A setback in public administration
Today we are experiencing a change, or rather, a conceptual and temporal regression in public administration in our country. The party in power and its allies have turned to the past in a nostalgic way to anchor and imprison, once again, information and archives in the bowels of power itself. Returning to the last century seems to be the slogan of a regressive transformation, where the evolution and achievements of the past are not accepted, even if these are few or with imperfections.
On the issue of access to information, transparency, protection of personal data and open consultation of historical archives, a fight was fought to defend a series of human rights enshrined in the Constitution that, as such, should be progressive and not the other way around. The rights of access to information, protection of privacy and memory are neglected and controlled by the same power. The Arcana Imperii prevails, a concept developed by Tacitus to describe the State’s control over public information, a situation that opens the doors to opacity, encryption and secrecy fought by many of the left-wing figures who in the past fought these practices against the first version of the single and overwhelming party that commanded the country for more than 70 years. The model is replicated with the same vices and citizens who had achieved a less winding path to be informed in the democratic exercise of demanding accountability are despised.
Corruption has not been defeated because this is a complex issue and is sustained and fueled by networks and complicity in both the public sector (executive, legislative and judicial) and the private sector.
The fight to open public information has had an evolutionary path since the Power embodied in the executive accepted in 2002 to echo the demands of society and propose a first transparency law, guaranteeing access through a the most powerless organism. Herein lay the guarantee. This guarantee has already been lost when the State becomes judge and jury. Capturing and co-opting information is an unequivocal sign of secrecy and opacity. It is a film lived in the past and that is why it was wanted to remedy it with the tools developed over 20 years, which although were not 100% perfect, were perfectible and adjustable. But making them disappear with a stroke of the pen alleging excessive expenses, forgetting the great waste of the past six years due to inefficiency and administrative inoperability, is nonsense, which directly damages citizens in their right to demand accountability for public actions.
It is a bad thing that is done today with these determinations based on fallacies, because they are false premises that are blindly accepted without seeing the horizon and the consequences. The past cannot be modified, but if we can learn from it to improve the future, not to return to what was proven not to work. The blindness that causes arrogance when you have all the power makes the appetite for the centralization of power itself insatiable.
Access to archives and information
The archives will be affected by these resolutions because, in a way, they were visible thanks to the issues that are now delimited and closed within the walls of power, at the expense of the will to open or not, the information as it suits; and applying what Peter Burke calls political ignorance, fueled by secrecy and lies. The past six years already pointed to this faTdic fact, as it was said in the circles of discussion on these issues: if it walks like a duck, it looks like a duck, and acts like a duck and flies like a duck, it is a duck. That was it.
We return to ground zero to fight again to open information, to promote transparency, to defend the right to memory in the face of frequent information reservations, privacy violations as was done in the last six-year term, disappearance of archives without anyone guaranteeing the opposite.
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