“As governor, I am clear about my responsibility: to serve with transparency, empathy, and action,” said Jenniffer González Colón on a social media post, referring to the allocation of funds to municipalities. “The transparency we have right now is the greatest we’ve ever had in our history,” proclaimed former Governor Pedro Pierluisi when discussing information about Puerto Rico’s power outages. “Greater transparency is essential to exposing unlawful practices and ultimately ridding society of shameful, dangerous racial hierarchies,” states an executive memorandum from U.S. President Donald Trump, which requires higher education institutions to collect and submit racial statistics on college students as a condition for receiving federal funding.
Transparency has become a worn-out slogan, invoked by politicians to create the illusion of openness and accountability. Even worse, it has been weaponized to undermine the value of diversity in a distorted version of reality, as in the Trump regime’s case. In practice, politicians and officials say one thing and do another, or announce “achievements” while concealing the how and why to avoid public scrutiny. But what if I want to know the behind-the-scenes process that shaped a public policy decision? Do I have the right to know? The answer is yes.
Access to public information is a human right that every person has to request and receive documents in the government’s possession. In Puerto Rico, this right enjoys constitutional protection since the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Soto v. Secretary of Justice (1982), one of the many repercussions of the police killings of two young pro-independence university students at Cerro Maravilla. It is a civic right that does not belong exclusively to the press; it allows citizens to obtain information to opine, analyze, and participate effectively, timely, and actively in our country’s decision-making process.
On September 28 and throughout that week, the world marks the International Day for Universal Access to Information, a day proclaimed by UNESCO in 2015 and later by the United Nations in 2019. Its goal is to raise awareness about transparency and good governance as antidotes to corruption, and to promote this right as an indispensable tool for building better-informed societies equipped for civic life and participation.
The world’s first access-to-information law was signed in 1766 in Sweden. But the more tangible origins of government transparency can be traced to the years leading up to the French Revolution of 1789. It is a history worth revisiting. By the late 18th century, France faced a severe financial crisis after supporting the fledgling United States in its war against Great Britain. In an attempt to win over the bourgeoisie, in 1781, King Louis XVI’s finance minister, Jacques Necker, released a budget report revealing the monarchy’s finances in an effort to prove that France could continue subsidizing its wars. For the public, this act of openness and disclosure allowed, for the first time, an informed debate about the nation’s finances. The nobility opposed the release of this “state secret,” arguing they had been deceived and denied acknowledging part of the public debt. But no one could prevent the opening of the royal treasury to public scrutiny from becoming a catalyst for popular revolution. This episode underscores that true transparency, as a democratic principle, is not merely about showing “results,” but about revealing how, why, and for what purposes public resources are used.
For most governments, however, access to information remained opaque well into the 20th century, with secrecy serving as a shield against accountability until the aftermath of World War II. In 1966, the United States made a breakthrough with the approval of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which for the first time established, by statute, a right to request records held by federal agencies.
Despite its impact and influence on transparency laws worldwide, FOIA should no longer serve as a model for Puerto Rico. Its design responds to the vast machinery of the federal bureaucracy, and it has become a law that often fails requesters and serves commercial interests more than the public interests. Above all, it should not be emulated because in the United States this right exists only by act of Congress, not as a constitutional guarantee as it does in Puerto Rico. We must remember that the legislature cannot abolish constitutional rights, though they can be regulated by statute.
In Puerto Rico, our constitutional “right to know” has been regulated since 2019 by the Transparency and Expedited Procedure for Access to Public Information Act, Law 141 of 2019. More than five years after its approval — signed quietly by former Governor Ricardo Rosselló — the situation regarding access, at least for journalists, has remained the same or worsened. A report prepared by the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI) at the end of 2022 revealed that the implementation and enforcement of this public policy has been deficient and inconsistent.
Recent legislative efforts in Puerto Rico seek to restrict and impose new barriers to accessing public documents. Just a few weeks ago, the Senate passed Bill 331 into law, without holding public hearings, which now classifies as “confidential” all information generated and held by the Demographic Registry. Given Puerto Rico’s demographic crisis and its public health challenges, it makes no sense to block access to these vital statistics. On the contrary, such data should be available for independent scientific analysis by civil society organizations, academics, and the press. If another Hurricane María were to strike in 2025, we would not be able to know the actual number of people affected or killed, because no one, except the government itself, would have access to the statistics that allowed CPI, along with other news organizations, to investigate the impact of that catastrophe.
Also under consideration is Senate Bill 63, which would extend the time-limits that agencies have to respond to an information request to nearly two months, while giving the government exclusive power to decide in what format it can deliver public data . Approving this measure would mark a setback for Puerto Rico’s standing in the Global Right to Information (RTI) Rating, a methodology developed by the Centre for Law and Democracy. CPI, along with the Puerto Rico Bar Association, held public hearings for citizens and prepared a report opposing these bills after receiving input from 12 civil society organizations. Yet, last week, the Senate’s Government Committee issued a favorable report on the bill, even though only one government agency submitted written testimony and six organizations, including CPI, sent written statements, in the absence of a public hearing, outright rejecting the proposal.
On the occasion of the International Day for Universal Access to Information, we must denounce these setbacks and learn from other parts of the world, where transparency is being strengthened and adapted to the challenges of technological change.
There are valuable lessons to be learned from abroad.
The transparency advocacy group MuckRock has published a guide encouraging people in the United States to request copies of text messages sent and received by public officials in the course of their duties. Today, policymaking takes place not only over email but also in group chats among government workers . This has been evident in Puerto Rico: first with the infamous Telegram chat of former Governor Rosselló and his “brothers,” and more recently in a CPI investigation of a WhatsApp chat in which trusted employees of the Puerto Rico Lottery Bureau, amid jokes and banter, received work orders for official activities from the bureau’s then–assistant secretary.
In a recent case in Washington state, PBS and NPR journalists secured thousands of pages of records showing municipal officials’ conversations with ChatGPT. Their investigation revealed the widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) in official business, from drafting letters and audit reports to writing press releases and even responding to applications for public grants. I do not doubt that AI can serve as a tool for government “efficiency.” For instance, in Puerto Rico, agencies are already using AI to recruit employees. Still, clear guidelines must be established so the public knows which government documents are being generated by AI and what human processes are in place to address its flaws and biases.
In Spain, meanwhile, the nonprofit news organization CIVIO secured a landmark ruling when the Supreme Court ordered the government to release the algorithm behind Bosco. This computer application determines who qualifies for certain social assistance programs, such as electricity subsidies. The court concluded that citizens have the right to know how algorithms that affect them operate, and that neither national security nor intellectual property exceptions are valid grounds to restrict their disclosure.
In Puerto Rico, since its founding in 2007, the CPI has filed 50 lawsuits at the local and federal levels to demand access to public records. So far this year, the organization has already sued Governor González Colón’s administration six times to obtain public information, matching the number of legal actions filed in the first year of former Governor Pedro Pierluisi’s administration. The “results” and “achievements” touted by the government mean little if we cannot uncover the interests driving them.
The future of access to information in Puerto Rico must focus on greater openness and adapting to new technological realities, rather than erecting barriers or limiting who may request information. Transparency is not a publicity slogan; it is an essential condition for those who aspire to live in a democracy.
This translation was generated with the assistance of AI and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and clarity.
