Mexico’s president is in a rush to finish the big legislative and building projects he promised before his term ends in September, and experts say officials are getting a bit sloppy amid all the haste.
This week, legislators from the governing Morena party mistakenly submitted the wrong bill on pension reform for a vote in Congress, before sheepishly admitting the error and rescheduling the vote. They claimed Thursday that aides had mistaken one set of papers for another, but the bill almost got approved before the opposition noticed the error.
“In the legislative process, as in life and all activities, human mistakes are made that aren’t premeditated, that aren’t ill-intentioned,” said Sen. Ignacio Mier, the point man for President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s party in the Senate.
The rushed atmosphere extends to infrastructure, with the president’s beloved train projects suffering glaring construction errors in recent months. Cranes have crashed off bridges and pilings have been sunk into supposedly protected cave systems. With the June 2 presidential election approaching, the president wants to finish his administration’s projects, fast.
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“There is this rush, because López Obrador wants to put as much in place as possible to assure his own policies, so that … whoever wins (the election), they won’t be able to backtrack on it, at least not easily,” political analyst José Antonio Crespo said.
“Taking these individual, unclaimed accounts … could affect the rights of workers and their beneficiaries, if they don’t move to make a claim,” said Orlando Corona, the social security specialist for the Mexican Institute of Financial Executives.
López Obrador has a history of rushing laws through congress without much time for legislators to actually read the bills, just as he has sought to ram through his infrastructure building projects by exempting them from normal permitting and environmental review processes.
On Tuesday, an 800-ton gantry crane — a huge piece of machinery used to position pre-fabricated concrete bridge spans — came crashing to the ground at an elevated commuter rail line meant to link Mexico City with neighboring Toluca.
On the same project, the government has acknowledged that steel and cement pilings meant to support an elevated section of the tracks were driven directly through the roofs of sensitive limestone caves.
The network of caves, sinkhole lakes and underground rivers along Mexico’s Caribbean coast are both environmentally sensitive and have been found to hold some of the oldest human remains in North America.
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