Ignacio Morales Lechuga
The austerity narrative that accompanied Morena’s rise in 2018 was not a government plan but a founding myth. We were promised the restructuring of public finances and a moral redemption of the State; time has shown that the much-proclaimed austerity was a lie. The promise of administrative purification mutated into an instrument of political subjugation. Austerity does not seek to organize the budget, but rather to systematize a narrative in which saving is not the end goal but a pretext for deciding which expenditures are presented as the sins of others and which are hidden as one’s own virtues.
The episode involving the Supreme Court’s armored SUVs is a clear symptom of this pathology; the official narrative attempts to present the purchase of these vehicles as a triumph of rationality and as saving one billion pesos. However, arithmetic has no ideology: the previous lease agreement (SCJN/DGRM/DPC-002/02/2022) had a maximum ceiling of 95.6 million for a fleet.
The regime’s propaganda machine shows its most acidic and selective side when it scrutinizes the budget of the “old Court” to justify its institutional destruction under the banner of combating privilege. However, this fiscal fury becomes blind to the embezzlement from which the government itself benefits. The expenses and privileges of the checks and balances were demonized, while “fiscal fuel theft” drained more than 27 billion pesos in 2025 alone. What is lost in a single day would be equivalent to what the Court would spend in four years. There is no consistency in a manipulation that claims fictitious savings while concealing real million-dollar hemorrhages.
“Franciscan poverty” is demanded of the checks and balances on power, while the embezzlement of 15 billion pesos in Segalmex, the equivalent of 5,000 armored SUVs, is normalized. The same thing happened with the Mega Pharmacy: a 15 billion peso white elephant that, at its peak, filled three prescriptions a day and of which there is now no trace. The budget is a weapon: it is used to destroy the adversary for being “extravagant” and to justify one’s own spending as “necessary.” It is inexplicable that the “New Court” would resort to registering its new armored vehicles in the state of Morelos. According to Article 161 bis 3 of the Mexico City Tax Code, official federal vehicles are exempt from paying vehicle ownership tax.
If the tax benefit is within the institution’s rights, why circumvent local regulations? Could it be that these assets are not registered in the name of the Federation, but in the name of the justices themselves to ensure a personal privilege beyond the reach of public scrutiny? This is the establishment of the morality of the “abusive citizen” at the highest Court, which punishes its adversaries with the full force of the law while using legal loopholes to obtain advantages that, according to its own narrative, should be classified as corruption.
Austerity never existed as a principle of efficiency; López Obrador’s white Tsuru and Jetta were only empty symbols of a fictitious serenity designed to distract while the looting was consolidated. The contradiction of the “New Court,” which criticizes the past but justifies the purchase of luxury SUVs for “travel,” reveals that the problem was never the expense, but who cashes the check. Giving up the vehicles after the scandal is not an act of virtue, but a tactical retreat in the face of overwhelming evidence; the real violation of public ethics is not the purchase of a vehicle, but the manipulation of the truth to cover up the real theft. Demanding accountability when it suits you is propaganda; demanding it where it hurts is democracy.
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