I consult on the website of the Mexican government the “Priority Programs and Projects” of President López Obrador. They are 30. The majority, a failure. The president fills his mouth in the morning talking about them, but practically all of them are involved in serious scandals of inefficiency and even corruption.
“Youth Building the Future” is almost extinct. They gave him less than half of the initial budget. It has been revealed that it is used to enroll relatives and friends of the “servants of the nation” and that nights are charged to register young people, not make them work, and divide the scholarship between the false employer and the false employee.
The “100 Public Universities” do not exist. The “Dos Bocas Refinery” is costing 4 billion dollars more and will not be finished this six-year term. “Livestock Credit to the Word” did not exercise its budget in 2020 and by 2021 it has already disappeared. “Internet for Everyone” has already been postponed from 2021 to 2023, and while they promise to connect 120,000 communities, the presidential spokesman presumes that they have inaugurated 70.
I will not say anything about the “Free Medical Care and Medicines” program. The joke tells itself. I’m not going to tell the “Modernization of the Mexico City International Airport” joke either, because vacation videos speak better than any columnist. The “New Felipe Ángeles International Airport”, contracting ghost companies and awakening a range of irregularities. The “Mayan Train” has already become more expensive, it will not be ready and the failure is such that they have just changed the general director in charge of doing it. Even the president said that he had not given the width.
There is another joke. It is called the “Free Zone of the Northern Border”. I transcribe the description: “it will serve as a curtain so that people do not emigrate”. Entrepreneurs in the region say that it has not worked.
The “Urban Improvement” has served a lot: from this program came the resources to beautify the surroundings of the “La Chingada” ranch, owned by the president in Palenque. Its surplus value has skyrocketed with new roads, bike lanes, parks, cultural centers.
The “National Oil and Gas Plan” has a larger budget, but has not been able to increase oil production as proposed.
On the official page, in the “Rescue of Lake Texcoco” project, there is a gleaming render (includes rainbows), one of those used by architects to “sell” their projects that do not yet exist. “Sowing Life” — international media have denounced it — generates incentives to destroy forests instead of reforesting.
Do you remember the “Tandas for well-being”? It no longer works or has a budget. I add collaterally the “Bienpesca”: there is no fishing community exempt from complaints that the support reaches people who are not fishermen and even fall into the hands of organized crime, as in the Upper Gulf of California.
Welfare Scholarships. The Superior Audit has detected amounts without documentary support or “scholars” who had already died. The goal was to prevent school dropouts. Today we have a desertion of more than 270 thousand students due to the pandemic, according to official data.
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So, with a couple of exceptions, the “priority projects and programs” have collapsed. The explanation is simple: a combination of ineptitude and corruption. A president who does not believe in specialists, who despises technicians, who disqualifies experts, and who puts people at the forefront of public policy design whose only experience is having been electoral operators (“raccoons”) for Morena. That is what they have served for: to divert money to the structures of the party in power.
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