Not the first contradiction with its self-image but a government calling itself libertarian and seeking to restrict access to public information is really starting to take the biscuit. Granting public officialdom the refuge of a “private sphere” is tantamount to handing out total impunity – until civil servants are replaced by artificial intelligence or robots, they will always be human beings with an individual and private aspect in everything they do.
An aversion to transparency is a defining feature of the “caste” which President Javier Milei has vowed to destroy – nothing could speak louder than the general silence of the political opposition apart from the PRO authors of the 2016 Access to Public Information Law which Milei now proposes to neuter. An austere government professes to have nothing to hide (even if star spin doctor Santiago Caputo’s preference for working in the shadows with no official post arouses suspicions, a legitimate target for requesting access to public information already there) – if so, then Milei’s decree only serves to cover up the past sins of others.
Thus what would have happened with the 39th birthday party of former first lady Fabiola Yáñez violating lockdown or the newspaper delivery flights of ex-president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner if “anything containing data of a private nature” is not to count as a basis for requesting public information? Surely few things are more private than birthday parties or reading newspapers, yet should this deny the general public’s right to know that Fernández de Kirchner was using presidential aircraft to fly her newspapers almost 3,000 kilometres down to her Patagonian retreat? But this decree does not stop at purely domestic details – the “working papers” and “deliberations” of officials are also to be off-limits, thus potentially shielding everything going into the crony capitalist public works contracts which have given Kirchnerism such a bad name. Given the current trials and tribulations of ex-president Alberto Fernández with their potential overspill, almost needless to say that Peronism seems in no hurry to condemn this drive to limit access to public information.
While a conspiracy theorist might argue that this potentially beneficial decree is bait to gain Kirchnerite Senate votes for controversial Supreme Court nominee Ariel Lijo, whitewashing Peronism is clearly not the name of the game here – its roots in the kennels of Quinta de Olivos presidential residence could be described as a classic example of the tail wagging the dog, except that in this case it is the English mastiffs who are doing the wagging. While the costs of the canine upkeep and the construction of their kennels out of the public purse qualify as public information justifying questions, Milei could legitimately argue that whether he has four or five mastiffs (depending on what view is taken of the mystic presence of the cloned original Conan) is his own business. But even taking the most charitable view of this issue, by using a nuclear bomb (or at least a tactical nuclear device) to kill an ant, Milei has gratuitously injected a weapon of mass institutional destruction into the political scenario.
It remains to be seen whether push will come to shove with this drive – always pragmatic, Cabinet Chief Guillermo Francos hinted at backtracking when reporting to Congress last Wednesday but there were also intransigent voices behind the scenes on social networks – but the harm has been done. Whatever the outcome, questions remain as to the origins of this wholly anti-libertarian initiative – is there an underlying authoritarian streak at all odds with the rhetoric (akin to being a global beacon of the free market, Milei dixit, while maintaining some of the world’s strictest capital controls) or does it reflect an amateurish government genuinely free of “caste” skills and hence electorally attractive issuing a text with a sloppy draft which it does not really mean? Either way it is bad news.
Or should we be taking this issue so seriously – might it not be a (yet another) provocative distraction to shift the battleground from the tussle between executive and legislative branches over vetoed pension legislation, as made manifest by last Wednesday’s protests, while all kinds of demolition jobs good and bad are going on behind the scenes at the hands of the new Deregulation & State Transformation Ministry of a government empowered by the ‘Ley de Bases’ enabling act? But, as Edmund Burke wrote, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance – although strangely almost alone, civil society organisations and press associations were right to jump on this move. This newspaper can only add its voice to the condemnation.
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