The National Development Plan

The government is currently publicising its preparatory exercises that will feed into drawing up a National Development Plan (NDP) for the period 2013-2018. The first NDP was created in the 1970s and aimed to regulate economic and social activity, thereby enabling the country to manage and overcome the crises and problems that it was facing at the time, which stemmed from a change of model from the so-called Stabilising Development Model, and enabling it to deal with the changeable and dangerous conditions that it was experiencing.

Each new federal government has written an NDP at the beginning of its six-year term, and every time the work of putting it together began, important figures or groups in society were called on to give their opinions with respect to the proposed plan. With the resulting NDP, the government gave details of how it would proceed with each of the steps that it considered to be vitally important.

NDPs were also written during the two six-year terms of the National Action Party (PAN) from 2000 to 2012, with the difference that they did not publicise these plans as widely as previous Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) governments. Because they were hardly publicised, it is no great risk to say that the NDP almost disappeared from society.

The PAN governments minimised State intervention in the economy and left decisions about the future in the hands of free market forces, governing by way of gross improvisation. Today, however, we see that it was merely a way to flatter and bow to big investors and private companies, that is, to the free market.

The process of writing the NDP for 2013-2018 will not lead the country to a change of economic and social model which overturns the foundations of the appropriation of wealth and its brutal concentration in a few hands, nor a radically fairer distribution. Everything seems to indicate that it will be a framework of economic and social reordering that looks a lot like an attempted use of gatopardismo, or the ‘leopard’ principle, according to which everything must change so as to remain the same, with minor variations. The opinions of businesspeople have been canvassed for this NDP, but there are no records of similar efforts to canvas the opinions of popular sectors of society or the working class.

This is blatantly evident in the case of the unions, in that they continue to be treated with the same contempt as under the PAN when the political persecution of various unions was rife. This is in spite of what president Enrique Peña Nieto said on the 9 May during the last Citizen Consultation Forum for the development of the NDP, called Prosperous Mexico. Overarching economic policies must be reflected in the pockets of Mexicans and in the quality of life in the country’s homes. That is what we must work towards.

The questions to ask are: How can we improve the wellbeing of the population with a model that keeps wages low and even reduces them in real terms? How can we stimulate demand when purchasing power is constantly diminishing, with the negative effect this has on a depressed market? And all to favour the competitiveness of businesses, as if they needed any more help. In other words, this is a plan based on a mistaken model into which are built its contradictions, its brake and its self-destruction. In contrast, Brazil, China, Korea and India, among other nations, have followed a completely different strategy and have been able to reverse this trend towards crisis.

The president has the best intentions, but he does not grasp that the unions should have received an invitation, as emphatic as the one extended to businesses, to give their opinion on the country’s economic and social path in this six-year term. And some high-ranking civil servants have also expressed their lack of enthusiasm for that plan. Such is the case of the Minister for Labour and Social Welfare, Alfonso Navarrete Prida, who believes that we live in the best of all possible worlds. He stated on Friday 10 May in another round table for the NDP: ‘there is indisputable labour peace in this country, with only 23 strikes currently recorded.’ And he went on: ‘Mexico has had decades of labour peace; some conflicts date from Salinas’ presidential term, and do not involve more than a thousand workers, and that in plain and simple terms is labour peace.’ He added that ‘dialogue and balance between production factors will continue to be a major priority for this country’s government, a condition for the attraction of investors.’ Translated to the real world, this statement means lower wages, even lower than in China today, and greater exploitation so that the income may become increasingly concentrated.

The suggestion to Mr Navarrete Prida is that before getting excited about attracting capital, he should count and recount the workers who are on strike and not minimise the importance of the so-called existing strikes, or the conflicts in which tens of thousands of workers were simply fired or their unions attacked and pursued politically, such as the unions of electricians, airline pilots, those in the automotive industry, teachers, farmers and particularly the Miners’ Union, despite the fact that it is the third most important sector of the Mexican economy and the third largest flow of capital into the country.

So it seems that upon assuming the title of Minister for Labour he caught the anti-union virus from previous PAN governments, as shown in his refusal to dialogue, but Enrique Peña Nieto need not inherit this legacy as well. And a further suggestion is that in those cases of real conflict with workers, the civil servant must honour his statement that there is dialogue and balance between production factors, because although up to now we have seen a lot of privileges we have seen none of this dialogue or balance.