SOCIAL ISSUES

Items

• Champion of the poor

  LatinNews 03 December 2019 Hits: 441

  López Obrador has portrayed himself as the champion of the poor. Indeed, the PND specifies a target of reducing the number of people living below the poverty line by 25 million. As such, his administration has prioritised social policies that seek to improve living conditions of the most vulnerable, such as the elderly and the disabled. People in rural areas, particularly subsistence farmers and indigenous peoples, are also considered priority sectors.

  A distinctive feature of the current Morena government is that it considers social policies essential to curb crime. By providing the population with health, education, and jobs, the administration seeks to reduce their incentives to engage in criminal behaviour. This explains the emphasis that López Obrador’s government has put on supporting young people not-in-education-employment-or-training (NEETs).

  For all sectors of the population, the administration’s social policy approach is highly assistentialist, based on direct transfers reminiscent of policies implemented in the 1970’s which relied heavily on subsidies. However, the provision of grants, stipends, or pensions through some of his flagship programmes – which have been extremely popular – have the advantage of setting the foundations of a political clientele that will prove useful in electoral times.

• Focus on wellbeing

  LatinNews 03 December 2019 Hits: 431

  López Obrador has repeatedly stated that his priority is to improve the population’s wellbeing. As a result, the former social development ministry was rebranded as the ministry of wellbeing, which is responsible for some of the Morena government’s most emblematic programmes, which have generally been welcomed by the population. These include the ‘Pension for the Wellbeing of the Elderly’, which saw its budget for 2020 increase by 22% relative to 2019, and the ‘Pension for the Wellbeing of the Disabled’, which had a 35% increase in allocated resources from 2019 to 2020.

   A notable exception was the elimination of an existing childminding scheme, which the government claimed was plagued by corruption, which led to hundreds of judicial appeals. Nevertheless, López Obrador did not back down and the scheme was replaced by direct cash transfers for childcare through the ‘Support for the Children of Working Mothers’ programme. Though this programme saw a small reduction of 7% in its budget allocation for 2020, it remains one of the administration’s main policies.

• Education

  LatinNews 03 December 2019 Hits: 406

  López Obrador campaigned to revoke the education reform of 2012, which he claimed was contrary to the interests and wellbeing of teachers. This was achieved through a constitutional reform that came into force on 16 May, though the three secondary laws to implement the changes were not approved by the senate until 26 September.

  The main amendment to the General Education Law is that it eliminated the autonomous entity that had been established to improve school infrastructure, which is now the responsibility of the Ministry of Education (SEP). The SEP will send the funds directly to parents and teachers committees within schools. This law also forbids making entrance to schools dependent on passing any assessment or admission exam. The Law for the Improvement of Education got rid of the National Institute for the Evaluation of Education (INEE) that was central to the 2012 reform’s goal of improving teaching quality at all levels. Instead, it established the National Commission for the Continuing Improvement of Education (CMCE). This law also specifies that teachers will be able to retain their post even if they fail assessments. Finally, the General Law for the Teaching Career established that local education authorities and unions will jointly assign teaching positions, that there will be no assessments for teachers, and that graduates from the state teacher training colleges will be given preference to hold teaching positions within the state school sector.

  These changes thus restored the unions’ clout with the sector, both the mainstream National Teachers’ Union (SNTE) and the dissident National Confederation of Teachers (CNTE), which had been significantly weakened by the 2012 reform. Unsurprisingly, business organisations and education specialists rejected the changes, arguing that they will fail to improve the quality of education provision in the country.

  López Obrador’s reform also made pre-school state provision compulsory, which explains why the largest share of resources for the sector in the 2020 Budget – 61,5% – goes to basic education. Secondary school and higher education got allocated 14.1% and 16.6% of resources for 2020, respectively. Importantly, although the 2020 budget provides an increase for the whole sector of only 0.5% in real terms relative to 2019, it comprises a huge increase of 73.8% for the ‘Universal Scholarship for High School Education Benito Juarez’ programme. Most of the resources for education in 2020 will go to current expenditure, mainly teachers’ salaries, rather than long-term investment.

• Youth programmes

  LatinNews 03 December 2019 Hits: 471

  Support for this sector of the population, which López Obrador claims has been neglected for too long, comprises key policies of his administration. According to figures from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) the proportion of 15-to-29-year-olds in Mexico that are considered NEETs reached 20.88% in 2018, equivalent to 6.4 million people.

  The importance of these measures for the administration is reflected in budget increases between 2019 and 2020. The ‘Youths Writing the Future’ programme, which provides scholarships for higher education students, received M$4.5bn in the 2019 budget. Its resource allocation increased by 74% in the 2020 budget.

  With the aim of increasing the number of young people in education, López Obrador also promised to create 100 new universities across the country and to scrap entrance exams to universities (currently only one in ten applicants is admitted to the country’s main university, the National Autonomous University of Mexico – UNAM). In his first state of the nation address of 1 September, López Obrador claimed that he had achieved that goal, with 815 teachers and 39,170 students enrolled in his ‘Benito Juarez Universities for Wellbeing’, who receive a scholarship of M$2,400 per month.

  The ‘Youths Building the Future’ programme, which is run by the Labour Ministry (STPS), is also one of the priorities of the administration, having received M$41.4bn in the 2019 Budget. It provides apprenticeships that include a monthly stipend of M$3,600 for one year, and its goal is to benefit 2.3m 18-to-29-year-olds during López Obrador’s six-year term of office. Although it was well received by young people and by business representatives as well, the actual running of the programme has been problematic due to allegations of corruption that include illegal charging of fees, identity theft, nepotism, and non-existing employers, among others. The 2020 budget proposes a cut of 38% of resources relative to 2019. However, it continues to be paramount to the administration as it accounts for 89% of the resources allocated to the ministry.

  While the country’s young population may benefit from these stipends, and they may even prevent them from going into crime, the steps taken so far will not necessarily improve their employability and their access to better paying jobs because knowledge and training are limited.

• Health

  LatinNews 03 December 2019 Hits: 443

  Alongside security, health is the other area where López Obrador acknowledged his administration has not made significant progress in delivering the improvements promised during his campaign: universal coverage, improvement of infrastructure and services, more staff, and free medicines.

  His assessment of the problems that most affect the health sector has been accurate, as it suffers from fragmentation, underfunding, and limited coverage. Inequality in accessing health care across the country, as well as quality of services, is also significant. Figures from the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (Coneval) show that some 9m people in rural areas have very limited or no access at all to health services. In contrast, around 86 million people in urban areas can easily access health care.

  In order to achieve its goals regarding health, soon after López Obrador took office in December 2018, the government launched its ‘federalisation of public health services’ which brought together the main health providers – the Ministry of Health (SS), the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS), and the Institute for Social Security and Services for State Workers (ISSSTE) – into a single system. Thus, this process in practice entailed a centralisation of responsibilities away from state governments towards the national government. This process was launched in eight states within the south-eastern region of the country, where limited access to health is more severe, and the rest will follow gradually.

  The reform to the sector under the current government also includes the centralisation of medicine supplies at the national level and the regularisation of more than 80,000 temporary employees. It also sees the federal government taking over responsibilities that were previously the remit of state-level authorities, in particular the so-called ‘popular insurance’ (SP), which was introduced in 2003 to cover non-salaried workers – self-employed, under-employed, or jobless – who are uninsured and comprise the poorest sections of the population. On 12 July, López Obrador announced that the SP would be eliminated and instead an institute of health for wellbeing would be set up to cover the uninsured population. This sparked some controversy as despite its shortcomings – beneficiaries often missed their necessary treatments due to lack of personnel, equipment, or medicines – the SP was considered a success as it reduced the size of the uninsured population from around half to15%, as of November 2018. At the same time, specialists have welcomed the opportunity to reform the health sector given the increased pressures it faces due to Mexico’s aging population with chronic conditions such as heart disease and diabetes – though critics have voiced concerns about the lack of strategies for prevention, particularly regarding obesity.

  However, as ever, the success of López Obrador’s plans will depend on implementation. Crucially, the 2020 budget sees resources for the sector increase by only 2.1% relative to 2019, with the IMSS and the ISSSTE receiving 3.6% and 3.4% more resources, respectively. According to the Centre of Economic and Budgetary Research (CIEP), a local think tank, providing health coverage to all the population that is non-salaried would require an increase of 66% in resources for this sector, so no significant improvement in this area is likely in the short-term.

• Rural sector and indigenous population

  LatinNews 03 December 2019 Hits: 494

  Although some of the programmes in this area are among the government’s priorities, as of August 2019, they had significantly underspent the resources they had been allocated for 2019. This was the case of the ‘Farming Credit’ programme (which provides accessible loans for agriculture and transfers of livestock) and ‘Planting Life’ (a programme to plant fruit trees and trees for timber in the south-east region of the country), both of which seek to benefit small-scale farmers by providing support to boost their income. By this date they had only made progress against their targets of 29% and 39%, respectively. Nevertheless, in the 2020 budget, the ‘Planting Life’ programme received an increase of 62% relative to 2019. Resources for the ‘Farming Credit’ programme were reduced by 76%, but subsidies for basic goods increased by 61%.

  López Obrador also promised to prioritise addressing the needs of the indigenous population that has the lowest access to social rights, defined as education, nutrition, social security, health, housing, and economic wellbeing. The country’s 68 ethnic groups are mostly located in six states – Oaxaca, Chiapas, Veracruz, Mexico state, Puebla, and Yucatán – which account for just under 65% of all indigenous population. In Oaxaca and Chiapas, 70.4% and 77.1% of the indigenous population, respectively, live under the poverty line (significantly above the national average of 43.6%).

  Indeed, one of his government’s first actions was carried out even before he was formally inaugurated, with a bill which Morena submitted to congress in November 2018 to replace the existing National Indigenous Institute (INI) with a new National Institute for Indigenous Peoples (INPI). Passed unanimously, the INPI redefined the relationship between the state and the country’s 68 indigenous groups. The government no longer seeks to ‘rescue’ indigenous groups through the INPI, but instead acknowledged that indigenous peoples are legally capable of exercising political power and handling public resources within their territories. The new legislation also recognised the population of African descent as a specific ethnic group entitled to benefit from the INPI’s support.

  The National Programme for Indigenous Peoples unveiled in December 2018 also made it clear that indigenous groups would be priority beneficiaries of all the administration’s social programmes (such as the pensions for the elderly and the schemes for young people). However, despite supposedly being a priority sector, the actual allocation of budgetary resources has been meagre. The new INPI received fewer resources in the 2019 Budget than its predecessor was allocated for 2018, and the 2020 budget provides for an even greater reduction, 40%, relative to the 2019. This casts doubt about the ability of the administration to effect tangible improvements for this sector of the population.

  What also remains unclear is the position of the current government regarding the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), which has been at the centre of opposition to some of López Obrador’s flagship projects such as the Tren Maya and the ‘Planting Life’ programme. Moreover, the current government has not made clear its stance towards the 1996 San Andres Larrainzar Agreements that call for collective rights for indigenous peoples.