Posted on 09/08/2001 11:23:28 AM PDT by rdavis84
MEXICO CITY (AP) - As the world congratulates their nation on finally achieving full democracy, Mexicans are realizing how many rights they are still missing.
Citizens here have no right to demand government information, Congress has few investigative powers, there is little consumer information, and factories don't report the pollutants they emit.
But in some of the most ambitious reforms since peasants threw out the large landowners during the 1910 Revolution, Mexico's newly independent Congress is looking to adopt U.S.-style practices that could make the country something it never has been: an open society.
The changes are a natural sequel to the 2000 election of President Vicente Fox, experts say. Fox unseated the party that had ruled Mexico for 71 years, but he took over a government built on the former ruling party's need for absolute power and secrecy.
"In a sense, with the change of regime we really should have had a new constitution, but it didn't happen that way," said Mexico historian Lorenzo Meyer.
The series of proposed changes include a public information-access law, a public registry of industrial pollution sources, and a congressional investigative arm to keep tabs on the executive branch, like the U.S. Office of Management and Budget.
The reforms may also allow the re-election of legislators and mayors, who currently must sit out a term before running again - a limitation that has made them permanent newcomers in a system dominated by crafty bureaucrats.
"Society has achieved many of the traits of democracy. Now we have to go about changing the rules of government to make them fit that new reality," said congressman Gregorio Urias German of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party.
Those changes have been too long in coming for the mothers of leftist activists who disappeared in the 1970s dirty war, and whose fate the government has never revealed.
Too long for hundreds of mothers in the northern city of Torreon who saw their children's blood tainted with lead, while a nearby metals plant kept its pollution record a secret for decades.
Mexicans have never been told how many people died in the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, nor how many people die of hospital-transmitted infections each year at government-run clinics.
"In fact, any request for information has always been met with suspicion, a look that says, 'Why do you want that information?'" said environmentalist Homero Aridjis, who has met stonewalling, hostility and bureaucratic barriers while doing research on pollution and past crimes.
"It's a Soviet mentality of denial, with an Aztec ritual of secrecy," said Aridjis. "The files mysterious disappear, they get lost, the official you need to speak with is never in. Only the Tlatoanis (bosses) are allowed to see the important information."
Mexico is not the only country in the region still struggling to perfect its democracy. Next week, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell is scheduled to join leaders from 33 other hemispheric countries to discuss ways of strengthening democracy at an assembly of the Organization of American States in Lima, Peru.
"We have to make sure that we do not allow backsliding to occur," Powell said in a recent speech.
But in Mexico, things may already be improving on the repressive past of just a few years ago. In 1997, Aridjis received death threats. The government gave him several bodyguards from its domestic intelligence agency - but Aridjis was never sure if they were protecting him, or if the agency itself had made the threats in order to spy on him.
It's not just activists: Congressmen themselves complain that they are kept in the dark.
"Every year we approve the federal budget, the president takes it and cuts it, or does whatever he wants," complains Congressman Jorge Ramirez Marin of the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. "We have to define Congress's power to investigate the presidency."
While many of the proposed reforms would weaken the once all-powerful presidency, Fox's conservative National Action Party supports most of them.
"We need structural reform that goes to the very heart of government," said Alejandro Zapata, a National Action congressional leader. "We need to establish a new relationship between the branches of government and the public."
I guarantee, you are not going to see the paper trail of the public money that Fox (or his new wife)is moving to his friends, relatives, and supporters. Want to release documents? Let's see what the FBI and CIA have on Fox and his wife. Let's see what the Mexican counterparts have on these folks. Then, I'll believe in Mexican FOIA.
The PR blitz continues. Soon the TV Gazers will believe that Mexico is Just Like the U.S.!
Maybe, they'll be right ;-)
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