The federal commissioners for transparency and protection of personal data Óscar Mauricio Guerra Ford and Rosendoevgueni Monterrey Chepov will leave their positions in the inai next March 31. His departure coincides with the worst moment in the relationship of the inai with the federal government and in a context of weakening of the autonomous constitutional bodies, offices specialized in guaranteeing human rights, regulating markets or designing sectoral public policy, in addition to counterweights of the Executive Branch.
Guerra Ford and Monterrey Chepov conclude their eight-year terms in the office responsible for guaranteeing transparency at the federal level and the protection of personal data handled by federal public bodies and individuals.
It is to be expected that the Senate, which is responsible for choosing the people who will replace Guerra Ford and Monterrey Chepov, will delay the appointments, as has been done with the commissioners of the Federal Institute of Telecommunications (IFT) and the Federal Economic Competition Commission (Coffee), who operate with difficulty to fulfill their constitutional obligations and with the accumulation of work.
The Federal Telecommunications Institute (IFT), responsible for monitoring the agents of the sector of the telecommunications and to design and impose the rules of the game, March will start with one less commissioner in its plenary session. Of seven, four remain. The end of the exercise of Adolfo Cuevas Teja, on February 28, 2022, will leave a third empty seat at the decision table of the IFT. This office had to make changes to its operating manuals so that its collegiate decisions have legitimacy with the vote of only four of the seven members that it should have.
The same happens in the Federal Commission of Economic Competition (Coffee), responsible for guaranteeing conditions of effective competition in economic markets. Cofece operates with four out of seven commissioners and has already paused decisions because its operating rules require it to have the vote of at least five commissioners.
The Senate could press for the appointments to fill the vacancies, but it does not, allowing them to be weakened by suffocation in line with President López Obrador’s position that they should not exist.
The president calls on the autonomous organs a supposed inaction in the face of what he considers injustices, demands the budget they require to function and the salaries of their commissioners. He considers them gigantic and complex bureaucratic structures, whose results are not in accordance with his expectations, a legacy of the “neoliberal period”.
Senator Ricardo Monreal Ávila, an ally of the president in the upper house, already tested an idea in 2020 to merge the tasks of the authorities of economic competition (Coffee), telecommunications and broadcasting (IFT) and energy (Energy Regulatory Commission, CRE) at the National Institute of Markets and Competition for Welfare (Inmecob).
There is little time left for the president to reform the legal structure of the autonomous bodies or to make them disappear, if not all of them, then some of them. He has already weakened them with budget restrictions imposed by his allies in the Congress of the Union and also by delaying the appointment of new members to fill the vacancies.
About him inai in particular, López Obrador has pointed out that it is a body that “previous corrupt governments” created “to pretend that they were going to fight corruption and that there was going to be transparency. (…) It is a very expensive bureaucratic apparatus, a government that costs the people a lot, a government that is maintained and good for nothing”.
The departure of Guerra Ford and Monterrey Chepov coincides with this context. It is to be expected, then, that the appointment of the new commissioners goes directly to the freezer.
Editor of El Economista online
Economy
Journalist. Since 2010 he edits the digital version of El Economista in Mexico City. Master in Transparency and Protection of Personal Data from the University of Guadalajara. He has a specialization in telecommunications and information technology law. His personal blog is Economicon.