Kate Doyle | The Nation

Kate Doyle served as an expert witness in the Mack trial. The documents used in the trial and dozens of other declassified US records on US policy in Guatemala may be found at the website of the National Security Archive.

Mexico's first freedom of information initiative, signed into law by
President Vicente Fox on June 10, represents a growing popular challenge
to governments throughout Latin America to end corruption and guarantee
openness and accountability. It also contrasts with attempts by the Bush
Administration to hinder public access to government information.

In addition to the new law, Fox recently opened up a lode of secret
police, military and intelligence documents from the early 1950s through
the mid-1980s. They promise to shed light on the long and dirty war the
government fought against its left-wing opponents, of whom more than 500
are thought to have been disappeared, tortured and killed by the state.
Mexico's new openness is especially significant because it arose from
public pressure rather than being imposed from on high. The catalyst
behind the freedom of information bill was a campaign by a collective of
reporters, editors, academics and nongovernmental organizations dubbed
the Grupo Oaxaca, for the Mexican city where eighteen months ago they
kicked off their drive. Once members of Congress indicated they were
prepared to introduce a bill last fall, the group drafted and submitted
one, getting it to legislators more than two months before Fox's
government came up with its own proposal.

That kind of citizen lobbying is rare in Latin America, but it appears
to be catching on. In Peru a consortium of media owners, the Peruvian
Press Council, has rallied to the cause, taking the unprecedented step
of holding discussions with the armed forces in an effort to preclude
military opposition while hammering out national security exemptions
that will permit the greatest openness possible on such sensitive issues
as human rights. In Paraguay news organizations and NGOs are preparing
to present an initiative before their Congress, and Guatemalans have
been pressing for several years for the right to request personal files
from a government notorious for intelligence operations targeting
citizens.

Now that the bill has been passed, Mexico faces its real battle:
convincing the public to use it. In a country where a powerful executive
branch has historically overshadowed a weak Congress, a dysfunctional
judicial system and a malleable press, citizens are not used to
demanding and receiving their rights. Supporters of the Fox government's
new openness say it will give them the leverage they need to expose
painful episodes of the recent past, like the state's role in the dirty
war of the 1970s and '80s, when the military abducted and disappeared
hundreds of guerrillas and suspected subversives. An even more pressing
mystery is the October 2, 1968, killing by Mexican security forces of
hundreds of students protesting for democratic reform in Mexico City's
Tlatelolco.

The Tlatelolco massacre offers the most acute example of the Mexican
government's obsession with secrecy. Hours after the confrontation
between demonstrators and soldiers, then-President Diaz Ordaz had the
plaza scrubbed and cleaned to efface all signs of the indiscriminate
firing. Soldiers descended on the city's newsrooms and confiscated
undeveloped rolls of film, so that no image of the violence would
survive. Many questions remain as to who ordered the massacre, and who
began the shooting.

But the real test for Mexico's new law will be much more mundane. This
is a country where citizens have no access to the most fundamental
government information affecting their daily life. Local school budgets,
crime statistics, antipollution controls, the salaries of public
officials, the number of police patrols, the contracts awarded by the
state and much more are out of reach for ordinary citizens. The same
civil society groups that organized and fought for their right to basic
information must now mobilize to educate people on how to use the law in
their favor.

Ironically, Mexico's incipient efforts toward greater transparency come
as the Bush Administration moves resolutely in the opposite direction.
The freedom of information law in Mexico--indeed, the effort to
challenge government secrecy and corruption throughout Latin America--is
perceived by citizens as an indispensable tool for exercising their
rights in the hemisphere's new democracies. Perhaps the oldest democracy
in the region could learn a thing or two from its neighbor.