Backwards

There are many decisions that President López has made in the last four years that, in practice, have resulted in Mexico going backwards in many areas. The president is embarking on an unsuccessful and very costly attempt to return to a supposedly glorious past that never existed. Mexico is today, in many respects, worse off than it was before he became president.

Undoubtedly, of all the decisions that it has made, the most serious due to its implications for investment, growth and well-being of the population is the weakening, from the government itself, of the rule of law and the decrease in the legal certainty that there will be arbitrary modifications and interpretations of the rules of the game. The expression of the president himself “don’t tell me that the law is the law” summarizes, in a single sentence, the absolute lack of respect he has for the rule of law.

In this regard, the World Justice Project report indicates that in Mexico, during the last three years that President López has been heading the government, there has been a setback in the rule of law. The report gives Mexico a score of 0.42, which places us in 115th place out of 140 countries considered (by the income range of the economy, Mexico was placed in 39th/42nd place). The lack of corruption item stands out, due to its poor qualifications with an unfortunate score of 0.26, placing us in 134/140 place (instead of 30/32 in the American region). Shameful rating when the fight against corruption was one of the flags raised during the election campaign; in practice, it turned out to be just a deception to his constituents.

But it is not only in the line of validity of the rule of law where there is a marked setback; there is also it in different specific areas. I point to four.

Undoubtedly one of the worst, due to its direct and negative impact on the well-being of individuals, is the destruction of the public health system, which highlights the cancellation of Seguro Popular and its failed replacement with the monstrosity that resulted from INSABI, with which 15 millions of Mexicans were left without access to health services. In addition, it destroyed the drug acquisition and distribution system; The acute shortage is a problem that the president created and that he has no chance of solving because he himself is not interested in solving it (he customarily lies about it) and because health sector officials are notoriously inept. Denmark?; Not with this government.

Another line in which there has been a setback is in the energy sector where the president mentally lives in the seventies of the last century; revolutionary nationalism seasoned with Marxism. The president is notoriously wrong since national sovereignty is not rooted in or sustained by two very inefficient government enterprises, but rather by an economy with an increasingly wealthy population. His vision that the greatness of Mexico is that the Mexican energy sector is dominated by PEMEX and CFE with monopolistic practices that discriminate against private companies has an enormous cost not only because of the inefficiency with which they operate, which is why they require huge subsidies, but Even more so, because this discrimination inhibits investment and growth. That the real GDP per inhabitant in 2024 is going to be 4% lower than in 2018 is evidence of the failure of his economic policy.

One more is his intention to eliminate the INE; a regression of almost four decades in the electoral system that, if approved in Congress, would give democracy a coup de grace, yet another violation of the rule of law. The president is not a Democrat.

Finally, the apparent lapse when he referred to Russia as the Soviet Union. In the morning of last Thursday, the president said that with China there was a relationship of economic cooperation, with the Soviet Union one of friendship and with the United States one of good neighborliness. If it was not a lapse, and I think it was not, by referring to Russia as the former Soviet Union, it reflects, on the one hand, the longing for and ideological affinity with the communist system and, on the other, by saying that with the United States there is a good neighborly relationship reveals the lawsuit/resentment/hatred he has towards our neighbor and partner and that he really does not perceive the importance of the economic relationship between the two countries. Will he put the accelerator fully, but in reverse, repudiating the T-MEC even if it destroys the economy? We’ll find out next year.

Twitter: @econoclasta