MEXICO

On January 11, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) held a cabinet meeting to work on a proposal for the National Institute of Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data (INAI, for its acronym in Spanish) to be absorbed by the Ministry of Public Function (SFP, for its acronym in Spanish). This means that the entity in charge of regulating private personal data protection held by private parties could be modified in the short term. The meeting took place after last week, the president announced work on a proposal for reform to be presented to the Congress of the Union at the beginning of the next regular session starting on February 1. The initiative will seek to modify the numbers of autonomous, deconcentrated and decentralized organizations to reduce national public spending. 

Regarding the reasons behind the initiative, AMLO said that the INAI “was created to be transparent and currently this is not the case. They are reticent to discuss matters that they do not want made public. Being transparent does not mean that there is the right bureaucratic apparatus for this objective.” In reference to other state agencies such as the Federal Telecommunications Institute (IFT, for its acronym in Spanish) and the Federal Economic Competition Commission (COFECE in Spanish), AMLO said that “these agencies consume billions of pesos that could be put to good use in the areas of health, education, and people’s welfare.”

In this regard, the Business Coordinating Council (CCE, for its acronym in Spanish) spoke out against the president’s intentions in a release, stating that “the concentration of power, the elimination of controls and specialized technical knowledge will never contribute to achieving positive results in any of the currently autonomously regulated areas.