The month of October has arrived with a new North America Free Trade Agreement deal being agreed to by Mexico, the United States and Canada that will be henceforth known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). Both the current and upcoming governments in Mexico wanted to strike a deal with its northern neighbors because the elimination of NAFTA would have been a catastrophic outcome for the Mexican economy. The details of the agreement have just been released so more information will be included in next week’s transition recap. Meanwhile, in domestic affairs, the week revolved around the announcement of who would chair each of the different committees in both houses of Congress. Social media outcry appeared once it was announced that legislators from the disappeared[1] ultra-conservative Social Encounter Party (PES) would preside over particular committees like health, education, culture and sports. To many liberals, having Evangelists control these committees was outrageous and to many of Lopez Obrador’s critics, it was just another example of how incongruent his government could be. This situation, forced the governing coalition to shift who received these committees, putting Morena legislators as the chairs of them replacing the PES legislators. This in turn, made people like former telenovela star and stripper Deputy Sergio Mayer (Morena) the head of the culture committee, situation he announced in a misspelled tweet. Regarding AMLO’s agenda, he continues visiting different cities on his “thank you tour”, stopping by the state of Tlaxcala and indicating that the first department to relocate will be the Culture Department. During the election campaign, AMLO promised he would aid Mexican decentralization by moving the different departments that compose the Executive branch to other states rather than all of them being in Mexico City. This is one of his most criticized proposals as it implies a ton of hidden costs that his team seems to not be considering, to the point that criticisms had made the future government silent on the issue for several weeks, but reigniting debate once he announced in Tlaxcala that the Culture Department would be the first to move in 2019. During the week, AMLO promised to parents of the disappeared student-teachers from Ayotzinapa that his government would create a special committee to get to the truth of what happened four years ago with them. On the anniversary of their abduction, President Elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, said that institutions must be strengthened to prevent this situation from happening again and suggested that he would invite international human rights organizations to aid in the clarification of the disappearance of those 43 student-teachers. He promised that from now on, the Government Department (of the Interior) would be an institution tasked with governance and furthering human rights and not spying on people as it happened during Peña Nieto’s administration (according to the New York Times). On other stops of his tour, AMLO reiterated his proposal to give scholarships to young people without a job as part of training programs while also emphasizing the role that sports could play in receiving those grants while visiting the Mexican Olympic Committee. He said his government would allocate 5 billion pesos (~263 million USD) to give 2.6 million sports related scholarships. Later on, when visiting the state of Hidalgo, he spoke once again about reinvigorating Mexico’s energy sector (mainly speaking about Pemex rather than the entire energy sector) by investing 70 billion pesos (~3.7 billion USD) in the reconfiguration of the Tula refinery in that state. [1] Note: The Social Encounter Party lost its ability to compete in federal level elections last July 1st as it did not reach the 3% of the vote threshold so legislators that won single member plurality districts have a seat in Congress but are independent. However, as the PES was part of AMLO’s coalition, those legislators are acting in tandem with Morena and its allies in the different legislative negotiations.
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Manuel Franco
4/24/2023 10:42:26 am
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