Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
Every budget reveals priorities and concerns; it conceals errors and keeps the skeletons hidden in the closet. Such is the budget for the year 2024 that the Chamber of Deputies has just approved.
The fact that the Morenista, Green, and PT majorities refuse to appropriate funds for the natural tragedy in Acapulco and 43 neighboring municipalities speaks of a shameful publicity strategy imposed by AMLO on his legislators. By the way, this strategy was accepted by most of them without balking. The President intends to get people to discuss anything but Acapulco and Hurricane Otis. Why? Simple. He does not want to spend his precious public money rebuilding from a natural disaster. He wants it to be devoted exclusively to his priorities.
The then Morenista Congresswoman Selene Avila vehemently protested against the President’s instruction to her parliamentary group to deny the approval of resources for the reconstruction of Acapulco. In an impassioned defense, Congresswoman Avila denounced Morena’s attitude and resigned from her party in the Congress plenary.
So, what are the President’s priorities in promoting this budget to which “not a comma has been changed”?
To put it briefly, the President’s priorities are to continue investing in his mega-projects, to invest whatever is required to keep PEMEX afloat, to increase the funds and responsibilities of the Army, the National Guard, and the Navy, to expand to unsuspected levels the money for social assistance and to eradicate the autonomous bodies and the Judicial Power once and for all before leaving power. To achieve all this, he must reduce spending on health, education, justice, transparency and accountability, science and technology, and state and municipal funds, among other items included in the President’s destructive agenda.
It is noteworthy the high indebtedness that the government proposes to contract, knowing that it will spend much more than it takes in. The President does not seem concerned about leaving a historically high public debt, which will choke the incoming government in October of next year.
In essence, what kind of government does everything this budget proposes? The economic premise from which it starts is radical neoliberalism with an authoritarian bias. For example, it cuts fundamental social services (health, education, women’s protection), although it increases direct support only to win people’s votes. These supports are of no use in alleviating people’s poverty.
It invests in the militarization of the economy and politics. Merging the military with the economy stimulates the military commanders’ greed, creating a new social class: the milibourgeoisie.
The destruction of the autonomous bodies is fundamental to eliminate any capacity for vigilance, oversight, and punishment of the government corruption that has flourished and multiplied during this six-year term.
Not allocating resources to Acapulco and its surroundings is equivalent to saying that the human tragedy is unimportant to this government. The only important thing is AMLO’s priorities, and no hurricane will make him move one iota what he wants for now and until the elections in June 2024.
The only thing that matters to the President is that Morena wins the elections and that he continues to be the main puppet master of the political project he represents.
The 2024 budget proposes a restrictive, purely neoliberal economic model that will be imposed by force, if necessary. The mixture of a restrictive economy with militarism reveals the true project of despotic presidentialism.
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