Are four great failures of this administration: first of all, without a doubt, the securitywith 185 thousand dead (until this week) and some 50 thousand missing. Second, the healthwith a six-year term without enough medicines, with erratic projects: Seguro Popular was removed to create Insabi that failed and now the IMSS-Wellbeing was created without any guarantee that it will work, more than 50 million do not have access to health public, at the same time the call megapharmacyother presidential occurrence In which billions of pesos have been spent, in its first four months of operation it has filled just 314 prescriptions. Another failure is education: the new Mexican school, the textbooks, the educational policy, the mistakes made during the pandemic, have significantly reduced educational levels, but in addition, one million 500 children have left primary school, an unprecedented number.
And the fourth big failure is the energetic politics. This week, to the disastrous data of Pemex blackouts have been added that show the inability of the CFE to supply sufficient electrical energy to the country, something that has been repeated for many months. In the case of Pemexthe Secretary of the Treasury, Rogelio Ramírez de la O (who off the record has disagreed on many occasions with the energy policy and who maintains very important differences with the authorities of the sector) declared at the BBVA convention regarding the financial situation of PEMEX that “you cannot hide the sun with a finger, it is a very large company that has been restructuring for six years. This restructuring in the last six years has left us with a lot of learning about what is a priority to do in the next instance, and this next instance involves the need to focus more on the refinancing of the debt of Pemexinvolving the sovereign debtor more directly,” he said.
Translated into Spanish, the policies followed must be redirected and the debt of Pemex (the highest of the energy companies in the world) that grew constantly in this six-year term, as well as its losses and debts to suppliers (higher last quarter to more than 160 billion pesos). If it were a private company, Pemex would have been completely bankrupt a long time ago: it is maintained by the help of the government, but if we add to that the more than 17 billion dollars spent on Two Mouthsa refinery that experts say cannot be in full production before 2027, that is the reflection of an institutional disaster with a very high fiscal cost for the country.
The blackouts They are one more face of the failures derived from an ideological decision that had nothing to do with the reality and demands of the country. The president wanted and the director of the CFEManuel Bartlett finally convinced him that the State should be the largest generator of energy in order to maintain control of the sector. It was not necessary, with the previous reform the government maintained control over energy distribution and the private sector was investing more and more in the sector. The previous reform ended and the Iberdrola plants were even purchased without any benefit for the country (that energy would have continued to be received without the ownership of those plants being the State) to reach that objective without any concrete benefit. On the contrary, it has become an energy bottleneck as we have seen again this week.
One of the big problems is the gas. There is not enough gas because the CFE does not have deposits to reserve gas for more than 48 hours and the majority comes from the United States.
We are not self-sufficient because the government has blocked private investments in the exploitation of deposits gas that exist in different parts of the country and notably in the so-called Burgos Basin, which covers 12 municipalities in Tamaulipas, 10 in Nuevo León and 12 in Coahuila. That basin extends towards Texas, and in that state of the American Union the gas is extracted to sell it to Mexico.
At the beginning of the six-year term, some of its main officials, none of them are already in the federal government, presented investment plans to the president, with national businessmen who contemplated investments of tens of billions of dollars to exploit that basin and other regions. of the country, so that we could be absolutely self-sufficient in gas supply. The projects included gas pipelines and supply routes so that no company in any area of the country would be left without gas, much less the CFE plants, and therefore without energy.
He President López Obrador He never approved them because the pre-eminence of a CFE was not guaranteed, which, quite simply, does not have resources for projects of that magnitude, and if it did, it should not use them for it.
It was also argued that to exploit these deposits the technique of fracking should be used, which the federal government also prohibited. Fracking has been debated since it began to be used years ago, but it has become significantly more efficient, it requires less and less water and its results are better. So much so that thanks to this, the United States now enjoys energy self-sufficiency, and has become an energy exporter… part of it we buy. With an additional point: without sufficient energy, the much-talked-about nearshoring will remain a relatively limited phenomenon.
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