The recent approval of the Public-Private Associations
Law, via a last minute ‘fast track’ through the Senate after it was accepted by
the Chamber of Deputies, is a further confirmation that the current
conservative government benefits disproportionately from the private sector, at
the same time as it pursues and harasses workers and their leaders, and
criminalises their social struggles. Now it openly protects wealthy men, giving
them a direct debit from public funds, which are the property of all the
Mexicans who contribute to the Treasury Department along with the income from
the sale of goods and public services. These resources should not be held
arbitrarily in bank funds for private investment, but it is obvious that this
happens because the banks are almost entirely in foreign hands and work for
their interests rather than for the national cause.
Our tax structure is one of the weakest in the world.
This wrongful financing of the private sector will only weaken it further,
because the government also returns a large amount of tax resources to that
sector as part of the special treatment that for years it has unjustly
received. It is clear that with this law the government is giving up its
support of public infrastructure which, notwithstanding errors of judgement,
had been ongoing under different parties for decades and with varying yet
tangible success. The current federal government displays not only its preference
for private capital above national social interests, but with this law it also
offers huge public resources to private investors. This means that the
government has failed to carry out any significant public works, and on top of
that it is now handing over the task to companies, doubtless the most powerful
ones. What is more, the government is offering to guarantee these projects with
its own public funds, even the blunders that participating private companies
commit due to their incompetence or corruption.
Various voices questioned the adoption of the
Public-Private Associations Law in the Senate and in the media, for example La Jornada; those voices are not willing
to let another plunder of the nation go unnoticed. This new procedure, which
institutionalises the corruption that has become commonplace, was approved by
the government almost in secret, and it is now protected by a law that much of
society had no chance to see and much less to revise. Everything was kept
hidden behind the shadowy deals between legislators.
It is probable that a lesser or greater number of
legislators, if they have not already done so, are thinking of becoming
providers, bidders and contractors for works tendered by the federal
government, whatever the political or ideological bent of the party that wins
in elections. Otherwise it is impossible to understand why they would pass this
law that so blatantly legalises and formalises corruption.
What system do we live in, where permissiveness,
complicity, ignorance and a lack of legal responsibility allow the approval of
a law of this kind, with no conditions or limitations or clauses in practice?
It is a new way of privatising national goods and services and of socialising
losses and exploitation, so as to generate greater inequality.
This law furthers the future sacking of the nation,
just as is currently underway with flexible and unlimited concessions of the
country’s non-renewable natural resources, minerals, gas, oil, and alternative
sources of energy. Of course, it would be useful to know and analyse how many
mining concessions have been given to the country’s industrial groups over the
last 11 years with the National Action Party in government. What areas of the
national territory have been given to the apparent owners of these concessions,
for how many years, who is complicit and who are the beneficiaries?
As Arnaldo Córdova has said, it is impossible to make
out a shared presence of government and private interests in this law, rather
there is a virtual substitution of the State by those interests, who will carry
out works and public services that correspond to the State. Senator Pablo Gómez
rightly put it: We are facing a legislative attempt to legalise corruption and
to turn the State into an instrument to promote private interests. And Senator
Francisco Labastida added: there is an inherent danger for the development of
the public sector if it leaves its works and services in private hands, because
they will end up grabbing public wealth and perverting the vocation of service
in the society that inspires and informs it. In sum, we are faced with this
government’s irresponsible renunciation of the State’s power to act as a State.
The fine points of the law show that necessary
investment will be laid out by the government, and this is confirmed, in case
there was any doubt, by the formal declaration that this expense will be
absorbed by governmental accounting. The theft that this constitutes will
remain institutionalised and permitted by this law, which goes totally against
what is written in the Constitution and in the laws which govern State economic
activity.
Although the law establishes that contracts will be
assigned through a bidding process, it also anticipates that when one of these
tenders is declared null and void the convening authority will be able to
assign the budget directly, which opens the door for making this process
flexible and discretionary. This same thing happened in the not-too-distant
past, at the beginning of Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s presidency when mining
and steelwork companies that were wholly owned by the State, that is to say, by
the nation, were privatised. After simulating the majority of these tenders,
the government handed over the concessions to private companies and to people
who had previously been selected. This indicated a level of corruption that had
never previously been seen in Mexico and which is reflected in the current unequal distribution
of income.
In whose hands does the country’s future really lie? Is
it possible that we Mexicans do not really understand the situation, that the
fate of this unchecked exploitation matters so little to us, and worse still,
that we do not realise what we are going to leave for our children and for
future generations? I am reluctant to think that Mexico has become a country
led by a small group of unscrupulous and cynical people, ahead of an absolute
majority of citizens who until now have not known how to defend our nation’s
true wealth with strength, dignity and justice.
