Who Has the Right to Know? Contests over State Secrecy and Transparency in 1970s Mexico

Analyzing heated discussions about the “right to know,” this paper reveals contested ideas about transparency in late-1970s Mexico, when state secrecy and lies became the object of intense public criticism. The stakes of information access were high. Since 1974, a brutal counter-insurgency campaign led to the imprisonment, torture, and disappearance of hundreds of leftist dissidents, which activists and victims’ families pressed to bring to public attention. Governing officials meanwhile, denied, obfuscated, censored, or attacked information and individuals that threatened to break the open secret of the so-called Dirty War.

In this conflictive context, a 1977 legislative reform package passed a small amendment to Article 6 of the Mexican Constitution, guaranteeing the “right to know.” Without a corresponding regulatory law, there was no mechanism to ensure transparency, but the mere suggestion that Mexican citizens had the right to access state secrets was significant. In 1979, the Congress held public hearings, inviting journalists and public intellectuals to discuss the role that information played in a democratic society. While legislators ultimately failed to vote for the regulatory framework in 1980, the discussions planted the seeds for a freedom of information law that would finally pass some two decades later.

This paper explores the resulting debates, which not only focused on the value of informed citizenship— a common contemporary association with right-to-know laws—but also underscored the need to protect individuals’ reputations from media, which some argued, “bombard the public with all manner of lies.” These discussions thus revealed conflicting ideas about who could legitimately claim offense, what information should be kept secret, and when transparency constituted a public good.