Although the Law on Transparency and Access to Information of Public Interest was approved on September 17, 2021, Venezuelan public bodies continue to be opaque by not publishing information that should be known to all citizens.
Text: Valentina Gil
Obtaining information in Venezuela is a task that is becoming more and more complicated. Impediments to access data that should be public knowledge not only hinders journalistic work, but also affects citizens. The government of Nicolás Maduro minimizes the dimensions of our complex humanitarian crisis through silence. It is not possible to know what is not said.
EsPaja.com was given the task of reviewing government pages, bulletins and reports and accounts from the years 2010 to 2022 to document the lack of public data. In its research Opacity in Venezuela, a way of governing recorded that more than half (64.22%) of the 47 official documents considered in the study, which should have been published between 2010 and 2022, were not disseminated, while 4, 9% showed up late.
Data on public debt, spending, health status, mortality rates, numbers of violent deaths, forced migration, and other key indicators of the crisis are scant or nonexistent. And the practice remains. On Wednesday, June 5, journalist Rodolfo Rico denounced that the Public Ministry had eliminated a large part of the news archive on his website.
“How do I know that content was removed? He frequently did thematic searches and downloaded them.
For example, I have saved the femicide search before it returned more than 400 articles. Now only 30 », wrote the communicator on his social networks.
EsPaja.com reviewed the new page of the Public Ministry and found that the oldest records in the “News” section date from December 2017. However, the press releases corresponding to the years 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 are not available .
Screenshot of the Public Ministry page showing the time jump in the “News” section, taken on July 6, 2023.
According to lawyer Mildred Rojas, a legal consultant for Transparencia Venezuela, before it was possible to read news prior to 2017. “It was a fairly sensitive search engine. Now, for example, you put the name of a person like “Manuel Sosa” in the search engine, or you searched for it as “El Coco Sosa”, and no record appears, “she explained.
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The Public Ministry has not published its management reports since 2015, despite the fact that Article 276 of the Constitution obliges the MP to deliver its annual management report to the National Assembly, in addition to making it public. So, the news archive was a useful tool to keep track of the crimes that have been committed in the country.
The Public Ministry has not been the only one to close information windows or have opacity in its documents. The Google Drive in which the Ministry of Health kept its official documents, such as the Mortality Yearbooks, is no longer publicly accessible. The ministry previously had the information available in the “Informative Material” section of its web portal. Now it is no longer possible to consult the informative material.
Screenshot of the Drive where the Ministry of Health uploads documents such as mortality and birth yearbooks, epidemiological indicators, situational bulletins, among others; Taken on July 6, 2023.
Although the Law on Transparency and Access to Information of Public Interest was approved on September 17, 2021, the lack of transparency and access to public information continues to be a cause for concern. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) recommended in its most recent report “the establishment of mechanisms to guarantee timely responses to requests for public information from civil society.”
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