Deputies

Mexico City. The Chamber of Deputies approved today in particular the reform through which seven autonomous organizations will disappear (INAI, IFT, Cofece, CRE, CNH, Mejoredu and Coneval), which had already been approved yesterday in general, and in which it was added a reserve to create an antitrust agency, attached to the Ministry of Infrastructure, Communications and Transportation (SICT).

Likewise, a reservation presented by the PT was accepted, which specified that there would be no concessions regarding lithium, an issue that was part of the reform approved on October 29, which returned to Pemex and the Commission Federal Electricity (CFE) the character of “public companies of the State”.

After the session that began on Wednesday resumed, the debate lasted six hours and the “administrative simplification” amendment was endorsed by 332 votes in favor and 119 against, so it was sent to the Senate for ratification.

Once nearly 300 reservations to the ruling had been expressed, in the voice of more than 80 speakers, the vice coordinator of the Morena parliamentary group, Alfonso Ramírez Cuéllar, took the stand to present the details of the creation of the agency that would assume the tasks entrusted to the Federal Telecommunications Institute and the Federal Economic Competition Commission.

In the text of the aforementioned reservation, it was defined that the Federal Executive, “through the authority on free competition and competition, will exclusively exercise the powers of economic competition to regulate in an asymmetric manner the participants in the markets of telecommunications and broadcasting, with the aim of effectively eliminating competition and free competition.”

Likewise, it establishes that the aforementioned authority “will impose limits on the national and regional concentration of frequencies, concessioning (sic) and cross ownership that controls several media concessionaires of radio broadcasting and telecommunications that serve the same market or area of geographic coverage”.

In addition, “it will order the disincorporation of assets, rights or parts necessary to ensure compliance with these limits, guaranteeing the provisions of articles 6 and 7” of the Constitution.

To carry out this work, the reservation of the guinda party specified, the “parastatal entity called the Telecommunications Investment Promotion Agency” will be created, which “will be sectored to the SICT.”

Said authority “will have legal personality and its own assets, will be endowed with technical and operational independence in its decisions, organization and operation, and the separation between the authority that investigates and the one that resolves the procedures will be guaranteed.”

When consulted by the media, almost at the end of the vote on this issue, Ramírez Cuéllar assured that the creation of the aforementioned organization will help to “bring to heel” the companies that engage in monopolistic practices, and does not mean a reduction in the functions that carried out by Cofece and the IFT.

“¡Lárgate you!”

During today’s discussion, both the majority and opposition parties reiterated the arguments they had already made in the session that began yesterday. While the former emphasized the savings that will be obtained from the extinction of organizations that “did not give results,” the latter stressed that their loss is a risk for democracy and the systems of checks and balances in Mexico.

The PAN member Héctor Saúl Téllez reproached the Morena deputies and their allies for “having applied political cannibalism among themselves,” since the organizations they created or endorsed at the time, such as the Health Institute for Well-being and the National Commission for the Continuous Improvement of Education, they destroyed them.

On one side of the tribune, a blanket was placed with the phrase “Morena Dictatorship, 99 percent,” and the figure of a type of cell phone battery about to reach 100 percent charge.

The government of former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador “began destroying Seguro Popular, regardless of whether they left 50 million people without access to health services; They created Insabi and also led it to destruction, disappearing 400 billion pesos, of which they were not held accountable, and today they also want to destroy an institution that you have created yourselves, like Mejoredu,” Téllez lamented.

The constitutional changes, he insisted, “are not about austerity or simplification, they are about co-optation, removing limits from the government and removing the healthy counterweights that any government should have.”

He highlighted that the seven autonomous organizations that are going to disappear “during 10 years they consumed just one billion pesos. These organizations could survive for 230 years with the surcharges of the 300 mega-projects carried out by President López Obrador. “Morena’s corruption costs more than the operation of these seven necessary organizations.”

The speech permeated the ranks of Morena. From their seat, deputies Zenyazen Escobar – close to the Veracruz governor, Cuitláhuac García – and Roberto Ramos – shouted “get down!”, “get out!” The PAN member responded: “You get out!”

Other opposition deputies emphasized that the 4T governments were especially harsh with the INAI, because thanks to this body, alleged cases of corruption were made known that would involve officials from the previous six-year term or their relatives.

For their part, the legislators of Morena, PT and PVEM reiterated that the defunct organizations “were autonomous from the people of Mexico,” but supposedly close to economic interest groups that, they accused, benefited from their actions to obtain greater benefits.

“What we are putting an end to is the privilege and waste of resources in supposedly decentralized bodies that only benefited the political and economic power elite,” said Morenoist Julieta Vences Valencia.

As has happened in the discussion of other opinions, the majority deputies registered reservations only to repeat the arguments that they had already presented on various occasions, and later withdraw the observations they would make, which prolonged the debate for several hours.

Reserve “on the knees”: PAN

When it seemed that the debate would end without any major surprises, PT member Maribel Martínez took the stand to propose a reservation through which article 28 of the Constitution is reformed, to specify that “in the case of radioactive minerals and lithium, no concessions will be granted,” and that Individuals, in matters of electricity generation, “in no case will have precedence over the public industry of the State”, which is the CFE.

The above gave rise to the opposition to complain to the majority parties that they were trying to amend a legislative failure, because although the reform of last October 29 related to “state public companies” specified that in matters of lithium there would be no concessions, that point was not included in the opinion voted yesterday.

The PAN recalled the phrase of the late deputy Porfirio Muñoz Ledo of “fuck your mother! What a way to legislate!” and reproached that Morena “does everything on their knees, because they forgot that in the reform of October 29, when we discussed the opinion of the state’s public companies, they left out lithium, and now under the pretext of the IFT, they want to return to right the wrong of what they did wrong.”

If the aforementioned correction had not been made, an antinomy would have taken place, since the reforms of October 29 and the one voted on this Thursday would have conflicting provisions.