López Obrador made very bad decisions during his government that will mortgage the country for many decades. The worst are those assumed by authoritarian whim or to benefit those closest to them.
This week thousands of Mexicans faced the consequences of López Obrador’s bad decisions in the agricultural sector on the roads.
The intention to generate political clienteles dependent on government handouts caused this regime to cancel many productive programs in the countryside, such as the objective income that was granted through contract farming, to make way for welfare support that failed.
Pemex survives thanks to government bailouts, and with great losses, because López Obrador abandoned profitability goals to give way to his idea of nationalized self-sufficiency.
Despite the efforts of morning sanctification, history has already begun to judge former President López Obrador and it is the enormous costs to pay that reveal the failure of the self-called Fourth Transformation.
But among all the López Obrador blunders, the worst are those that have to do with his incomprehensible whims, among them, The Mayan Train, the Megapharmacy, the raffle for the presidential plane and the one with which he made his debut in the government: the cancellation of the Texcoco International Airport.
With complete success, it was designated as the “mistake of October (2018)”, the cancellation of the most important airport project in Latin America to provide Mexico with an international hub.
The reason for the whim became known very quickly when López Obrador showed the sketches for his airport by his favorite builder, José María Riobóo, marginalized from the Texcoco project.
Building a regional airport, instead of a global hub, building it very far from the location of its clients, not developing the terrestrial communication infrastructure, canceling a project that was already 40% advanced, all of this was an authoritarian whim of a man hidden behind his political charisma.
The result was evidently a failure that cost, according to López Obrador’s own first Secretary of the Treasury, 460,000 million pesos.
It forced airlines to move operations to what it called Felipe Ángeles International Airport (AIFA) and it was a costly failure, so it forced cargo companies to move there.
Today Mexico continues to accumulate negative consequences of those mistakes. The recent cancellation of Mexican airline routes to the United States, by the Department of Transportation, is a direct bill related to the air safety crisis and the disorder generated by measures, such as the capricious decree that forced cargo companies to move to AIFA.
And the list does not end there: the strategy of hugs not bullets, the elimination of science and technology trusts, the disappearance of powers and autonomy, Mexicans without Popular Insurance. In short, the crisis is structural.
The Fourth Transformation sold the illusion that the political will of a single man would solve national problems. Today the narrative collides with the reality of a Mexico that is far from a positive transformation and that, on the contrary, is saddled with a mortgage of financial and structural problems that will transcend several six-year terms.
