🕊️ Data Transparency

Welcome to Latinometrics. We bring you Latin American insights and trends through concise, thought-provoking data visualizations.

Let's talk about one of Latinometrics' favorite values the human race has ever come up with: transparency.

The term literally describes a physical property that allows light to pass through materials, enabling clear visibility. Starting with the Enlightenment, this term developed into a societal aspiration.

Although English philosopher Bentham used the term "publicity" for similar ideals, he is known as the grandfather of modern transparency and also for the more controversial notion of utilitarianism.

The push for modern open governance started in the West, but much before then, ancient Eastern wisdom promoted similar ideas through inner moral development or spirituality. Their focus was on the leader's character as a source of natural transparency.

So, where are we today? Latinometrics would not exist without a key byproduct of transparency ideals: access to free and public data.

Among countless worldwide initiatives to promote transparency, there's our chart's source today, the International Budget Partnership (IBP). Founded in 1997 in Washington, DC, with the goal of promoting access to government budget information and enabling public engagement in the process.

Mirroring Bentham's belief that "publicity" prevents evil, IBP created systematic tools to force disclosure through measurement. Their Open Budget Survey, first launched in 2006, evaluates 125 countries using 240+ standardized questions.

And what does the 2023 survey tell us about our region?

Latin America has quite the range. First, the incredibly impressive news: Brazil and Mexico tied for 6th place in 2023's Survey.

Brazil demonstrates the payoff of a two-decade push, which began when President Lula gave his anti-corruption chief, Jorge Hage, a clear mandate: publish all federal spending online. Hage's 2004 Transparency Portal still attracts 900K visitors per month and has survived four presidents and one impeachment.

Mexico's score is the product of an unlikely marriage between reformist technocrats and watchdog NGOs that in 2011 built the Budget Transparency Portal and later hard-wired audit data into public dashboards. But a 2025 legal overhaul now threatens to shutter the independent information authority (INAI) and even scrap CompraNet, the procurement window—proof that openness is never a finished job.

Rising fast is the Dominican Republic. A 2012 restructuring of its budget office turned spreadsheets into live public tables and, this year, an AI tagger began marking every peso against the UN SDGs—catapulting the country to #1 worldwide for citizen input in budgets.

At the other end sits El Salvador's "descent into darkness", scoring even lower than Nicaragua's authoritarian dictatorship. Since 2019, the Bukele government no longer publishes its budget publicly.

How can you push for more transparency at your job, local, and federal levels?

Footnote: In the spirit of the topic, we decided against a paywall behind today's issue. If you like our work, consider supporting us with a paid subscription—50% off today only, and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

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