The mostrencos, from charity to the army

It sounds chilling that a government that has not been precisely characterized by respect for legality announces that it is going to change the law to keep the resources of the bank accounts that it considers abandoned.

Not a few come to mind that image of the Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez standing in the middle of a street shouting “expropriate” with all the omnipotence that this people allowed him to build.

Others revive the urban legends that speak of a regime that confiscates second homes or cars to be distributed among the good people.

The truth is that the fate of abandoned accounts in Mexico is not new. The content of Article 61 of the Credit Institutions Law, which underwent its last amendment in 2014, and which says, in short, that a bank account not operated in three years is reserved in an account and that three additional years later, the resources are allocated to public charity.

This is where the detail of the quadrotheist style of changing the laws according to the criteria of the current regime is.

The name of the person who presented the initiative from the Morena political party does not really matter, because not a page is moved without the instructions coming out of the National Palace.

The current legal text is very clear regarding the destination of the resources of the abandoned accounts: public charity.

But it has been evident that this government has very clear likes and dislikes. Among those despised by this regime are those assistance institutions that do not depend directly on having to thank the President and that the beneficiaries can endorse their gratitude at the polls.

And there is no greater filiation for Andrés Manuel López Obrador than the Army. Yes, the initiative approved by all the political parties aims to allocate the resources of the mostrencas accounts to “security”, basically they speak of the National Guard that is unconstitutionally under the command of the Ministry of National Defense.

They are something like 75,000 million pesos that, now that the legislative process is finalized and the modification is published in the Official Gazette, will go from public assistance to complete the security expenditure budget managed by the armed forces.

Of course, insecurity is one of society’s main concerns, after the potholes, says the President, but that policy of diverting resources for social assistance to the list of presidential priorities is maintained, where his pharaonic works are, spending welfare distributed in cash and the Army.

This determination is also further evidence of the urgency of obtaining resources from anywhere to complete public spending in the face of the evident refusal to accept the reality of an economy that is not growing and therefore does not contribute enough to maintain this current rate of spending. .

We will soon find out who is affected by this legislative decision to dry up that flow of resources to public charity to complete the increasingly enormous budget of the armed forces.

Article 61 of the Law of Credit Institutions, says that a bank account not operated in three years is reserved in a global account and that three years later it will go to public charity.

ecampos@eleconomista.mx