It is often thought that municipalities cannot do much to improve people’s lives. I am not a supporter of that idea. Therefore, I tell you the five points on which our government platform will be based if we win the mayor of Zapopan this June 2.
According to data from the National Survey of Victimization and Perception of Public Safety (2023) conducted by INEGI, 6 out of every 10 inhabitants of Zapopan perceive that their municipality is not safe. Feeling fear in Zapopan, the Jalisco municipality that registers the highest number of missing people nationwide (2 out of every 10 of these cases are concentrated in this municipality) is the norm. Despite this situation, in 2023 the mayor of Zapopan decided to cut the Police Station budget by almost 80 million pesos. Guaranteeing people’s safety will be our number one priority, therefore: we propose to have the best paid, best trained and best trained municipal police in all of Mexico, as well as create the largest neighborhood crime prevention network in the country.
According to data from the National Survey of Government Quality and Impact (2023), also conducted by INEGI, 8 out of 10 people in the state believe that acts of corruption in the entity are frequent. In this line, the last mayors of Zapopan take the cake. There we have, for example, the use of a helicopter intended for public security tasks by the mayor to get to a soccer game, the loss of more than 300 million pesos that were deposited in Banco Accendo or the very suspicious insistence to give away the municipal public lighting concession to a friendly company. We do not want any of this to happen again, so we propose that all interactions that the municipality has with companies and citizens be transparent with the help of technology and Zapopan students.
On the one hand, Zapopan stands out at the national level for having high levels of per capita income; On the other hand, Zapopan is distinguished by brutal inequality. One of its most notable expressions is that in 2024 there are more than 167 thousand hungry Zapopans (10% of the population). This is a scenario that seems inconceivable to us in one of the richest municipalities in the country and one of the three with one of the highest public budgets. We are committed to ending hunger in the municipality through the installation of new community kitchens and food distribution centers throughout the territory.
A consequence of having managed the government for years as if it were a private company is that opportunities have been distributed following the logic of profits, not the guarantee of rights. That which does not represent votes or money is despised by the rulers of Zapopan. It is enough to remember what Pablo Lemus, candidate for governor of Jalisco for the orange party, already said: the election is against social programs. We, on the contrary, believe that the universalist social policy of this six-year term has had very positive benefits in reducing poverty that had not been seen in previous years. In this way, we will implement a battery of transfer programs for the most vulnerable people and to guarantee rights such as mental health, housing, culture, education and caregivers. In our municipality no one is going to be left behind.
Finally, we want a Zapopan of innovation, which through its highly qualified human capital attracts the benefits of phenomena such as nearshoring, which encourages entrepreneurs, which uses technology to benefit the greatest number of people and which takes care of the environment. We want to be a model city of fraternity, through which it is demonstrated that rights are within the reach of all people when there is political will involved. Our proposal is to direct the highest public investment in history to the people and areas that the orange governments did not turn to see: the most marginalized neighborhoods of the municipality, the young people, the forests and the street animals, which do not deserve the treatment unfair they receive.
There is no doubt that if all these measures are implemented, Zapopan will be an example at the national level of how much can be done from the municipalities.
