The dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo really disappeared the Ministry of Family, Community, Cooperative and Associative Economy (MEFCCA) and all its projects, which the Sandinista propaganda sold as “flagships” and has lied to its people saying that they merged that institution and its dependencies with the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit (MHCP), as can be seen from the elimination of all budgets for that institution and the reduction of the budget for 2025 of the Treasury.
On September 27, dictator Ortega issued presidential agreement 14-2024, published in the Official Gazette of that date, ordering the administrative merger of the two most important social programs of the MEFCCA: Usura Cero and Adelante and in the same order establishes that said projects would come under the control of the MHCP.
A month before this administrative merger, the regime had already ordered and carried out the dismissal of at least 400 MEFCCA workers, according to information obtained by Confidencial, in the midst of a “reorganization in public institutions” that became necessary after evaluations. to the performance of some state agencies, where, according to the vice dictator, Rosario Murillo, they detected “both successes and challenges.”
Propaganda at the service of the dictatorship sold the Usura Cero and Adelante programs as the spearhead of the regime in its plan to fight poverty and the supposed generation of family businesses.
Budget for the MEFCCA disappeared
This Tuesday, October 29, Ortega sent the Draft General Budget of the Republic (PGR) for 2025 to his deputies in the National Assembly, and in said proposal there is no longer an amount allocated for the MEFCCA.
For 2024, that institution received a budget allocation of 696 million 512 thousand 600 córdobas, of which 20% were consumed by the ministerial bureaucracy in Managua.
The economist and opposition leader Juan Sebastián Chamorro, in an interview on the program In Contactof Article 66, He pointed out that, most likely, the dictatorship actually completely disappeared the MEFCCA as an institution and the programs it served “were blown up.”
Related news: Ortega removes the Usura Cero and Adelante programs from MEFCCA and transfers them to the Ministry of Finance
That is to say, according to Chamorro’s analysis, it is not true that there was such a fusion of programs and the transfer of functions from the MFCCA to the Ministry of Finance, but rather that the regime actually disappeared that institution and its dependencies.
During the interview, the host of the program, journalist Álvaro Navarro, asked Chamorro if logically, by transferring the MEFCCA programs to the Treasury, the annual budget for the institution he takes over should increase.
The economist maintains that indeed, yes, it should have increased, however, the Treasury will receive less budget in 2025 compared to the current year, which indicates that the dictatorship is lying.
The Ministry of Finance received a budget allocation for 2024 of C$5,119 million, however for 2025 it will receive C$4,800 million, which represents a decrease of more than 300 million. “They simply ‘blew up’ the MEFCCA, they canceled the projects,” says the economist.
Chamorro, who has a doctorate in economics and a master’s degree in economics with a mention in Social Policies, from Georgetown University, USA and was vice minister of Finance and Public Credit of Nicaragua in the presidential term of Engineer Enrique Bolaños, (RIP ), recalled that for reasons of “public law”, when an institution is dissolved, it must designate a successor to whom to transfer the assets and that is what happened with the MEFCCA, when it was disappeared by the regime and its assets were transferred to the Treasury.
«If a public entity disappears, this is common in Public Law, you have to name a successor, for continuity, say the lawyers, but that does not mean that they will pass money or projects to it, probably what they transferred to it was the mamotreto ( building), the furniture and some trucks, but the projects were surely blown up (eliminated),” says the expert.
According to Chamorro, this explains the absence of the MEFCCA in the draft budget for 2025.
MEFCCA was a scam
In the detail of the MEFCCA 2024 budget, it is broken down that, of the 695.6 million córdobas it received, C$142 million (20%) remained in expenses of the headquarters in Managua, and of that amount, the senior management of the ministry more than C$41 million was consumed.
For “care services to central delegations (departments)”, in 2024 they allocated an amount of C$261 million, but for the programs: Promotion of Agriculture they allocated C$91.3 million; Adoption of techniques and agroindustrial C$8.2 million; Small businesses and SMEs, C$17.6 million.
For the productive-food program only C$1.4 million; for the Caribbean Coast development program, C$2.4 million; and for a section they call “Not assignable to programs” that does not specify what it is about, the MEFCCA allocated a total of C$69 million in 2024.
Of the total budget of that ministry, created by the dictatorship, supposedly to promote and boost the productive capacity of families and food security programs, it only allocates a total of 38.7 million córdobas to its projects, that is, barely 5.5%. .
