Transparency is a human right exercised by citizens to demand accountability from their institutions. It is also a political concept that can be considered as a sign-term that implies semantic relations with other legal and political concepts; at the same time, it is a metaphor extended to other fields of knowledge. The present research questions what are the semantic and pragmatic implications of the metaphorical use of the term “transparency” in legal discourse and citizen discourse in Mexico? The corpus to answer this question requires the conceptualization of the two mentioned discourses: the Mexican General Law of Transparency and the report Transparencia Proactiva of the organization Article 19. The method is on pragmatic semiotics. Specifically, a multilevel analysis was carried out to emulate Charles S. Peirce’s tripartite semiotic construction (2012) and, therefore, it will be performed in three moments. The microsemiotic, where the discursive relations of the definitions of the concept of transparency will be analyzed; the macrosemiotic, where the conceptual associations of the concept with other similar concepts will be studied; and the focal, whose emphasis will be on the metaphorical analysis of the concept and how this characteristic derives in semantic and pragmatic conditions.