He June 2nd At stake is whether voters are willing to be stripped of his condition citizens, either if they give continuity to governments that reduce them to the condition of mere electoral clientelestated Jesús Ortega Martínez, former president national of PRD.
At the presentation of his book 2004: Suffrage under attack: Manual against electoral clientelismco-authored with Rafael Hernández Estrada, which was carried out in a bookstore in Polanco, in Mexico City, Ortega Martínez stated that the current presidential system “ha allocated a lot of money to raise a network of government agents called ““Servants of the Nation”.
The PRD member mentioned that with this scheme that Andrés Manuel López Obrador implemented before protesting before the Congress of the Union as constitutional president, on December 1, 2018, “it has been about reverse the process of citizenship that Mexico experienced go back to the ancient method of clientelism electoral”.
In the words of the former president of the PRD, “the mechanism where the president gives money from the treasury in exchange for the votethe same thing that happened in the six-year term of Carlos Salinas de Gortari with the National Solidarity Program (Pronasol), a character that López Obrador has criticized so much, but who deep down are very similar.”
“If we manage to prevent the existence of the Nation’s Servants or, where appropriate, we apply the antidote to frustrate their purposes, then we could recover, largely, the right to vote freely and guide Mexico on the path of a democratic nation,” he said.
Ortega Martínez explained that in the last month it has been seen that the substance of the electoral campaign of the presidential candidate of the Let’s Keep Making History coalition, Claudia Sheinbaumconsists of a simple “market operation”, where “the candidate offers to deliver government subsidies for those citizens who live in conditions of povertyit in exchange for your vote, of their right to decide and their freedom.”
Carlos Salinas de Gortari is a character that López Obrador has criticized so much, but deep down they are very similarJesús Ortega, former president of the PRD
Rafael Estrada explained that the Mexican government has a “patron, clientele and intermediaries” scheme, where “Lopez Obrador and his group in power is the patternwhich at the same time has a structure of intermediariesthat with the calls Servants of the Nationwith their respective bosses appointed directly by the president, who have a purely electoral purpose.”
“They are an army of 20,000 workers, who obviously earn from the federal payroll, but who are commanded by 32 delegates in the federal entities and by 266 regional coordinators. This entire structure is territorialized according to the federal electoral districts and the large cities of the country,” he noted.
The parliamentary advisor also stressed that these Public servants are responsible for integrating the beneficiaries of the social programs What are they opaque, arbitraryand where, even, “according to data from the National Institute of Geography and Statistics (Inegi), there are approximately 600,000 more people in the support register for older adults than the total population of older adults in the country.”
Jesús Ortega pointed out that the total budget that has been allocated to this “client structure, under the guise of social programs,” is 2.5 billion pesos in the last five years.
“The most dangerous thing is that instead of citizenizing, as it should be in the democratic development of Mexico, we return to the times of electoral clientele,” said the person who was López Obrador’s general campaign coordinator in the 2006 presidential elections.