MEXICO .- The culture of the “moche” is more and more cruel to Mexicans. The practice through which a worker has to give a part of his salary to get a job or keep it in the public sector has become a cancer and a permanent cause of social inequality because there is no sector federal, state or municipal that is exempt.
Today, an employee must give a percentage of his salary to his bosses for working cleaning floors, for collecting garbage , for sticking staples in offices, for risking their skin as policemen, for building bridges, roads, for getting oil, for wanting to retire for keeping their seniority premium, for planting trees, for wanting to get a contract.
And if he does not give it, they throw him out, send them to the street, according to complaints in various states for years, during 2021 and at least a dozen in the last month.
“ It is very perverse because one does not have a choice, employment in the midst of the pandemic is scarce ”, warns J osefina Ramos, a public sector worker in Mexico City who requests anonymity: reason why her name was changed.
“It gives a lot of courage because it is money that you earn with the sweat of your brow, getting up early, exposing yourself to being mugged and the officials do nothing, they just reach out and fill up pockets. ”
This desk worker about to retire reveals that the practice has been going on for many years, since the then head of the Government of Mexico City, Andrés Manuel López Obrador , wanted to be president in the 2006. “Since then they took away the 10% supposedly for the campaign. ”
The percentage has been increasing over time in various sectors. During the approval of the budget of 2014, for example, a group of deputies was accused by mayors of charging a commission for approving federal resources additional for projects in their municipalities.
The amount of the commission ranged from 10 up to 35% of the approved budget, according to the testimonies of the municipal presidents.
The deputies, mainly from the National Action Party (PAN), assigned resources to the states and municipalities at that time from a public money exchange called Ramo General 23, which as a result of the scandal was designated as “The bottom of the Moches”.
At the time, civil organizations such as Mexicanos contra la Corrupción promoted the regulation or the disappearance of the fund , but almost no change was achieved and the fund for the Branch 23 remains in effect with federal resources.
“Impunity allows the moches to have become a daily issue,” denounced Azael León, a worker of the parastatal company Petroleros Mexicanos, who leads a movement of complaints against of the Section 47 of the Union of Oil Workers of the Mexican Republic.
“Union leaders and Pemex officials are n colluded to ask us moches from between 10, 000 and 15,000 (Come in 500 and 750 dollars) per contract and the same percentage per month ”, he revealed. “This is everyday bread.”
Last September they were Indicated for asking for “moches” from people in need of employment , various federal officials, among them, high-ranking Army commanders in charge of the construction of the new Felipe Ángeles airport.
A complaint was also filed for corruption in the Energy Regulatory Commission for profiting from the delivery of permits for gas stations and a complaint was dusted against the current Secretary of Public Education, Delfina Gómez after the National Electoral Institute (INE) documented “moches ”Institutional.
The INE recently fined the Morena party for forcibly deducting a percentage of their salary from employees of the municipality of Texcoco to finance the campaign of the then mayor, Delfina Gómez, who wanted to be a federal deputy in 2015.
At the state level, entrepreneurs from Ja Lisco launched an SOS against the Moche culture that prevents them from competing healthily for a local tender, a scheme that is repeated in each of the 32 states of the country; In Sinaloa, municipal policemen retired from Culiacán closed avenues in protest against the collection of “ moche ” of the 20% to authorize retirement and seniority premium.
“They want to charge for a basic social right, it is unfair, they did not risk their lives in Sinaloa, they only reached a position of power,” said the leader of the movement, Iván Durán, just a few months later that in Campeche officials in charge of the Sembrando Vida program were singled out for asking for money to give work to peasants.
Solutions?
On October 1, the Nayarit congress became one of the most recent legislative in taking action on the matter by unanimously voting on the “Zero Moches” Law to stop those state, municipal and deputy officials who could go to jail for up to nine years by accepting “gifts”, stealing or divert resources of the people.
“It is enough that the white-collar thieves get rich with public money,” said the promoter of the law Cristal Espinoza in a political speech that passes the card to the judiciary where the main failure of the country that gives way to impunity is concentrated.
The Mexican Institute for Competitiveness, another of the civil organizations that conducts studies on corruption, points out impunity as the main incentive for the “moches.”
In a report On the subject, he reproached the Mexican authorities for allowing cases such as that of former deputy Ernesto Núñez to occur, who was recording asking for four million pesos in moches to allocate resources to cultural programs and was not even investigated.
Or the case of the White House that the wife of President Enrique Peña Nieto bought at the time under dubious contracts that the Attorney General’s Office refused to investigate declaring itself incompetent.
“The lack of sanctions makes corruption permanent.”
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