Mexico City (AP) – President of Mexico He is in a rush to complete the big legislative and construction projects he has promised before his term ends in September, and experts say officials are getting a little slack amid the rush.
This week, lawmakers from the ruling Morena Party accidentally submitted the wrong bill on pension reform to Congress for a vote, before they acknowledged the mistake and rescheduled the vote. He claimed on Thursday that colleagues had mistaken one set of papers for another, but the bill was almost cleared before the opposition noticed the mistake.
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“In the legislative process, as in life and all activities, human mistakes are made that are not pre-determined, that are not caused by bad intentions,” said Senator Ignacio Mier, head of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s party. Senate.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador holds his regularly scheduled morning press conference at the National Palace in Mexico City on Tuesday, April 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)
The atmosphere of panic extends to infrastructure, with the president’s pet train projects facing serious construction errors in recent months. Cranes have crashed off bridges and pilings have reportedly caved into protected cave systems. With the presidential elections on June 2 approaching, the President wants to complete his administration’s projects quickly.
“It’s premature, because López Obrador wants to do as much as possible to ensure his policies are in place, so that … whoever wins (the election) will not be able to back out of it, at least. Not easily,” said political analyst Jose Antonio Crespo.
But pension reform has become a lightning rod for criticism in particular, because it would essentially seize unclaimed pension funds if a worker doesn’t start receiving them by age 70.
López Obrador says the seized funds – which he wants to put into a pot for workers whose pensions are too low – will always be available for withdrawal if a worker or his or her dependents come forward to claim them later. Will remain.
“Even if time has passed, they can file a request to return the funds,” López Obrador said Thursday.
But the bill accidentally introduced for a vote late Wednesday would have actually removed some of those protections. For example, employees who have not collected their pension by the age of 70 or 75 because they are still working may still have their pension confiscated.
And because pension withdrawals are already so bureaucratic and restrictive – dependents in Mexico often have to go to court to access a deceased employee’s pension fund – the idea that a simple request would get the money back has been met with derision. .
“We are against it, because they are going to rob everyone’s account,” said opposition senator Ruben Moreira, a member of the old ruling PRI party. “First, because the money in individual accounts is private property of many people, and second, because it will not solve the pension problem.”
The tension includes López Obrador’s disdain for private or personal benefit programs. The president often speaks out against “individualism” and “aspirationalism,” a term roughly equivalent in Spanish to “moving forward” or “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.” He prefers large, government-run programs.
Mexico’s extremely underfunded pension programs were converted to some extent into individual accounts in 1997. US 401K ProgramIn which both an employee and his or her employer contribute to an individual retirement investment account.
López Obrador has long criticized that change, saying the government itself should guarantee everyone a pension equal to 100% of their last salary. Of course, the Mexican government does not have enough money to do this, hence the proposed raid on “unclaimed” personal accounts.
Orlando Corona, a social security expert at the Mexican Institute of Financial Executives, said, “Taking over these individual, unclaimed accounts … could have an impact on the rights of workers and their beneficiaries if they do not step forward to make a claim.”
Corona said a massive outreach and advertising campaign would be needed to remind workers about the importance of claiming their money — something the president’s plan doesn’t contemplate.
López Obrador has a history of pushing legislation through Congress without giving legislators much time to actually read the bills, just as he sought to advance his infrastructure construction projects by exempting them from normal permitting and environmental review processes. Is.
On Wednesday, his party passed a law through the Senate that would block judges from blocking government projects, even if citizens file appeals against them.
Major railway lines are among the projects dear to López Obrador’s heart. Mexico largely abandoned state-run passenger train service in the 1990s, and the president is building rail lines to bring it back. The problem is that those projects are either environmentally questionable or too large to be completed during their tenure.
López Obrador has vowed to complete these before leaving office on September 30, and has bragged that they are being built in “record time”. He spends most of his weekends visiting various construction sites to personally supervise the work.
But obviously in both law and construction, it is difficult to do things carefully in a hurry. “It’s not fair, but that’s the way they do it,” Crespo said.
On Tuesday, an 800-ton gantry crane – a massive piece of machinery used to install pre-fabricated concrete bridge spans – crashed onto an elevated commuter rail line connecting Mexico City to neighboring Toluca. No one was injured, but the accident caused construction delays and frightened neighbors.
In January, another crane dropped a huge pre-fab concrete span onto the street below, narrowly missing two men repairing a truck.
In March, a loose railway fitting derailed a train carriage on the president’s pet project – a tourist rail route known as the Maya Train, which was designed to take both visitors and local residents on a loop. Has been planned. Yucatan Peninsula,
No one was hurt in the incident, but given that this was, after all, a high-speed train, the oversight was worrying.
The rail switches involved in the accident are designed to operate automatically. Although the automated system was not yet in place, the President wanted that part of the line to remain operational anyway.
So the switch – which shunts train cars to the other track – must be manually loosened, moved and returned to its original position by hand. Apparently no one re-tightened the fitting.
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On the same project, the government has admitted that steel and cement piles to support elevated sections of the tracks were driven directly through the roofs of sensitive limestone caves.
The network of caves, sinkhole lakes and underground rivers on Mexico’s Caribbean coast is environmentally sensitive and has yielded some of the oldest human remains in North America.
