Missed Opportunity to Address Mexico's Corruption and Press Freedom Alexander Howard - The Huffington Post
go to original October 30, 2015

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. (Reuters)

When President Enrique Peña Nieto spoke at a global conference on open government Wednesday morning, he could have addressed Mexico's record on human rights and press freedom, including a still-unexplained attack on 43 Mexican students one year ago. He did not.

Instead, the president delivered a glowing account of Mexico's efforts on open government that went largely unchallenged at least onstage. After Peña Nieto's speech, activists took to the street outside the event, and hundreds of people from across Latin America met nearby to protest the Mexican government's record of corruption and human rights abuses.

The extraordinary Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City has hosted many productions in its history, but it's quite possible that it's never played host to political theater on the scale of the opening plenary for the Open Government Partnership's annual summit.

Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta, who spoke before Peña Nieto, was indicted on corruption charges in September. He did not bring that up in his remarks, and neither did anyone else. When Francis Maude, the United Kingdom's minister of state for trade and investment, said that people are more likely to trust a government that's willing to be open about what hasn't worked, no one asked Maude how that squared with the U.K.'s record on the Freedom of Information Act. If the idea of the Open Government Partnership is to provide a platform where members of civil society - that is, people who are not part of any government - can hold participating governments to account, then this week's high-profile inaugural session of its global summit fell short of embodying those principles.

Read the rest at The Huffington Post

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