This is serious. EFIARTES is promoting peer capitalism by making artists and the government have to resort to private meetings with the richest families in Mexico to ask them for money. In Mexico there are only 1,576 Mexican companies large enough to be able to donate 2 million pesos to the arts. The universe of possible donors to culture is the top of the business leadership. And perversely, the incentive, set by EFIARTES, is that the government asks them for favors.
The worst thing is that participating in EFIARTES is tremendously difficult because unlike the PAN governments, whose ideological goal was for the arts to be financed through the market, Morena’s goal is to pretend that the arts can do it, but put their foot down.
EFIARTES does not facilitate access to resources, it makes it difficult. Artists have to deliver projects designed at a ridiculous level of detail, complicated paperwork and proofs. Presenting everything in order is so difficult that INBAL has had to design several-hour courses to teach artists how to apply. Still, 34% of projects die in the contest for making simple mistakes.
The intention of the paperwork seems to be to kill as many projects as possible. This is evident in the fact that the authorities refuse to do simple things such as establishing a prevention period to settle simple errors in the documents (by the way, INBAL has declared that the one who refuses is the Secretary of the Treasury of Ramírez de the O).
Also, there is no feedback as to why a project doesn’t go through. According to the Association of Theater Producers, there is no transparency in the qualifications, the way of qualifying or even, in who belongs to the evaluation committee. At the current rate, the call for 2022 projects will go out without clarity as to why the 2021 projects were not accepted.
