After the protests in Mexico against the changes to the National Electoral Institute (INE), proposed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the international reaction has not been long in coming, considering that there are “risks” in limiting an instance that in recent decades facilitated the alternation in power.
When the Mexican citizen Ana María Olmedo decided to join the massive recent sunday protests in Mexico City, as thousands of his compatriots did in other cities in the country, he said he did it out of the conviction that “the country needs clear rules, transparency and of course democracy,” according to the quote Associated Press.
The package of reforms to the INE that the Mexican legislature, dominated by a simple majority of the ruling party of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, approved last week, set off international alarms and unleashed an internal wave of discontent under the slogan: “The INE does not touch itself”.
The approved package includes a drastic reduction in the budget assigned to the autonomous body that organizes, directs and arbitrates the electoral processes, both local and at the federal level, changes that would take effect once President López Obrador signs it.
The regulations include eliminating some 300 district boards, which are designated to work on the ground in electoral processes, both in local and national elections, including the presidential ones. According to the first calculations, the structure of 32 local boards with more than 260 seats would be reduced.
The INE has already made an estimate of the impact that the budget reduction would have on the staff of the National Electoral Professional Service, calculated at 84.6% less, which would make it difficult for it to carry out field work both for updating the electoral roll and for the training of officials, among others.
Another point of change is the elimination of the trusts with which the INE could retain public resources and allow political parties to use remnants of allocations, both public and private, in the next electoral process.
The change in the electoral law would also restrict the concept of “government propaganda” and limit it only to what is designated as such in the General Budget of the Nation, which critics see as an open door for the Executive to direct funds to covert political propaganda during electoral processes without being sanctioned by the INE.
At the same time, the salary tables of employees with amounts that must not exceed the salary of the President of Mexico will be reviewed.
To stay
The former US ambassador to Washington, Arturo Sarukhán (2007-2013), told the voice of america in the US capital that the Mexican president refuses “to accept that the upcoming presidential elections give the Executive to another party”, after a constant bleeding of citizen support for his party.
These changes to the INE “have woken up” the Mexican middle class, the diplomat assures, because the work done is recognized, he says, to have a guarantor instance in transparent electoral processes.
“It is an electoral system that took a lot of work, that was a political investment of efforts, of lobbying that united the opposition of the left, of the center and of the right at the time in Mexico in the 1990s to wrest the federal government from the federal government. organization of the elections”, explains Sarukhán.
The US reaction
Before the Mexicans took to the streets to show rejection, the presidents of the foreign committees of the US Senate and House of Representatives expressed suspicion this past weekend.
In a joint statement, Democratic Senator Robert Menéndez and Republican Congressman Michael McCaul warned about the step taken by the Mexican legislature to “weaken the National Electoral Institute.”
“The Mexican Congress has jeopardized the future of your country’s democratic institutions, returning Mexico to its dark past of presidentially controlled elections, not only turning back the clock on its democracy, but also on relations between our countries. the lawmakers said.
This Monday, the State Department affirmed that “the United States supports independent electoral institutions and with sufficient resources”, which in some circles is seen as an interference by Washington in an internal controversy.
On the other hand, the controversy unleashed by the reform has provoked airy responses of López Obrador against the protesters. The Mexican president raised the tone in the last hours against his detractors both internal like the United States and pointed to “a bad habit” in Washington.
And about his fellow citizens, he said that the opponents of his plans to reduce the budget to the INE by some 5,000 million pesos, some 271 million dollars in the first year and allocate those resources to social programs for the poor “don’t care about democracy , but what they want is for the dominance of an oligarchy to continue, a government of the rich”.
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