I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate our president-elect, the next constitutional president. President! President! President!
The ports and airports of Tuxtla, Chetumal and Mexico City were rehabilitated.
The new Felipe Ángeles International Airport was built.
The Tulum International Airport in Felipe Carrillo Puerto was completed in 15 months. We call it ‘Felipe Carrillo Puerto’, the Tulum International Airport in Quintana Roo. In 15 months, an international airport that is already receiving flights from various countries in Europe and states of the American Union. Here I take the opportunity to acknowledge the military engineers.
Two million 495 thousand vehicles of foreign origin have been regularized for the benefit of low-income families. The small amount they pay for this procedure has accumulated six thousand 239 million 537 thousand 500 pesos that are given to municipal and state governments to improve city streets.
The Zapotillo dam in Jalisco was completed without flooding the communities in the area.
The Santa María dam in Rosario, Sinaloa, the Pilares dam in Sonora, and the Chihuero dam in Michoacán have been completed and are nearing completion, and the Libertad dam in Nuevo León is nearing completion.
Irrigation districts were built in Santa Maria, Sinaloa; in El Chihuero, Michoacan; Picachos, also in Sinaloa; in the Yaqui towns; and the Alejandro Gascon Mercado Irrigation District in Nayarit.
Consider this fact: in contrast to what happened in the six previous six-year terms, in 36 years, which coincides with the neoliberal period, in which only 22 thousand hectares were incorporated, 22 thousand hectares of agricultural irrigation, in this government of all, 120 thousand hectares of irrigation will remain.
We have built dams, reservoirs, pumping plants, storage tanks, water treatment plants and aqueducts to bring 24,550 liters per second of clean water to Concordia and Mazatlán, Sinaloa; to Xpujil, Campeche; to the metropolitan area of Monterrey; to the metropolitan area of Guadalajara; to nine municipalities of La Laguna de Durango and Coahuila; to Macuspana, Tabasco; to Mexico City and to other towns.
It was declared – and this is something exceptional, I also invite you to go and visit it, which is the origin of our national emblem – the Texcoco lake was declared a protected natural area, where an airport was planned to be built and an ecological park was created with large educational and sports spaces.
The Mexican government is the majority shareholder of the Altán company, and the Federal Electricity Commission already has 12,600 antennas throughout the country and enough optical fiber to provide Internet services to 120 million inhabitants in 119,259 communities together. During this six-year period, Internet access has grown by 20 percent, from 75.5 percent to 95.6 percent of the population. This coverage includes 99,000 free Internet sites in 2,469 municipalities in the country.
A natural gas liquefaction plant was built in Altamira, Tamaulipas, in partnership with a company, New Fortress, and the Federal Electricity Commission.
The contracts for the construction of gas pipelines that the government had awarded to private companies during the previous six-year term were renegotiated, which resulted in a 27 percent reduction in tariffs and a savings of $4.4 billion for the Federal Electricity Commission.
A photovoltaic power plant was built in Puerto Peñasco, Sonora, which will soon be the largest in America. It is named ‘Rafael Galván’, after a true labor leader.
Ten combined cycle power plants are under construction, two internal combustion power plants, 16 hydroelectric plants are being modernised and 13 plants have been purchased from Iberdrola.
When we arrived, the Federal Electricity Commission was only generating 38 percent of the national consumption. They had planned to finish it off. If the people had not said ‘enough’, the Federal Electricity Commission would already be producing at most 10 percent of the country’s electricity generation. That is no longer the case, the Federal Electricity Commission has already been rescued.
341,822 homes were electrified in marginalized communities, benefiting 1,366,310 inhabitants.
Daylight saving time has been cancelled.
The workers of the Federal Electricity Commission have helped a lot in the rescue of this public company, and there is evidence that when damage is caused by hurricanes and other catastrophes, they restore the electric service in a few days. They are like all the workers in Mexico, the best in the world. And enough of the complexes, ok? Enough of the complexes, because we are not going to have complexes nor are we going to allow them to continue making us feel complexes. Mexico is a cultural power in the world.
Before coming to power, the retirement age of electrical workers was raised; we restored their labor rights.
We have had the support of oil workers to rescue this other company belonging to the people and the nation.
We gave 30,205 Pemex workers permanent positions and granted 90,329 promotions. No one in this six-year term, no Pemex worker was fired.
When we came to power, only 1,642,000 barrels of crude oil were being extracted daily; we quickly stopped this decline, which had been going on for 15 consecutive years; now we are producing 1,795,000 barrels daily.
Oil reserves have not decreased, they are equivalent to 7.5 billion barrels. We have oil for several more decades in our country.
We have reduced production costs and have banished corruption from Pemex. When we came to power, the company’s debt was 105 billion dollars; now it is 99 billion dollars, that is, it has been reduced by six billion dollars.
The six refineries we inherited were in complete disrepair, processing 511 thousand barrels daily; in these six years they have increased their capacity to 1 million 62 thousand barrels, that is, they went from 38 percent to 65 percent of their capacity. To achieve this objective, a constant investment in plant modernization and maintenance of 71 thousand 887 million pesos was made during the six-year term.
The Deer Park refinery in Houston, Texas was purchased, paid for in just eight months, and has so far generated additional profits of $1.12 billion.
The large refinery in Dos Bocas, Paraíso, Tabasco, was completed. It has the capacity to process 340 thousand barrels per day and produce 20 percent of all the gasoline consumed in the country.
The coking plant is under construction, two coking plants, one in Tula, Hidalgo, and another in Salina Cruz, Oaxaca.
With these works, before the end of our government we will stop importing 90 percent of fuels and by the end of this year we will be self-sufficient in gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.
Are you tired yet?
The construction of these works in the oil industry has meant generating more than 100 thousand direct jobs and 150 thousand indirect jobs.
We rescued the fertilizer plants in Pajaritos and Cosoleacaque, in Veracruz; the one in Lázaro Cárdenas, in Michoacán, and the phosphate rock mine in La Paz, Baja California Sur.
In partnership between Pemex and the companies Carso and Mota-Engil, work was restarted on a maritime gas extraction platform.
And the construction of a very large fertilizer plant is about to begin in Escolín, especially because of the site where it is going to be built, which was abandoned during the neoliberal period. This fertilizer plant is going to be built in Poza Rica, Veracruz. It is also a tribute to the former oil workers.
The Gas Bienestar program was created. And I am proud that a 20-kilo cylinder, which is the one consumed most by poor households in our country, does not cost more than 400 pesos.
52 rural roads were paved with a length of 1,656 kilometers.
The Quintín Arauz bridge was completed in Tabasco.
In Nayarit, the El 80 bridge.
In Chiapas, the La Concordia bridge. And in that state, at the end of the year, the Rizo de Oro bridge will be finished, which will connect towns and communities bordering Guatemala to Tuxtla Gutiérrez, saving two hours in time.
We expanded the federal highways from Ozuluama to Tampico, in the states of Veracruz and Tamaulipas; the one from Ciudad Valles to Tamazunchale, in San Luis Potosí; the one from La Pera to Tepoztlán, Cuautla, Morelos; we also delivered the highways from Las Vigas to Cuajinicuilapa, in Guerrero; and the Acayucan-La Ventosa interoceanic axis, in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec; the highway to Oaxaca to Puerto Escondido was completed; and the one from Mitla to Tehuantepec, in Oaxaca, is about to be completed.
I laugh, because look, it’s happiness. I knock on wood, but imagine, imagine if the people of Mexico had not decided for President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo. President!
Let’s take an example that comes to mind now: we built our house with a lot of effort, as many poor families have done, with self-construction, little by little; now they have two rooms, they have a bathroom, they have their plot, they have their land left. And the first child gets married because… We have that good habit, don’t we?, that the children continue to live with us, and hopefully it continues like this, it’s not that they are already teenagers and ‘take off’, no, that doesn’t help. We have an institution, the main institution of social security is the family, which is very supportive and very fraternal.
But we are missing something. We also started to build the annex, the extension of the house for a son who is getting married, a daughter who is getting married, and it is built. Well, it has a room, and the material is already there, especially the one that does not harden, not cement, but there is the block, and there is the rod, but now one has to go or one goes, because that is what the Creator, or science, or nature decided.
But what a joy that the person who will be replacing one is an exceptional woman, who will continue the transformation. That’s why I laugh, because the things that will remain pending, well, I am absolutely sure that they will be completed because of how extraordinary the president-elect of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, is.
Imagine what would have happened. No. Hypocritically, as they are, because that is the doctrine of conservatism, hypocrisy… Can I elaborate a little?
Voices in chorus: Yes!
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador: Well, I now have permission.
Hypocritically, during the campaign, they said that they were not going to remove the welfare programs. Yes, they remember, right? They even signed their names in blood and everything. The election is over and they say that one of the mistakes they made was that from the beginning they did not specify, they did not define that they did not agree with the welfare programs because, according to their philosophy, a collection of sophistry, of lies, it was better to teach people how to fish than to give them fish, they say that later.
So, what was going to happen? Well, they were going to change the welfare programs, they were going to take away the people’s rights to social justice. But the people are a lot of pieces, the people are not stupid. They thought they were going to deceive, that they were going to manipulate, and it was a ‘have them learn’, so they learn to respect the people. If they don’t love the people, they are going to have to learn to respect them at least.
We expanded federal highways in several states of the country. During the six-year term, 58.61 billion pesos were allocated for the maintenance and preservation of toll-free highways.
Three thousand 17 kilometers of beautiful artisanal roads were built by the hands of women and men from the communities and towns of Oaxaca. I also invite you to go and see these roads. This program was extended with very good results to Sonora, Chihuahua, Durango, Nayarit, Hidalgo, Tlaxcala, Puebla, Guerrero and Veracruz.
A highway maintenance agreement that was granted during the previous six-year term to maintain these highways was reviewed. It was over budget, one of those leonine contracts, and they are saving one billion pesos a year. That money is being used entirely for the construction of roads in La Montaña de Guerrero, one of the poorest areas of Mexico.
More than 1,200 infrastructure projects and public spaces have been built in popular and marginalized neighborhoods in 190 municipalities in the country.
