The multiple diagnoses on the growing number of missing persons in our country point to the lack of institutional capacities of federal, state and municipal governments to face such illicit in their growing dimensions. It is, from this recognition, that the initiative presented by President Claudia Sheinbaum starts, which has aroused different reactions both for the rapidity in its approval by the cameras, and for its content.
The presidential initiative consists of a set of reforms to the General Law in the field of forced disappearance of persons, disappearance committed by individuals and the National Personal Search System, as well as the General Population Law. The conductive thread of the modifications sent to the Senate of the Republic is to provide the Mexican State with institutional and regulations for the search, location and identification of missing persons.
One of the components of the reforms that has caught the most media attention is the biometric CURP, which is being used by those who simplisticly accuse authoritarian intentions and even spies by the Morenista government.
As is known, the attempt to legislate on identity and provide a unique document for this purpose, does not originate in this administration. During the six -year term of Felipe Calderón, a project was even launched to register minors who ended up shipwrecked, and with former president Peña Nieto, they sought to create the citizen identity card as part of the “Pact for Mexico”, for which they tried to build their own biometric databases. Both experiences in the PRI and bread governments failed for various reasons, whose balance were millions of pesos and that, to date, we do not have an identity policy in Mexico.
If President Sheinbaum manages to lay the foundations for such a policy, she would become one of the main legacies of her presidency and an answer to a problem that goes from the lack of conditions to include people to the financial system to make the recognition of missing persons even more complex.
Since 1992, in the General Population Law, the credential to vote as a means of identification is recognized, although provisionally, since the same norm conditions such recognition of the integration of the National Citizen Registry and the issuance of the identity card.
Thus, although there is an electoral roll (99.4 million) increasingly robust and extensive with biometric data, broad sectors of the population live in legal uncertainty regarding accreditation of their legal personality, such as minors and the foreign population.
The reforms of President Sheinbaum propose to convert the CURP into the “single source of identity of people, of Mexican nationality, or foreign … will be the national document of mandatory identification, of universal and mandatory acceptance throughout the national territory and will be available in physical and digital format.” In addition to the data that currently contains, the CURP would be added the fingerprints and photography.
How do you intend to build this database? The approach is the transfer to the renapus of the biometric data that obtain in the hands of the authorities of the three government orders, prior authorization of its holder, as well as assistance of the holders of the centers enabled by the Ministry of the Interior for this purpose.
The need for this State policy is, clearly, taxable, and the inter -institutional coordination and collaboration approach and between the three government orders is also successful, the INE being the main recipient of this purpose.
About the author:
Palmira Tapia is a teacher in public policies from the University of Oxford and a degree in Political Science and International Relations, by the Economic Research and Teaching Center (CIDE).
Twitter: @palmiratapia
The opinions expressed are only the responsibility of their authors and are completely independent of the position and the editorial line of Forbes Mexico.
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