At a time when public debate in the United States is consumed by questions of secrecy, accountability and the selective release of government records, Puerto Rico has quietly taken a dangerous step in the opposite direction.

In December 2025, Gov. Jenniffer González signed Senate Bill 63 into law, introducing sweeping amendments to Puerto Rico’s transparency statute, known as the Transparency and Expedited Procedure for Access to Public Information Act. Framed as administrative reform, the new law (Act 156 of 2025) instead restricts access to public information and weakens one of the archipelago’s most important accountability and democratic tools.

This is not merely an administrative reform. It is an attempt to limit the exercise of a right with deep constitutional, political and historical roots.

Unlike many U.S. jurisdictions, the right to access public information in Puerto Rico is not an administrative privilege created by statute. It is a constitutional right, derived from freedom of expression and developed through decades of jurisprudence, legal mobilization, and political struggle. Long before the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Puerto Rican courts recognized that democracy requires public access to government records, especially in a political system shaped by colonial rule, surveillance, and repression.

As I have shown in a recently published article, history matters because the right to access public information in Puerto Rico did not emerge from bureaucratic reform. It emerged from oppositional politics.

As a U.S. colonial territory, Puerto Rico has long been governed through a regime that relied heavily on secrecy, political surveillance and repression, particularly against pro-independence and leftist movements. The practice of Carpeteo, or the systematic collection of political dossiers by police and intelligence agencies, produced a culture of surveillance, state violence and persecution, which was all legitimized by opacity and a lack of accountability. Families of victims, activists, and lawyers were routinely denied information about arrests, surveillance and political assassinations. It was in response to this machinery of colonial repression that the constitutional right to access information began to take shape.

A pivotal moment came in 1982, when the Puerto Rico Supreme Court ruled in favor of citizens seeking access to documents related to the political assassination by Puerto Rico police of anticolonial activists Carlos Soto Arriví and Arnaldo Darío Rosado at Cerro Maravilla on July 25, 1978. The court affirmed that access to public information carries constitutional rank and established a strict standard, requiring that any limitation on this right favor the public’s right to know. This ruling did more than release documents; it transformed access to information into a legal weapon against impunity.

Subsequent cases reinforced the transparency principle. Together, these decisions did not simply clarify procedure; they helped to dismantle official narratives, enabled the construction of counter-memory, and challenged the state’s monopoly over truth. Access to information became a means of confronting colonial state violence and rewriting Puerto Rico’s historical record from below.

This history explains why access to information has played such a central role in Puerto Rico’s contemporary political life. Over the last two decades, especially during the economic crisis that began in 2006, the imposition of austerity, and the aftermath of Hurricane María, journalists, researchers and civil society organizations have relied on this right to expose corruption, mismanagement and abuse of power. Investigative reporting and legal mobilization made visible the social costs of colonial austerity, failures in disaster response, secrecy surrounding public debt, and the beneficiaries of tax incentive regimes.

An example of these legal mobilizations for access to information reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In May 2023, the Supreme Court delivered an opinion in Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico v. Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, a case addressing whether the federally imposed Fiscal Oversight and Management Board (FOMB) was shielded from transparency lawsuits in Puerto Rican courts. In 2017, the CPI sued the FOMB in federal court, arguing that its refusal to disclose financial records violated Puerto Rico’s constitution. The federal district court and the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit agreed with CPI, arguing that FOMB was not exempt from core principles of democratic governance. However, SCOTUS sided with the FOMB, holding that the constitutional right to access information does not apply to the FOMB. The case underscored the fragility of transparency rights under colonial governance.

It is against this backdrop that Act 156 of 2025 must be understood. Rather than strengthening enforcement or correcting the government’s long-standing failure to comply with transparency obligations, the law normalizes delay, discretion, and deterrence. Response deadlines have been doubled. Requests that once required answers within ten business days now allow agencies twenty, with an additional twenty-day extension. If records exceed 300 pages or are more than three years old, a routine reality in investigative work, agencies have thirty business days, plus another twenty, turning a constitutional right into a months-long waiting game.

The law also raises the threshold for what counts as a valid request. Requesters must now notify agency leadership and public information officers, yet the government provides no public directory of those officials’ contact information.Agencies are granted broader authority to declare information confidential, permanently shielding it from disclosure. Agencies are no longer required to provide records in usable formats and may deem a request fulfilled simply by allowing in-person inspection, without guaranteeing meaningful access. Requests can also be denied if information is spread across multiple documents. Even enforcement has been weakened. Fines apply only after a court order, are capped at $18,000,and lawsuits may be filed only in San Juan. Transparency remains formally recognized, but practically hollowed out.

International press, civil rights organizations groups and the ACLU of Puerto Rico warned that the law would provide the government with new mechanisms to deny access to public information and would mark a clear democratic regression. According to the CPI, more than 50 Puerto Rican organizations urged the governor to veto the bill. She signed it anyway.

The process was as troubling as the substance. As journalist Carla Minet documented, the bill was rushed through the legislature without meaningful hearings, amended behind closed doors, and approved without giving civil society organizations a genuine opportunity to participate.

This new bill does not eliminate the right to access information outright. Its constitutional protection remains. But by multiplying delays, formalities, and justifications for denial, the law transforms that right into a bureaucratic ordeal. In practice, it will reduce access to information essential for understanding corruption, public administration failures, and Puerto Rico’s ongoing transformation into an offshore financial center and tax haven.

Puerto Rico has seen this before. In a colonial context marked by overlapping economic, environmental, and political crises, opacity functions as a tool of governance. Weakening access to information shields decision-makers from accountability while maintaining the appearance of legality.

The right to access public information was forged precisely to confront this kind of power. In Puerto Rico, transparency has never been a technocratic ideal but a practice of democratic resistance, historically mobilized against colonial governance, fiscal secrecy, and impunity. The current moment demands a renewed articulation of forces that moves beyond denunciation toward coordinated action. This includes sustained legal mobilization and strategic litigation, but also grassroots organizing, investigative journalism, and public education campaigns that contest the normalization of opacity and corruption.

While the constitutional right to access information remains one of the few legal tools available to hold a colonial government accountable, it is also part of a broader political repertoire aimed at advancing genuinely democratic and transparent institutions. that is, decolonization. As noted above, access to information claims have long been central to the anticolonial toolbox, used to expose the anti-democratic and coercive practices deployed by the colonial state. Transparency, in this sense, is not an end in itself but a means within a larger struggle for self-determination and independence.

This struggle is especially urgent given that Gov. González’s administration lacks a clear democratic mandate. In the 2024 election, a majority of voters did not support her party, instead backing alternative political projects, including the pro-independence party. This deficit of popular legitimacy matters. It creates both the political justification and the urgency for civil society to challenge recent actions that weaken public oversight. A meaningful response must therefore do two things at once: confront the immediate rollback of transparency through litigation, public pressure, and international scrutiny, while simultaneously building an alternative political project rooted in decolonization and independence. Only through this dual strategy can the practices that justify secrecy, austerity, and executive overreach be effectively called into question.

A government confident in its legitimacy does not fear transparency; it does not dilute rights born of struggle but instead strengthens them. This legislation, and the colonial institutions that made it possible, do the opposite, normalizing secrecy and the absence of transparency as a mode of governance.

Jose Atiles is an associate professor of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of Illinois, a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project, and the author of “Crisis by Design: Emergency Powers and Colonial Legality in Puerto Rico,” which analyzes the role of law, emergency powers, and colonial structures in producing and exacerbating political and economic emergencies.