“One Battle After Another” is the title of one of the movies favored to win an Oscar next year, and it is also an apt description of the advocacy and public-education work we have done in recent months against Senate Bill 63 — now Act 156-2025 — which amended Puerto Rico’s Transparency Law.
In the feature film by director Paul Thomas Anderson, a former revolutionary confronts a retired fascist military officer who kidnapped his daughter and endures countless hardships in his attempt to rescue her. Here in Puerto Rico, even though government secrecy and opacity won this round, the fight for a more just, accessible, and transparent Puerto Rico continues — with no turning back. This process offered important lessons, and I want to share some of them in this year-end column.
First lesson: You confront the state’s abuse of power without fear — with tenacity and with the truth.
The legislative process that ended with citizens now having to wait up to 50 business days to obtain public information was an insult to participatory democracy.
Most New Progressive Party (PNP, in Spanish) lawmakers in the House and Senate who voted for SB 63 showed either a complete lack of understanding — or outright contempt — as they erected barriers to a fundamental right protected by our Constitution. The exchanges during the only public hearing held on the bill played out like a tragicomedy. And the explanation is straightforward: Few were acting on independent judgment; they were mere rank-and-file foot soldiers.
Inside Hearing Room 1 of the House of Representatives, you could see behind-the-scenes figures pulling the strings to create the illusion of a genuine space for public participation. But it was all theater. When advocates challenged majority-party representatives and senators in the marble corridors, they could not answer the serious concerns raised by civil society, communities, and the press. They simply parroted the talking points they had been assigned — and those talking points, to boot, were false. The circus magic wore off.
Because behind the colorful, attention-grabbing big top that our Legislative Assembly has become lies a reality: A bicameral system of checks and balances no longer exists. Inside, only the whims of Senate President Thomás Rivera Schatz — and his advisers — hold sway. House Speaker “Johnny” Méndez said he was “in no rush” to take up SB 63, but his counterpart had other plans.
It was painful, and even pathetic, to speak with PNP representatives who, at midday on the final day of the session, swore the measure would not be brought to the floor through a discharge petition. By nightfall — faces flushed with embarrassment — they offered every excuse imaginable to those of us who had spent weeks warning about the dangers of the legislation.
I remember when PNP Rep. José “Che” Pérez Cordero, who presided over the bill’s only public hearing, told us: “All I have is my word. I’m going to do what I can to push the measure to January. I’d like to do an investigative resolution,” he said, after his delegation sent the bill to a conference committee.
After last-minute political negotiations — or a hard twist of the arm, the kind used by the authoritarian regimes they so often criticize — the bill was put to a vote in the session’s final minutes.
Second lesson: You must always be skeptical — and you must counter those who lie shamelessly from positions of power with precise, reliable data.
Once the legislative process concluded and the measure reached Gov. Jenniffer González Colón’s desk, the strategy was to remind her of her campaign promises and to show that the amendments contradicted both the New Progressive Party’s governing platform and her Initiative for Deregulation and Administrative Efficiency (IDEA), a sort-of Puerto Rican DOGE project. We managed to ensure that multiple respected voices from the United States and around the world understood what was happening in Puerto Rico and wrote directly to La Fortaleza, effectively placing a veto of SB 63 “on a silver platter.”
Internationally recognized institutions — including the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the International Press Institute, and the Society of Professional Journalists (the oldest journalism organization in the United States) — explained to the governor that she was adding layers of bureaucracy and inefficiency to the detriment of the public.
None of it mattered.
The administration’s public-policy justification is that SB 63 aims to clarify supposed “confusion” in the process for requesting information, reduce lawsuits, and prioritize the press. All of those claims are false and unsupported by data or statistics, according to a fact-check by the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo.
The legislative record contains no evidence that there are “so many and so many requests for information that there’s no way the government can meet them on time.” In fact, at the agencies and municipalities for which that data is available, only one or two public records requests arrive each month. We lack data from other agencies because the government is not tracking monthly requests or their status, as the Transparency Law already required.
Nor does the new law give journalists “more power,” as the governor said at a news conference. On the contrary, it makes the process even more difficult for everyone. The script from the current administration repeats that the amendments do not limit access and that information will always be delivered — just now with some delay. That is falsehood and official disinformation.
If someone does not copy both the agency head and the agency’s information officer on a request, the request will be deemed “defective,” and there is no legal obligation to respond. The problem is that under González Colón’s administration, new information officers have been appointed in only 15 agencies out of more than 120 government entities. And agency heads change frequently — like a game of musical chairs. How are the public and the press supposed to comply with this new regime? Under this scheme, in practice, public information will never arrive.
Third lesson: There is no doubt that we are already living in a new era of government censorship and frontal attacks on freedom of expression and the press.
With each passing day, González Colón’s administration and the PNP’s legislative leaders are adopting — without shame — the anti-democratic style of the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump.
People I speak with still react with disbelief when they learn that, a few weeks ago, I was denied entry to the Capitol — the grand “house of laws” — on the final day of the legislative session. The reason? I was wearing my work shirt from the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, which they claimed was a “protest message” and was “allusive to a bill.” It read: “For public access to information.” What happened runs counter to free speech protected in Puerto Rico and under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
To extend the circus metaphor, with its cast of outlandish characters, no one ever showed me the regulation or the law they claimed justified barring me from entering. A supervisor from the Capitol Superintendent’s Office practically ran off when we told him we were going to tape his explanation for the record. And the police lieutenant on the scene showed me — on his phone — a search he had done on ChatGPT, under the premise that he was going to “teach” me the security laws that apply at the Capitol. You laugh so you don’t cry. Nearly half an hour later, after I turned my shirt inside out, they let me in.
The day after the anti-transparency amendments became law, Eliseo Colón Zayas, president of the Fundación Periodismo Siglo XXI, posted a reflection on Facebook that brilliantly captures what he calls the new “21st-century gag order” now prevailing in Puerto Rico. Colón Zayas explains that it is “not direct censorship, but an administrative reconfiguration of silence. Transparency is not eliminated; it becomes paperwork. The right to know is not denied; it is postponed until exhaustion.”
In response, he calls on us to practice investigative journalism as “an act of sustained resistance, not an institutionalized practice,” and as a “decolonial act” that refuses to accept “that access to knowledge is a concession of power.” That is the route forward for those of us who believe in the imperative of fighting for Puerto Rican journalism that keeps asking, challenging, investigating, and publishing the truth — without fear.
The final lesson: The courage that rises from the Puerto Rican people’s indignation, the steady solidarity, and the expressions of gratitude in defense of our right to know are values I will carry from this struggle.
If the government thinks it will silence us, it is mistaken. They forget that the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo has prevailed in court in more than 50 public records lawsuits, including seven filed this year against the González Colón administration. They forget that we are part of a citizenry that responds to greater repression with greater indignation. They forget that no matter how much they try to silence the message on the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo shirt, we will keep wearing it everywhere: “For public access to information!”
