Luis Rubio
The purpose is evident. The question is whether it dovetails with the needs of the citizenry, which, clearly, are not the needs of those who redacted the new bill of law. The “initiative in administrative matters of the federal executive branch” is the dream of any bureaucrat: the government decides what is done, how it is paid for, who benefits from it, and, if they do not like what is about to come down the pike, they can suspend their acquisition or contract without indemnification. Never, during the decades during which I have observed the manner of proceeding of Mexican politicians have I seen anything as perverse and biased as this.
The bill in question has as its manifest purpose the removal of all latitude and freedom of action from the next government: to persevere in the paradise that today characterizes Mexico, ensuring the permanence of the economy in a recession, that the income does not increase and that the country continues responding to the obsessions of a sole individual.
The bill’s avowed objectives that, in rhetorical terms, appear to be sensible, in reality, masquerade his megalomania: its nominal aim is to strengthen the rectorship of the State in the economy. The changes it proposes refers to the faculties and attributions of the government in matters of concessions, permits, authorizations, and licenses; modification (diminution) of potential indemnifications in the case of expropriation; elimination of compensation for damages or harm when a contract is revoked; and it includes a clause of early termination (exorbitant clause) to be added to all contracts with the government. Along the pathway, the preeminence is repealed, which is now granted to international treaties and arbitral agreements. In a word, full governmental faculties are conferred for conducting public affairs without any limitation.
This is about a sudden change in all game rules, like the news on electricity right in the middle of Holy Week, all geared toward radically altering the normative framework. All private investment would disappear if this legislation were approved because legal protection would no longer exist. Unless the proposed law were declared unconstitutional eventually by the Supreme Court, the new legislation would usher at the end of the only source of investment that has flourished during the last four years: the one that enters under the protection of the commercial agreements in force, including the most critical, already approved by the current government, that is, the Mexico-United States-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
The express objective of this is not to terminate private investment but instead to subject it to the preferences of the government in turn. Very much in the style of the Fourth Transformation (4T), the objective is for whosoever invests to be in debt to the government, which retains the legal faculty of wresting away authorization when it thus decides. That is precisely the opposite of what has been built during the past decades, when the objective was to consolidate and render credibility to the general rules applied neutrally and impartially. As we have seen in these years during which the government has been negotiating (or attempting to negotiate) special deals with each company, especially in the electrical ambit, the objective lies in extending this practice to the aggregate of the economy, bestowing upon it a halo of judicial legitimacy. The case of the Spanish clean-energy company Iberdrola is illustrative: given that the company was unwilling to negotiate in governmental terms, it ended up selling its assets. It appears obvious that the government acquired a political victory, while Mexico and Mexicans got impoverished along the way.
What the redactors of the initiative do not grasp, or do not recognize, is that entrepreneurs and investors of any nationality have at their feet the entire world regarding their opportunities to grow and develop. Certainly, the neighborhood with the United States offers an exceptional inducement that has served as protection in the face of the brunt of the battle that the government has undertaken; however, that has worked (well below its potential) under the existing legal framework. Were the legal context to be modified as this bill proposes, the situation would be another, very distinct.
An old axiom says that “When a governmental entity cannot, or would rather not, adequately perform its primary function, or when it feels like its function is insufficiently grand, the agency will expand its mission, thereby distracting attention from its core inadequacy. Sooner or later, everyone sits down at the banquet of consequences.” That is what this bill proposes to achieve: advance the mediocrity of the current reality to freeze it in time and render the country’s development and prosperity impossible.
Each person will judge the desirability of this initiative. Still, the consequences would be inevitable because, in addition to damaging the general credibility of the government and the legal system, it would constitute a straitjacket for the upcoming administration, even if it came from AMLO’s party Morena.
As the great novelist Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “Sooner or later, everyone is seated at the banquet of the consequences.” We are now breaking into a run toward that.
@lrubiof
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