MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s president is rushing to complete major legislative and construction projects he has promised before his term ends in September, and experts say all the rush is making officials a bit sloppy.
This week, lawmakers from the ruling Morena party mistakenly submitted the wrong pension reform bill to Congress for a vote, before sheepishly admitting the mistake and rescheduling the vote. They claimed Thursday that aides had mistaken one set of papers for another, but the bill nearly passed before the opposition noticed the error.
“In the legislative process, as in life and in all activities, human errors are made that are not premeditated and do not have bad intentions,” said Senator Ignacio Mier, President Andrés Manuel’s point person. López Obrador‘s party in the Senate.
The harried atmosphere extends to infrastructure, with the president’s beloved train projects suffering from glaring construction defects in recent months. Cranes have fallen from bridges and poles have been sunk into supposedly protected caves. With the June 2 presidential elections approaching, the president wants to quickly complete his administration’s projects.
“There is a rush because López Obrador wants to put as much as he can in place to secure his own policies so that … whoever wins (the elections), they cannot go back on them, at least not easily,” said political analyst Jose Antonio Crespo.
But pension reform in particular has become a lightning rod for criticism because it would effectively seize unclaimed pension funds if a worker does not start withdrawing them at age 70.
López Obrador says the seized funds – which he wants to put in a pot for workers whose pensions are too small – would always be available for return if a worker or his family members later showed up to claim them.
“Even if the time has expired, they can request that the money be returned to them,” López Obrador said Thursday.
But the bill that was wrongly put to a vote on Wednesday would have effectively removed some of these protections. For example, employees who had not yet received their pension at the age of 70 or 75 because they were still working could still have their pension seized.
And because pension withdrawals are already so bureaucratic and restrictive – surviving relatives in Mexico often have to go to court to access a deceased worker’s pension fund – the idea that a simple request will get the money back is met with scorn.
“We are against this because they are going to plunder everyone’s accounts,” said opposition senator Rubén Moreira, a member of the old ruling PRI party. “First, because the money in individual accounts is the personal property of many people, and second, because this does not solve the pension problem.”
The tension is linked to López Obrador’s disdain for private or individual benefit programs. The president often denounces “individualism” and “aspirationalism,” a term in Spanish that roughly equates to “getting ahead” or “pulling oneself to one’s own devices.” He prefers large, government-run programs.
Mexico’s woefully underfunded retirement programs were converted in 1997 to individual accounts somewhat similar to the U.S. 401K program, in which an employee and their employer both contribute to a personal retirement investment account.
López Obrador has long criticized this change, saying that the government itself should guarantee everyone a pension equal to 100% of their last salary. Obviously the Mexican government doesn’t have enough money to do that, hence the proposed raid on the ‘unclaimed’ individual accounts.
“Seizing these individual, unclaimed accounts… could impact the rights of employees and their beneficiaries if they do not take action to file a claim,” said Orlando Corona, specialist in social security from the Mexican Institute of Financial Executives.
Corona said it would take a major outreach and advertising campaign to remind workers of the importance of claiming their money — something the president’s plan doesn’t consider.
López Obrador has a history of rushing legislation through Congress without giving lawmakers much time to actually read the bills, just as he has tried to thwart his infrastructure construction projects by exempting them from normal permitting and environmental review processes.
On Wednesday, his party pushed through a law in the Senate that would ban judges from blocking government projects, even if citizens appeal.
The most important projects close to Lopez Obrador’s heart are railways. Mexico largely abandoned state passenger rail service in the 1990s, and the president is building rail lines to bring it back. The problem is that these projects are either questionable for the environment or too big to complete during his term.
López Obrador has promised to complete them before he leaves office on September 30, boasting that they are being built in “record time.” He spends most of his weekends flying around to various construction sites to personally supervise the work.
But apparently it is difficult to do careful work quickly, both in legislation and in construction. “It’s not recommended, but that’s how they do it,” Crespo said.
On Tuesday, an 800-ton gantry crane – a huge piece of machinery used to position precast concrete bridge spans – crashed to the ground on an elevated commuter rail line intended to connect Mexico City with neighboring Toluca. No one was injured, but the accident delayed construction and frightened neighbors.
In January, another crane dropped a huge precast concrete span onto the roadway below, narrowly missing two men who were repairing a truck.
In March, a loose track connection caused a train car to derail on the president’s pet project – a tourist railway known as the Mayan Train that is intended to transport both visitors and locals in a loop around the Yucatan Peninsula .
No one was injured in the incident, but since it was ultimately intended to be a high-speed train, the oversight was concerning.
The track switch involved in the accident is designed to be operated automatically. Although the automated system has not yet been installed, the president still wanted that part of the lineup up and running.
The switch – which shunts train wagons to another track – must therefore be manually released, moved and returned to its original position by hand. Apparently someone hasn’t tightened the fitting anymore.
For the same project, the government acknowledged that steel and cement piles, intended to support an elevated section of tracks, were driven directly through the roofs of vulnerable limestone caves.
The network of caves, sinkhole lakes and underground rivers along Mexico’s Caribbean coast is ecologically fragile and contains some of the oldest human remains in North America.
