MEXICO .- President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has thrown nine of the 11 reforms by Enrique Peña Nieto. Those in which his predecessor invested practically the entire past six-year term for their approval and implementation as a catapult to modernity.
The current president argues in contracted that these changes did not serve more than to enrich the legislators and politicians who approved them at the point of bribes as well as individuals who expanded their greed at the cost of violating “ to the Mexican people. ”
That is why he has put on the table many changes (some of total turnaround) to the reforms that They took Peña to the controversial cover of Time magazine with the headline “Saving México.”
These are counter-reforms to reforms: educational, labor, comp Economic, telecommunications, financial, energy security, transparency and criminal procedures. The electoral and fiscal policy reforms will not be touched and they are the only two that will not have changes, as guaranteed by López Obrador himself in a press conference and his party guarantees the same in the congress being a majority.
“I had said that I would back down everything and people voted for him. It is not something that should be surprising, but now it seems that the real impact that there will be on the economy, democracy and all the other areas that it impacts is not very clear, ”warned José Hernández, analyst at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico.
The energy controversy electric
López Obrador sent on the first day of February a “preferential” initiative to Congress, a privilege that the president has to carry out his priority plans: by law, deputies and senators are obliged to legislate in 60 natural days.
AMLO’s preferred project is to ensure that the electricity produced by the state Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) is consumed first; with the Peña Nieto Reform, private companies had more played in the industry either because they produced clean energy or because of help companies to self-production. In addition, it was allowed to buy first the least expensive energy .
Now, the president wants first to use all the energy produced by the hydroelectric plants and nuclear and geothermal plants of the CFE. Second, the wind or solar energy of individuals and lastly, the self-production of private companies.
“ We are going to reverse the process of privatization that weakened and transferred public companies to individuals… ”, he argues in the initiative. “The CFE was fractured, almost in ruins, in debt, forced to grant all kinds of subsidies to its supposed competitors.”
The parliamentary group Morena announced that it will support the presidential initiative “without changing a comma” and alerted business groups that consider it to be an “indirect expropriation” that violates trade agreements international markets in the country and that it will cost expensive.
“ If the government is committed to generating electricity with more expensive technology, this will translate into higher rates or subsidies, and would put pressure on public finances in the short and medium term ”, warned Juan Antonio Dorantes, managing partner of the consulting firm Dorantes Advisors.
In 2019, the López Obrador government provided CFE with subsidies for 75, 000 million pesos for electricity rates, according to the report Annual e of the state company.
The Business Coordinating Council, for its part, said that the changes would violate the Comprehensive Treaty and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Treaty between Mexico, the United States and Canada (T-MEC) and that could bring millionaire demands that the State must pay.
The one that already is
The president did not like that the textbooks did not talk about civic values or how to be a good person or That the public education teachers were demanded too much through a constant evaluation of their performance and as soon as they took power, the requirement for evaluations imposed by the Educational Reform was nullified.
The educational counter-reform that he imposed since 2009 with a majority in Congress, he eliminated the Teaching Career Service through which teachers to To enter the public education system or grow in it, they had to take competency exams, a requirement that Peña Nieto had given up due to pressure from organized civil organizations.
“It is something that will pay dearly in the long term,” warned the general coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Program on Educational Policy and Practices of the Center for Economic Research and Teaching.
“Teachers are once again political spoils because their promotion depends again on their loyalty to their union leaders and their political commitments” .
Those that are They are cooking
Peña Nieto had to implement one of the last reforms he made his predecessor, Felipe Calderón and, therefore, the former is considered the executor of the Labor Reform who theoretically sought to modernize the world of work by creating new forms of hiring
Thus, the hiring of human resources from one company through another was included as an option to outsourcing , which AMLO now wants to eliminate because he considers that it made Mexico an international market with low wages, that it took away workers’ rights and that it is a disaster in terms of local development.
I wanted to do it since last year, but after some forums of criticism and protests, no longer appears so radical because of the blunt warnings: eliminating outsourcing could lead to a displacement of foreign companies that are legal.
Similar situation occurs with the counter-reforms to disappear autonomous organizations (those that are not controlled by the government) in matters of transparency and economic competition “because they spend a lot of money.” AMLO wants to transfer them to secretariats under his control to become judge and party.
“ Let’s imagine that in full election campaign a journalist requests information about a contract that the Presidency of the Republic improperly entered into. Would the information be provided? The safest thing is not, ”warns Mariana Campos of the organization México Evalúa.
In Stand by
López Obrador said that Pemex will only extract oil for internal consumption and that its energy reform proposal would not, however, leave private companies aside.
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