The “exaggerated” cost of prisons points to the governments of Peña Nieto and Calderón

The administration contracts of eight public-private prisons have burst into the scene of corruption that fuels the current government in Mexico.

While the Attorney General's Office (FGR) unravels the ball of the

Odebrecht case

, the corruption in Pemex or the massive diversion of resources through government

ministries

during the years of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), a new issue looms behind the scenes, this time with the prison system in the background.

There are billions of dollars in public spending, which experts consulted by EL PAÍS call, at best, "exaggerated" and at worst, "a robbery."

This week, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has denounced that the cost of managing these eight prisons during the last nine years - the entire six-year term of Peña Nieto, plus two years of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) - exceeded 75,000 million pesos , at a rate of 3,819 pesos per inmate per day, about $ 200.

"Obviously here there were abuses of all kinds," said the president this Wednesday at a press conference.

By way of comparison, the Executive reported that in Mexico City prisons, the daily cost per inmate is 500 pesos.

These are public-private prisons, built by companies that later obtained contracts for their administration.

"The beneficiaries of these contracts were closely linked to power," said López Obrador.

The prisons were built during the Felipe Calderón years and management contracts were signed at the end of his term, seven in December 2010 and one in March 2011. Dr. Elena Azaola, who has investigated Mexican prisons for the past 40 years, he explains that the origin of this model “is the existence of large companies with a great capacity for lobbying and corruption of officials.

In the heat of the war on drugs [at the beginning of the Calderón years] it was anticipated that the prison population would grow and that is why these centers were built, ”he explains.

In the Calderón years, Azaola was part of the citizen council of the federal Ministry of Public Security, then headed by Genaro García Luna, today a prisoner in the United States for drug trafficking.

"On the subject of prisons, I told him that it was not clear that the public-private model was adequate and that the cost-benefit ratio was not the best," he says.

Asked about the allegations of abuse by López Obrador, Azaola remembers what she thought then.

“And the robbery… I always insisted that they review the contracts.

You feel it when you see all that excess of kilometers of concrete: They have to travel it in golf carts! ”.

During Peña Nieto's six-year term, Eduardo Guerrero headed the Decentralized Administrative Body for Prevention and Social Readaptation for a year, an agency that manages federal prisons.

“When I was there, 70% of the budget went to the payment of these contracts.

It's exaggerated, ”he says.

"An agreement must be reached with the suppliers."

Guerrero takes up one of the points that López Obrador touched on Wednesday: the future.

The 75,000 million pesos paid to suppliers are barely a third of the amount committed until the end of the contracts, which expire in 2032. The total amounts to 266,000 million pesos, 14,000 million dollars at the current exchange rate.

“The costs are excessive, because there is an oversize of what the center should be.

For example, the female prison in Morelos was made on 105 hectares.

You don't need so much space, because you also make it inoperative ”.

Asked if he was suspicious about the amount of the contracts he inherited, he replies: “We never had access to costs or financial runs.

We did not have access to that type of information.

I can't tell you if I was suspicious or not.

What I do tell you is that it was exaggerated ”.

For Saskia Niño de Rivera, director of the organization Reinserta, dedicated to supervising prisons, the underlying theme is "the forgetting of the penitentiary system."

Niño de Rivera maintains that “there are many six-year terms in which they have used the penitentiary system to enrich themselves, give contracts, and so on.

Many of the last six-year contracts had to do with electoral campaigns.

There are bites on all sides and agreements on all sides of how they are going to inflate prices ”.

In the background, García Luna

In their complaint on Wednesday, López Obrador and his team pointed to the prison management contracts, but said nothing about the agreements for their construction or the money that was spent on them.

The Government has not reported whether there is documentation in this regard or whether there are open investigations.

In any case, the name of García Luna appears in the background.

In October of last year, López Obrador denounced in a press conference a contract signed during the Calderón years with a company, Nunvav, for a service in a prison in Guanajuato.

He later detailed that the contract, signed to acquire a surveillance equipment, amounted to 19 million dollars, of which 14 had already been disbursed. The agency explained that it did not pay the rest because it found no evidence of the start-up of the system.

In her book

Los Millonarios de la Guerra

, journalist Peniley Ramírez narrates how a family of García Luna's friends, the Weinbergs, intermediaries for Israeli security companies, obtained contracts from the federal government during the Calderón and Peña Nieto years.

The Weinbergs used a network of companies to secure the contracts, including Nunvav.

The complaint that the Financial Intelligence Unit of the Ministry of Finance filed a few months ago with the FGR against García Luna has to do with Nunvav's contracts.

It is not too clear what other contracts were then signed between the Ministry of Public Security and the Weinbergs' network.

In his book, Ramírez narrates an episode that, he says, he contrasted with up to four sources.

In April 2012, a few months after the end of the Calderón government, officials from the Ministry of Public Security destroyed documents in the office of Vanesa Pedraza, an official of García Luna's advisers coordination.

“They were records of contests, hiring and contract supervision that the Weinbergs had obtained with Public Security.

The files included the negotiation of equipment with security technology for the new federal prison system, ”says the reporter.