The president of the Council for Transparency (CPLT), Gloria de la Fuente, spoke before the challenges in terms of transparency, where differences can be seen in the figures that come from public sources associated with the health emergency and the social outbreak, in which, despite recognizing advances in the amount of information available, focused on the conceptual and registration differences that “undermine public confidence.”
Along the same lines, the head of the corporation referred to the differences in the numbers of people killed by covid-19 and of those detained in the demonstrations of the social outbreak, where she maintains that in terms of public information, it is achieved appreciate a “fragmentation”.
Faced with these problems, he added that there is not only one single source of information. “As we saw in the face of the death toll due to covid-19 or in the face of the debate about the number of detainees after the social outbreak, just to mention two emblematic cases,” she asserted.
In any case, he valued the efforts and progress that have been made in recent times “to install a culture of transparency in the public sector,” which, in his opinion, has served as the basis for the publication of the information. Likewise, he recalled that since the publication of the Law on Access to Public Information, 862 organizations have joined the Transparency Portal to publish their information on the platform.
De la Fuente stressed that “the right of access to information contemplates, in turn, that it be reliable, understandable and actionable, a step that will effectively convert information into a powerful tool at the service of social control of citizens” , which today is not possible due to various shortcomings. “Today each agency compiles and builds data for its own purposes of operation, remaining in different records and reconciled under the parameters that make sense for each agency,” he added.
On the other hand, he pointed out that the fact that the figures do not match does not necessarily mean that the information is false, but that they respond to differences in each institution. But in any case, it must be precise so as not to sow a cloak of doubts over the population. “The discrepancies generate confusion, undermine public trust and also the possibility of generating adequate public policies to resolve social problems,” he said.
In relation to this, he pointed to the “imperative need to generate an integrated and open system of public data”, in order to eliminate duplication of efforts, standardize data collection and prevent dissimilar information from being generated. Therefore, he proposed standardizing criteria and parameters; define key concepts and ensure that all institutions are in a certain field.
That “they speak the same language and compile the information in the same way; establish persons responsible for the information; and maintain a single platform that cuts across all State agencies,” he concluded.
