No More Secrets; A transparency law is opening sensitive government files to public scrutiny. It's a positive step, if it lasts.

Byline: Scott Johnson

Arturo Fernandez Lopez, a midlevel accountant in a division of Mexico's Interior Ministry, got a lump in his stomach two years ago as he was crunching numbers. The 55-year-old bureaucrat began to notice what he calls "irregularities" in the office accounts--overly expensive purchases and what appeared to be evidence of no-bid contracts. Disaster-relief material and money destined for the coasts had somehow wound up in Mexico's interior without sufficient explanation. On July 2, 2002, Fernandez presented an official complaint to his office comptroller. But 17 days later, when he showed up for work, armed policemen outside the office stopped him at the door. "The police told me they had an order from my boss not to let me in," says Fernandez. Not long after, his paychecks simply stopped arriving.

But the accountant would persevere and help uncover what may be a massive scandal. Shortly after being fired, Fernandez sought help from the Federal Institute for Access to Information (IFAI), an agency started to help ordinary citizens obtain information from the government through a new transparency law. President Vicente Fox was swept into power four years ago partly on his opposition PAN party's promise to transform the corrupt system of patronage and secrecy that defined the 70-year reign of the PRI. Graft and bribery continue to plague Mexico, but the new transparency law--passed by the Congress a year and a half ago and modeled in part on the U.S. Freedom of Information Act--is shedding some much-needed light on the many dark corners of the system.

Already, more than 45,000 Mexicans have filed official requests through the IFAI. They range from the mundane (how many people there are in the Army) to the very complex (the details of the rescue of Mexico's banking sector in the mid-1990s). All show a public hunger for information that belies the oft-repeated mantra that Mexicans, as a people, are apathetic about issues like accountability and reform. Mexican institutions like the state- controlled oil company, Pemex, and Mexico's Social Security Institute have begun to disclose more information, and in a timelier fashion, than ever before. In May the IFAI prevailed on the government to explain why it had kicked two Cuban diplomats out of the country, following the first serious row between the two nations in years. The Fox administration had said little about the spat, but after repeated IFAI requests were made, the government released a 32-page document detailing what it claimed was Cuban meddling in Mexico's internal affairs. The government says that the Cuban diplomats were working with leftist political parties, including the PRD, to undermine the administration.

Fernandez was one of the first people to use the IFAI database. He asked for documents that he believed would support his claim that there had been improprieties in the management of a disaster-relief fund, which was in turn part of a larger government superfund called FONDEN. Officials at FONDEN oversee smaller trust funds which have historically been more vulnerable to corruption in Mexico because of a 1993 law that removes them from the same kind of public scrutiny reserved for normal government-administered funds. According to Samuel del Villar, a Harvard-educated anticorruption activist and scholar who has authored several constitutional reforms, the growing prominence of trust funds has led to what he calls Mexico's "dictatorship of corruption." The ...