Chilean Chronicles, Part 102: Culminating Thoughts on Transparency in Chile

Our days left here in Chile can fit on one hand-we’re flying back to Chicago and the United States on December 25-and I find myself in the summing up and looking back place that often is precipitated by the ends of experiences.

As I’ve written before, and really throughout, these chronicles, there have been many rich, meaningful and memorable aspects of our time in the land of Neruda and Mistral, Allende and Pinochet.

Friends.

Colleagues.

Students.

Travel adventures.

A profound sense of living out of our dreams and values.

There’s also been the research I’ve done about the landmark Transparency Act that was passed in 2009, a few years after the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights found in favor of former presidential candidate Marcel Claude that a right existed to government information.

Among the key components: the creation of an independent Transparency Council to which individuals and groups can appeal if their request for information is denied and accountability not just for functionaries, but for agency leaders who do not supply the data or documents that had been sought.

My goal as a Fulbright Scholar has not been to simply teach a course and conduct an investigation, but rather to spark relationships and bring people together who might not otherwise know each other so that those connections can continue after Dunreith and I return to the United States.

As part of that effort I participated a pair of conversations hosted by Fulbright Commission during the past couple of weeks. My colleagues at the University of Diego Portales and other journalists, folks from the Chilean government, people involved in transparency work in the non-profit sector, members of the Hack/Hackers community and staffers from the U.S. Embassy attended the events.

A research plan evolves

After thanking everyone for attending, I shared my original plan for the project.

Modeled on James Painter’s work on climate change coverage, I had intended to look at a year’s worth of coverage of El Mercurio, the country’s largest paper, before and after the law’s passage to determine what, if anything, had changed.

After arriving here, reading the paper on a more regular basis-it treated the fortieth anniversary of the Pinochet coup like a soccer news brief-and watching El Diario de Agustin, the documentary film that exposed the paper’s complicity with the Pinochet government, I decided to go in a more qualitative direction.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvo0939_bSc&w=560&h=315]

Instead, I approached the topic like a beat I would cover. As part of that commitment, I reported on what I did as I went along, using the iterative approach endorsed by dear friend Fernando Diaz.

As a result, I met with journalists at different levels of prominence and stages of their careers, with non-profit folks like ProAccesso, a group that does legal work on transparency, and Ciudadano Inteligente, a group that works to empower citizens through technology and access to information.

I talked with elected officials like Mario Gebauer, the mayor of Melipilla who had filed a lawsuit pushing for the emails of public officials to be public record.

I met with folks in the computer coding and hacking community as well as with people from the Transparency Council, the organ whose establishment was a key component of the law.

And I interviewed people from the Transparency Commission, the government’s organ dedicated to these issues.

I took other actions, too.

Within the country I attended and presented at Data Tuesdays sponsored by Fundacion Inria Chile, a French non-profit organization, and taught at the Winter Data School held at the University of Diego Portales where I taught. During our Data Journalism class I had students write letters and brought in a bunch of guest speakers, many of whom talked with the students about the importance of acquiring publicly available data.

And, with the help of lawyer friend Macarena Rodriguez, I filed an information request and appeal.

Outside of Chile I attended the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Rio in October and met with members of the data team from La Nacion when we traveled to Buenos Aires.

I blogged throughout about what I learned from these interactions, which took place during a time in which Chile not only marked the fortieth anniversary of the coup, but continued its ongoing transition from a closed and isolated dictatorship to a fitfully emerging democracy more connected to the world through technology and the global economy.

In addition to the specific area of transparency under the law, Chile was going through all kinds of openings from the past and into the present through the work people like the young volunteers of TECHO, who work in a holistic way with poor communities to identify and confront a plan to meet the challenges they face.

Or with people like Jaime Parada, the nation’s first openly gay public official who was elected in 2012 as councilman in the wealthy and politically conservative Providencia neighborhood.

Or members of MOVILH, one of the nation’s most visible and active gay rights organization.

Or Nancy, an Aymara woman who scours the Internet to send up north to members of her community about the devastation mining is doing to their land, who makes traditional handcrafts and is starting to teach her children the language that previously was banned.

Many of these individuals and organizations are part of a transition from an earlier concept of human rights as being individually based and consisting of dictatorship-era violations like torture, detention and disappearance to a more ample and collective vision that include the rights of people with disabilities and members of the LGBT community, the right to a clean environment, and even to Internet access.

I learned a lot through my research.

The good news first

The first part was that there was a lot of good news and positive developments around the law and infrastructure, which, along with Mexico, are among the best in the continent, according to transparency guru Moises Sanchez.

There are a core of people involved in the issue, many of whom expressed optimism and enthusiasm about the direction of transparency in the country.

The number of requests filed by citizens over time has grown to tens of thousands field per year.

It’s both an anti-corruption tool that is a central part of the government’s approach toward transparency and one that has the potential for historic reconstruction to gain a fuller and deeper understanding of what happened in the country during the earlier and darker time of the dictatorship.

The government has posted close to 1,100 data set on its data portal, and is working to integrate those sets with each other and with information from the country’s 15 regions.

The Council’s budget has gone up each year of its existence, increasing by more than 50 percent from 2010 to 2013.

The large papers appear to be using the law more frequently.

There was a Supreme Court decision in November that reversed its earlier position and said that emails from public officials are public record.

And the leadership of journalism organizations like Investigative Reporters and Editors and the Chicago Headline Club are willing to support continued efforts in this area.

Many challenges exist, too

At the same time, the law has many challenges, according to the people with whom I spoke.

Before its reversal, the Supreme Court had issued two decisions saying that public officials did not have to supply emails that had been requested-a position that was backed on the editorial pages of leading newspapers like La Tercera.

Many journalists are not using the law for a number of reasons. Some expressed the feeling that they could choose to wait close to a month, and very possibly longer, for information they could more easily obtain through their sources. Others said that some journalists feel they are betraying their sources if they request information through a freedom of information request-an attitude that suggests that their the relationship with a government official is more important than the public’s right to know.

There is a perception among many that law is the tool of the country’s elite, many of whom are male, educated, wealthy professionals with Internet access.

In 2011 President Sebastian Pinera, in a decision many considered to be politically, chose not to renew the terms of Raul Urrutia and Juan Pablo Olmedo on the Transparency Council, even though the Senate had endorsed their continued service.

The council is not officially linked to civil society, even though that option exists.

Many of the organizations engaged in transparency work have few resources and are isolated from each other. In many cases, there is little outreach.

As I experienced personally in my request, the process can be extremely slow on potentially sensitive data request, with government officials invoking concerns of national security and saying they have too much work to fulfill the request.

Finally, while the judicial and legislative branches have to publish information, they are not subject to the same disclosure requirements as the executive branch.

Based on this balance of positive and negative developments, I suggested that people consider working on legislation to address their concerns, collaborate more actively with each other, dedicate more resources to outreach, encourage the Council to develop an official link with civil society, and connect with people outside the country who are doing the same work.

I concluded by noting the following:

The law is still young, but has tremendous potential.

There has been significant progress, and the value and spirit of the law has yet to be truly realized.

The actions of the people in the room will play a role in the degree to which the potential is converted into reality.

I’m honored to be part of that dialogue.

From there, I opened the floor for discussion, which in both cases was lively and wide ranging.

I don’t want in any way to romanticize or elevate what occurred.

As always, the work of making a lofty promise real falls to those who live in that time and who must decide whether it is worth the effort, whether we want it enough.

It’s true that Dr. King said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b80Bsw0UG-U&w=420&h=315]

But he also said and wrote repeatedly that there is nothing inevitable about time’s passage and social progress.

Time itself is neutral, he said.

I did some research.

Two groups gathered and listened and dialogued with each other.

Folks who did not know each other now have met.

We've made a start, and we'll see how far we go from here.

I know that I’ll continue to work on this issue.

I'm transparent about that.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 93: On Albie Sachs and Giving Thanks

I’ve learned a lot from Albie Sachs over the years.

The South African freedom fighter and classical music lover whose taking the other as a Supreme Court Justice elicited a tear from then-President Nelson Mandela endured solitary confinement and a car bomb in Mozambique that cost him much of his right arm and part of his vision.

I first saw him at a conference in New Haven, Connecticut that Marc Skvirsky and I attended with Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow. Among many important things he said that day was that although Mandela had near-perfect pitch with the people he led, one should not mistake the leader for the source of the victory he and so many others had dedicated their lives to winning.

Speaking in his mellifluous baritone voice, his left arm moving animatedly, Sachs also cautioned against moral relativism.

Apartheid was evil, he said. We were better. And we won.

A few years later, he spoke at a community event for Facing History and Ourselves around his book, The Free Diary of Albie Sachs, a work that chronicled his six-week journey with then-partner, now wife, Vanessa September, to London and other European capitals.

In his opening comments Sachs talked about the dreams that he had had as a younger man of living as a free man in a country that was being transformed from a site of intense evil to a thoroughgoing democracy with many official languages, one of the world’s most far-reaching and inclusive constitutions and open debate of the questions of the day.

He also talked about living with a woman with whom he wanted to spend his life.

These dreams, he explained, had all come true.

Although I understood the meaning of Sachs’ words, I didn’t feel them the way he seemed to.

Now, I do.

There are moments, and I’ve been blessed to have a number of them recently, where I literally cannot believe the abundance of gifts and love I’m privileged to experience.

Where I wake up wondering not so much what I’m going to do, but which delicious set of options we’re going to explore together.

The past few weeks, which have seen Jon come here for a couple of weeks so that we can work on a project about Chile’s past, present and future.

A week later, Dad and Lee, whom we had seen in Argentina and Uruguay, were in for a week after their glorious two weeks plus tour that took through Argentina and down to the southernmost part of the continent before heading to the spectacular views of Torres del Paine, up into Chiloe and meeting us again in Santiago.

There are the gains that the students in my Data Journalism class have made, the pair of conversations in the next couple of weeks sponsored by the Fulbright Commission in which I’ll share preliminary results about my research into the nation’s 2009 Transparency Law, the news we’ve heard about the memorial event in Essen led by the indefatigable Gabriele Thimm that she told us was the best ever and the plans we’re formulating to advance the project, the events that we are planning in Wellesley and Cambridge and Arica or Punta Arenas.

All that is beautiful, and one of the most meaningful parts for me and for us is that Aidan got here on Sunday for what will be a month together in Santiago, in Northern and Southern Chile and in Peru’s fabled Incan ruins of Machu Picchu.

He’s just returned from a semester in which he traveled to New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia and the United States before he set foot here. It’s a treat to spend any time with him, let alone such a concentrated dose, and, in parts at least, Internet-free zone.

Underneath all of these experiences is a sense of possibility and flow, of the great fortune of being in a space it feels deeply possible to successfully integrate family and friends and language and investigation and teaching and writing and networking and traveling and food and drink and discussion and applying for new opportunities and converting those that arise and working more and more to do what we all need to do in life, which is to steer the ship of our lives.

This is not to say that we live in a perfect world.

Far from it.

Indeed, some initial discussions with Aidan have only reminded us how deeply flawed the world is that we will leave to his generation.

Nor is it to say that I’ve always felt this way.

That, too, has not been the case.

Indeed, my appreciation of this moment is deepened not only because I am more aware than before of life’s finitude, but because this more profound sense of possibility and authority comes after years of having a different gut-level conviction.

So, as Hannukah begins, after we’ve had one Thanksgiving meal and before we’ve had another, with a series of Chilean adventures behind us and more ahead, with family having departed and our son here, the sun shining in a cloudless sky, the breeze rustling the curtains of the room where Dunreith and I are next to each other, I am immensely grateful for my life’s abundant gifts.

I imagine that wherever he is, Albie Sachs is giving thanks, too.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 91: Becky Simpson's Counsel and a Full Life

In the nearly quarter century that I knew her, Becky Simpson, known to many as the "Mother Theresa of Applachia," taught me many lessons. She taught me that visions can come true after she had had an image of a mountain of food, a mountain of clothing and a molehill of money-and all three happened at the Cranks Creek Survival Center she co-founded with her husband Bobby.

She taught me about how far a sense of righteous indignation at society's inequities and a seemingly bottomless well of compassion and giving can flower and touch people from around the world.

She taught me that fierce and gentle can exist in equal measure in the same person.

She taught me that meaningful moments shared cut across all kinds of lines.

She also taught me about how people can endure and move through unimaginable suffering and come out bruised, but intact, on the other side.

This last lesson came after I asked her how she had been able to survive so much-a third grade education, the death of her younger brother and one of her six children, a profoundly damaged back, the most grinding of poverty, Bobby's blindness, floods that wiped out her home and a devastating car accident are only among the most noteworthy-and still continue both to extend an open hand to help those who needed it and to fight for justice.

How do you do it? I asked as we sat around the kitchen table where we spent many, many hours talking.

I was waiting for a lengthy explanation of social justice tactics.

Becky gave me nothing of the sort.

Rest and try again, she said, her clear blue eyes filled with hard-earned wisdom.

I'm trying to draw on Becky's counsel these days, when things are popping on many fronts, to put it mildly.

I'm working to pull my Data Journalism course together for the final month and to work with potential replacement Daniela Cartagena to make sure that she has what she needs to feel oriented and to continue the burgeoning tradition we're starting to establish at the University of Diego Portales.

I'm coordinating a presentation of my research into the impact of the landmark 2009 Transparency Law on the country with Antonio Campana, Yunuen Varela, and the rest of the folks at the Fulbright Commission.

I'm writing one post a week for Hoy in both Spanish and English, and working to maintain a similar pace with the Huffington Post in English.

I just sent off tonight an 8,000-word chapter that Dunreith, Gabriele Thimm, Dad and I wrote about our trip in May 2012 to Dad's hometown in Germany for a book based on the Engaging the Other conference at which we presented in South Africa in December 2012.

Dunreith and I are working out the logistics for trips that we'll take to Peru, the desert in northern Chile and the glaciers in the southern part of the country during the month that Aidan is here.

After receiving an email from high school friend Tamera Coyne-Beasley about the possibility of our class holding a 30th reunion, I reached out on Facebook to classmates to see if there was any interest in having such an event. This sparked a chain of events that has led in the past two weeks to the formation of a Facebook group with more than 150 members, the discovery that our class has had $559 since our tenth reunion in 1993, and the impending delivery of a class directory courtesy of the Brookline High School Alumni Association.

I'm gearing up for my brother Jon coming here for a couple of weeks for us to work on a journalism project, all the while trying to keep this space going.

This says nothing of following up and making plans to learn from and collaborate with, the talented, dedicated, courageous and inspiring journalists I met at the Global Investigative Journalism conference last month in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

And I'm trying to keep my writing going here and in another book project.

I don't offer this list either to brag or to complain.

It's hard for me to express how fortunate I feel on so many levels to be with Dunreith at this point in our lives and in the nation's history.

Rather it's to say that tending to all of these varied projects can leave me feeling alternately drained and scattered and to my head swirling with the myriad details to which I need to attend.

Which brings me back to Becky.

This afternoon Dunreith and I slogged through about three hours worth of checking out websites, reviews and options for each of the three trips we're taking starting at the end of this month.

My eyelids were starting to hang heavy as we sat on the lower level of the Starbucks on Pedro de Valdivia Street.

My response time and accuracy was diminishing, my irritability rising.

I've got to head back to the apartment, I told Dunreith, who was feeling the same way.

We loaded up our computers and cords and adapters into my red backpack, walked down Providencia Avenue, greeted the doormen and gratefully laid down on our bed.

The pain in my jaw that accompanies my starting to meditate began its inexorable rhythm.

My breath grew deeper.

My thoughts started to slow down.

I woke up forty minutes later.

My head was groggy, and, within 20 minutes, it started to clear.

After an hour, I felt fully recharged.

I kept contacting people to interview for the project.

Dunreith and I had dinner and watched the latest dark episode in the third season of Los 80, Andres Wood's look at a pivotal decade in Chilean history through the eyes of a middle-class family.

I called mentor and friend Paul Tamburello and filled him in on my doings.

I went downstairs, pumped away on the exercise bike and stretched on the rug-covered floor.

I came back up to write this piece.

It's close to 1:00 a.m. and I'm starting to fade again.

It's time once to more to heed Becky's words.

It's time to rest.

And, in the morning, to try again.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 86: La Nacion and the Struggle for Data in Argentina

I’ve been writing for about a month about the impact of the 2009 Transparency Law in Chile. Hailed upon its passage as a landmark piece of legislation, it called for the formation of a “Consejo de Transparencia," or Transparency Council.

The sweeping nature of the law and the infrastructure of the Transparency Council are two of the elements that led transparency guru Moises Sanchez to say that Chile has among the best frameworks on the continent.

But the law has yet to deliver fully on its considerable promise.

Among the challenges that I’ve learned about so far: many journalists are not using the law, and those that are using it are not connected to non-profit organizations and/or computer programmers who can write the code necessary to scrape website and create interactive applications.

Here in Argentina, the team of data journalists at La Nacion, Argentina’s second-largest newspaper, confront an almost inverted situation from many of their Chilean counterparts, and are meeting the substantial challenges to accessing and processing data in creative, collaborative and innovative ways.

I met with four members of the team today in their new offices in a multi-story, gleaming glass building. (Gabriela Bouret and I had met at the NICAR conference in Louisville in February, and had kept in touch since then.)

Team memberRomina Colman, an information activist, told me today that Argentine law only requires the executive branch to deliver the materials that members of the public request.

The legislature and judges are not held to the same legal standard.

Even within the executive section, emails are exempt from being provided.

Journalists have to specify what they plan to do with the information they request.

The agencies answering the information requests can take as long as they want to answer.

This can be up to three of four months, in some cases.

And, in the instances when they do ultimately provide data, they do so not in a digital format.

Instead, they provide paper.

Notebooks and notebooks filled with hundreds of sheets of papers that have to be entered by hand in order to perform data analysis.

For their ongoing and groundbreaking investigation into fiscal malfeasance by federal officials, for instance, the data team had received information on about 600 elected officials.

The team worked with about 50 volunteers from three separate non-profit organizations to do the data entry.

This took many hours.

After that, they went through and verified the data that had been entered, finding and correcting about 600 mistakes.

From there they did a second, random spot check to confirm the integrity of the entered data.

Then they performed the analysis and reported the story out.

The team is also working with computer coders and the design team headed by Gaston Roitberg to display the data in accessible ways and to have it update as soon as the original source updates.

They also embed the original documents so that interested readers can read them.

Every document that is embedded has to be scanned first.

This whole process can take as long as a year for a single project.

But the team at La Nacion is doing it.

They’re forging a distinctive place in Latin American journalism and gaining well-deserved global recognition for their work.

They’re also helping to change the culture of journalism within the paper.

It’s not just a shift from not using data to have it be an integral part of their work. (The team does a daily post that analyzes data in some way.)

It’s also helping shift from an individual, even secretive method of working in a more open and collective manner.

The paper’s management is backing the approach in more than rhetoric.

Gaby said the team has conducted a number of weeklong trainings for the other reporters outside of the office, away from the constant pull of emails and texts and phone calls.

They're also support this weekend's Data Fest, a two-day extravaganza that will feature the opening, mining and visualizing of public data bases.

Friend and former Python instructor Ben Welsh of the Los Angeles Times and Ryan Murphy of the Texas Tribune will be on hand to present.

I don’t want either to romanticize the team’s work or situation or to claim a knowledge about what they do that is greater than what I have.

But I will say that my visit to their office today showed me yet another way that journalists working in other countries with the benefit of a tradition of freedom of information laws are fighting, and succeeding, in making their country, and by extension, more open and more transparent.

Their work, and their story, deserve to be shared.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 72: Gains and Challenges for Transparency

I`ve been digging in the past few weeks on my Fulbright research project about the impact of the 2009 Transparency Law here in Chile.

This week I had the good fortune to meet with Francisca Skoknic, reporter for investigative non-profit outfit CIPER. Although a small shop-Francisca told me on Tuesday that they´ve got a team of just 10 people-they are by far the nation´s leader in hard-hitting news stories.

I also spoke with Felipe Heusser, chief executive officer of Ciudadano Inteligente.org, an internationally-funded non-profit that seeks to use technology to distribute power to the citizenry via transparency, and Rodrigo Mora. He´s the head of Pro Acceso, another non-profit that receives its money from sources outside of Chile, Pro Acceso focuses on legal work to advance its mission of making more information public and expanding the parameters of material covered by the law.

I´ll probably write individually about each of the latter three organizations, and for now here are the major points and current state of my thinking as the law heads toward the end of its fifth year of existence.

The good news

Each of these organizations is a part of a burgeoning civil society that is continuing to emerge in post-dictatorship Chile. Francisca, Rodrigo and Felipe all see the law as a fundamental tool in that process.

Each of the organizations uses the law in two primary ways. The first is to give it strength by having a steady volume of requests. Francisca said CIPER folks file requests daily, Felipe said Ciudadano Inteligente has helped citizens file about 1,000 requests thus far and Rodrigo spoken openly about bombarding agencies with requests on a designated topic so that officials there cannot ignore them.

The second method is to choose issues or aspects of the law that could lead to a lawsuit. CIPER was involved in a successful case against then-presidential candidate Sebastian Pinera around his refusal to disclose information about his foundation. The other two organizations were on the losing end of a Supreme Court decision that held that emails of public officials doing public business are not subject to the law.

More focused on documents than data, each organization uses the law as a tool both for present-day Chile as well as a part of the work of historic reconstruction of life during the Pinochet era.

Rodrigo mentioned that many documents about that time have recently been declassified, but have not yet been requested, while Francisca talked about the special section CIPER did for the fortieth anniversary of the coup. CIPER founder Monica Gonzalez, among other projects, played a critical role, along with John Dinges and Peter Kornbluh in bringing some of the regime´s foreign assassinations and the role of the United States to light.

Finally, all three people expressed a positive and optimistic sense of the direction the country is headed in regards to transparency. Francisca called the process ”irreversible".  Both Felipe and Rodrigo said there has been a lot of progress since the law´s inception.

Series of challenges

At the same time, the organizations and the people doing this work face a number of challenges.

To begin, each of the groups is small and comparatively under-resourced. Pro Acceso has a team of about 5 people, CIPER has but 10, while Ciudadano Inteligente is the biggest with about 17 or 18 employees, according to Felipe.

Their size means that they do not get to some of the projects they want to do.

CIPER would like to better integrate its requests and the documents they produce on its website, but have not yet gotten there due to focusing their limited resources on reporting, for example. Pro Acceso used to do more outreach than it did, and found that it had to focus more on the legal work itself.

A related corollary to this is that, even though they understand the value the community of computer hackers can bring to their work, they have not yet linked in meaningful ways to those people.

Pro Acceso´s difficulty with sustained outreach is both not limited to their organization and a symptom of another challenge: thus far the law has been largely a tool for elite Chileans. That is to say, that wealthier, more educated, digitally-connected people living in urban areas are far more likely to use the law than their poorer, rural, less wired countrymen.

The setback with the court´s decision about emails was a significant one.

In fact, Rodrigo said it was such a regressive decision that at times the folks at Pro Acceso are questioning the wisdom of having brought the case. That an increasing share of public business takes place online and that the case focused only on communication about public issues by public officials on public emails only heightens that concern.

Finally, CIPER is a glaring exception to a largely moribund press.

All three people talked about the concentration of major print media in Chile between COPESA and the Edwards family, owners of El Mercurio, and the resistance those entities have shown to pushing for more transparency. In fact, the editorial page of La Tercera, a COPESA property, sided with the government in the case involving emails.

It is important to note that there are individual journalists who use the law, and the number is few. There’s also the attitude Rodrigo said he’s encountered among journalists and that I heard echoed by a colleague that basically runs as follows: If I have to choose between waiting for more than a month to possible get information that my sources could probably get me in a day or two, I’m going with my sources.

In short, a picture is emerging of a small and dedicated band of transparency advocates, few of whom are journalists and most of whom are based in Santiago. They work in their own areas, and, in some cases, together to give the law meaning and to fight against continued resistance toward Chile’s continued movement into a more open society.

On to politicians and the government next.

To be continued.