climate Change, which provides information on environmental issues, was found to be particularly deficient by MCCI. The institute did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The researchers also said an “excess” of information was being held back by government entities when responding to freedom of information requests.

The government transparency institute has gone 131 days without a session because Lopez Obrador rejected the appointment of new officials, leaving the body without the necessary quorum to hold sessions.

Lopez Obrador argues his government is more transparent than previous administrations, pointing to his regular weekday press conferences in which he fields questions and presents government data on a range of topics.

But Maria Amparo, of the MCCI group, said this was evidence of information control rather than transparency.

“This government has decided to create its own mechanisms of informing the public,” she said. “However, access to information is an indication of the degree of democracy.”

Consultancy Spin counted 101,155 false, misleading or impossible-to-prove statements by Lopez Obrador during four years in office.

(Reporting by Stefanie Eschenbacher and Raul Cortes; Editing by Stephen Eisenhammer and Andy Sullivan)