The economic losses caused to the country by “the best president in history”, due to lack of economic growth similar to that of previous governments, plus the waste in occurrences and cost overruns of pharaonic works, are colossal.
Together they exceed five or six billion pesos.
Mexico has lost time, and it is possible to recover it if the course is corrected.
What is impossible to recover is the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who died due to the irresponsibility with which the government handled the pandemic.
Astonishing was the insensitivity that dominated savings in the health sector to spend money on frivolities.
Irreparable is the damage caused to the future of children and young people by having deprived them of education with trained and evaluated teachers, to aspire to better income and quality of life.
Let’s look at the data (contained in the book AMLO, the cost of madnesswhich José Carreño, Julián Andrade and Jorge Fernández do me the honor of presenting today at 6:00 p.m. at the Jesús Reyes Heroles Culture House in Mexico City).
Due to the pandemic, between January 2020 and March 2022, 786,826 excess deaths were recorded in Mexico (INEGI). For every 100 thousand inhabitants, we had triple the mortality rate than the world average.
Dr. Francisco Moreno, the doctor who helped guide so much while a charlatan –López-Gatell– misinformed about the pandemic, affirms that, in Mexico, one in every 165 inhabitants died from covid.
In two countries with a population similar to ours and a different political regime between them, the results were: in Japan one in every 23,800 inhabitants died, and in Vietnam one in every 18,100.
The difference between what happened in Mexico and what happened in Japan or Vietnam was not a matter of ideologies, but rather the difference between common sense and madness.
Using data from the Ministry of Finance, journalist Belén Saldívar published that the government’s health spending, in 2023, was the lowest in a decade. In fact, until 2023, this spending had been declining for three years in a row.
Mexico suffered the strongest blow to education in more than a century. Former Secretary of Public Education Aurelio Nuño Mayer explains it:
“Today there are fewer children in primary, secondary, high school and university than there were in 2018. That has never happened in the country. The quality of education was poor, but coverage, from the Revolution until 2018, had not stopped growing. Each six-year term had more coverage. “This is the first six-year term that has seen a decline in coverage at all educational levels.”
-In all?
-In all. In preschool, from 2018 to 2023, enrollment fell nine percent. There are 500 thousand fewer preschool children in school than there were in 2018. In primary school there are 626 thousand fewer children than there were in 2018. In secondary school there are 200 thousand fewer children than in 2018. In high school there are 141 thousand fewer students than in 2018. In total, among all educational levels, today there are one million 200 thousand fewer children and young people in the schools of this country. A decline of 4%. It’s dramatic! –Replied the former head of the SEP.
According to the PISA test carried out by the OECD on 15-year-olds in almost the entire world, in Mexico only 1% of students are able to distinguish a fact from an opinion after reading a short text.
The government that ends soon, ended full-time schools, in which children ate and were attended to by evaluated teachers who earned more because it was a double shift.
He lowered the teacher training budget from 1,200 million pesos to 90 million pesos.
We are already in the era of robotics, of artificial intelligence, in which a student needs to develop analytical capacity, judgment capacity, interpretive capacity, reasoning capacity, and knowledge of languages.
These are the skills demanded by the new jobs that are emerging in place of manual or mechanical jobs, which are being replaced by robots, algorithms and artificial intelligence.
We will see the depth of the damage that, with a terrible education, condemned Mexican children to a future of precarious jobs, or to worse things, such as leaving their homeland and their family.
The current government will also have curtailed their possibility of being free. Free to choose what life they want.
It is the cost of madness.
In López Obrador’s defense, it is fair to point out that he did not act alone.
Within the cabinet there were and are intelligent people who should have said no. Except for Carlos Urzúa, the others remained silent so as not to risk their position or obtain a political promotion.
The business leaders made waves with the most outlandish occurrences.
López Obrador, like King Lear, believes that the imaginary kingdom that he built in his imagination with his words and the applause of flatterers exists.
And as a farewell, in bullfighter style, he will circle the national arena with the tail and ears of the country.
