Ciudadanía y medios, aliados para la «primavera de la transparencia»

Abstract

The so-called “spring of transparency” is one of the most important moments in terms of citizen protagonism in the almost 30 years of democratic validity in Paraguay. His punctual contribution, based on a strong citizen and mediatic protagonism, was to institutionalize an explicit public policy for the right of access to public information, which, although it had already been enshrined in the Constitution in 1992, was only recently regulated. effective application 22 years later.This article seeks the possible explanations of that historical debt that dragged the democratic process despite the fact that, precisely, the freedoms of expression and of the press had been the main rights reconquered after the fall of the Stroessner dictatorship. In this framework, factors such as media concentration and the position of certain media as key veto actors in the political scenario are analyzed. These elements, which initially appeared as neutralizers for any attempt to effectively regulate that right, nevertheless converge in the political scenario of citizen protests against corruption in 2013. The institutional result of this socio-political phenomenon, with strong content of citizen outrage, was the adoption in Paraguay—as a result of a similar wave in the region—of different laws on access to public information, which have opened an important path to promote greater citizen participation in the control of the management of government.

Keywords

• democracy
• press
• citizenship
• participatory democracy
• media