Congress finalizes the controversial extinction of aid funds for science, cinema and sports

Andrés Manuel López Obrador during his morning press conference Presidency of Mexico / EFE

Andrés Manuel López Obrador's wave of austerity met a wall in spring.

The announcement in April of the imminent extinction of more than 40 trusts and funds, financing instruments for public organizations with a long tradition in Mexico, aroused a strong campaign of criticism from the scientific, university, cultural and sports community.

The official response was to freeze the initiative and open an open parliament process, a few days of dialogue between the deputies and the affected communities.

After the summer, with the economic prospects of the country even more gray due to the impact of a pandemic that barely gives a break, the adjustment plan has been launched again without granting practically any of the demands expressed by those affected.

Between the discomfort and the concern, they warn that the 50,000 million pesos that the Government hopes to save threaten the viability of important centers of studies, scholarships and support throughout the country.

The dialogue started in June opened a thread of hope among the affected groups, as they found a receptive attitude on the part of the deputies.

But sources present in the negotiation point to a hardening during the summer, guidelines that would come directly from López Obrador's office.

In fact, throughout the 86 pages of the opinion that will be debated this Tuesday in a congressional commission, the demands and arguments presented in the days of open parliament appear in the preamble, but in the conclusions there are no concessions: the trusts of the original plan.

With the majority of Morena in the Chamber, the forecasts are that before the end of the year the cut will be definitively approved by the full Congress.

The president defended the initiative on Monday.

"The Treasury is going to collect, we calculate, that as 50,000 million pesos that were handled without control, at the margin," said the president while listing some goals achieved by his government.

It is not clear how López Obrador arrived at this figure.

The Center for Studies of Public Finance (CEFP) estimates that the approval of the initiative will make it possible for the Administration to reallocate 36,058 million pesos (1,600 million dollars).

The figure is made up of the amounts reported by public offices up to March 31, 2020. Deputy Mario Delgado, who aspires to become the national leader of Morena in October, calculates that the amount that the Government will be able to use after the approval reaches 150,000 million pesos (6,700 million dollars).

In addition to the need for savings, which is increasingly pressing given the government's immobility in the face of the pandemic hit, the disappearance of funds and trusts is inserted in the narrative of austerity and the fight against corruption of the Morena Administration.

"This did not please the organic or pseudo-scientific intellectuals who were charging everywhere," said López Obrador in his morning conference on Monday, once again charging against his critics in his polarization strategy.

The Morena Executive's approach, however, has caused great confusion and discomfort among sectors that, moreover, are not part of the traditional fishing ground of opponents of López Obrador.

The motivation for the adjustment, according to the opinion, is to cancel the mechanisms that lived in opacity and avoided being accountable for the use of public money.

But the proposal makes a unique suit with the rule that modifies 14 laws and repeals one.

In total, within the 44 trusts condemned to disappear are represented sectors as diverse as threatened journalists, excellent scientists and researchers, high-performance athletes, migrant workers and filmmakers.

The widespread accusations of corruption have had concrete responses from, for example, the research centers of the National Council of Science and Technology (Conacyt), which are audited up to twice a year, both by the Ministry of Public Function and by the Superior Audit of the Federation.

The Center for Public Finance estimates that the initiative does not generate any impact on the budget for 2021, an electoral year, which is being negotiated.

"It is only a matter of reallocating resources that already exist in the expenditure budget," indicates the initiative.

The text is even more specific, stating that the resources will be reallocated "to actions to address the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on health and economic issues" and in the "continuity" of social programs.

Lawsuits

This "resignation of resources", as the opinion euphemistically points out, can also become a source of judicial conflicts.

“Trusts are not fed by federal money, but by resource benefits or private financing from third parties.

When this money is diverted to the federal budget, the companies that contributed those resources to finance, for example, research projects will begin to file lawsuits, "says David Romero, researcher at the UNAM Center for Genomic Sciences and spokesperson for the Network. ProCiency.

The scientific sector especially denounces the inefficiency of a measure that will destroy one of the sectors with the highest added value in the country in exchange for raising a very low amount of money in relative terms.

According to their calculations, of the money bag that the trusts contain, only 2.8% corresponds to science and technology.

Just 2,000 million pesos out of a total of 78,000.

Continuing with his calculations, three trusts accumulate 96% of the funds.

They are the Natural Disaster Fund, the Trust relating to the Customs Law and another to promote the energy industry.

"There is a lot of uncertainty," says producer Mónica Lozano, president of the Mexican Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The filmmaker, who has among her productions multi-award-winning films such as

and

, launched a warning on Sunday at the Ariel gala, the awards of Mexican cinema.

"Let's not allow a setback," said the president of the Academy, who has been negotiating since April with the Secretary of Culture, Alejandra Frausto, and the Chamber of Deputies for the survival of the model that has supported more than 400 feature films between 1999 and 2019.

Lozano considers that there is a danger of an impact on the budget that allows the creation of dozens of films.

Negotiations between the parties have lasted for more than four months, where the filmmakers have asked to replace the fund that will disappear with a scheme that allows the national filmography to maintain good health.

But there are no guarantees that this will happen when legislators sit down to discuss the text that will later be submitted to the plenary vote.