The mess about the fate of the presidential plane, in which the Mexican government has been engaged for almost a month, is increasingly like a scene of the Marx brothers. First, the ship was tried to sell. In the absence of buyers, a raffle was announced to circumvent it. Then it was added that it would be about a symbolic lottery, and that prizes would be given to the winners. Now, it seems that it will be the businessmen who are actually going to pay the lottery by buying most of the tickets. That is, something similar to what Groucho said: “Why don’t we make the first part of the second contracting part the second part of the first contracting part?”
Mexico has been attending between hilarity and the open criticism of this kind of soap opera by chapters while the problems continue to multiply in the country. The violence does not stop and the economy closed last year in negative for the first time in a decade. Many wonder what the reason is, why so much priority for what was another symbolic gesture of Andrés Manuel López Obrador – the plane was bought by former president Felipe Calderón for 218 million dollars – and has ended up becoming a puddle that increasingly splashes more inconsistencies and contradictions.
The last episode was the glove launched to the businessmen to finance the president’s project. Almost a hundred of the most powerful businessmen in the country –Carlos Slim, Emilio Azcárraga, OIegario Vázquez, among others- were invited on Wednesday to a dinner at the National Palace from which they left committed to put 1,500 million pesos (80 million dollars) in their raffle tickets. Upon leaving the meeting, everyone showed their availability for what they defined as “a good cause”, in addition to stressing that the collaboration will be completely voluntary.
The idea of López Obrador, repeated in many of his morning conferences, is to dedicate the money obtained from the raffle not only to defray the expenses of maintaining the plane until its sale is possible, but also to finance social causes. The Mexican president spoke in principle of medical equipment for hospitals, but this Thursday he announced during his daily press conference that there will be money for the indigenous communities: “to be delivered to the poorest.”
One of the great unknowns of the participation of businessmen in this adventure – discarded from tax relief – is what the government’s counterpart will be. In exchange for what have the great fortunes of Mexico agreed to collaborate in this supposed altruism? López Obrador’s relationship with the economic elite has not been precisely peaceful during his political career. Some frictions that, however, have been tempered by the approaches promoted by Alfonso Romo, head of the Presidency office, and a certain neutrality on the part of the businessmen during the long year of the legislature of the party in power, Morena.
In fact, relations with the employers are going through a hot moment after the announcement in November of an infrastructure plan of 42,000 million dollars for the next five years, which aims to be the lever to relaunch the economy, along with the agenda to accelerate the Foreign investment in the country.
Another of the swampy land that the presidential plane plan has entered has to do with the attorney general. Present at Monday’s conference, Alejandro Gertz Manero staged before the press the delivery to López Obrador of a check for 2,000 million pesos (107.5 million dollars) for the so-called Institute to Return the Stolen to the People, an instance renamed by this Government that is responsible for auctioning the confiscated assets to criminals for social policies.
“This money not only comes from common crime, it also comes from white collar crime, and it is a legal procedure. It already serves us, if it is 2,000 million pesos to pay for the presidential plane’s prizes ”. This was the president’s only explanation about the delivery of money, a practice that is less unusual and of which more details are unknown. Is it a confiscation? An embargo? Is there a firm sentence in between?
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