On October 1, the Official Gazette of the Chamber of Deputies of Mexico published a decree of an initiative promoted by President López Obrador that seeks to modify three articles of the Constitution related to the management of the electricity sector. For some time now, the government had announced its intention to carry out a constitutional counter-reform in response to the reform approved in 2013 by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), under the government of Enrique Peña Nieto, which led to the privatization of the sector. The initiative presented to the Chamber of Deputies is bold, aggressive and controversial, and the debate has exploded in the media and social networks.
The Executive Branch declared that the reform is necessary for reasons of “national security” and considers that the 2013 reform affects national interests and only benefited the interests of private companies, especially foreign ones, at the expense of the people and their interests. Thus, the government asks that the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) return to being a state agency and to be the most relevant actor in the production and management of this sector in the country.
The business sector and the political opposition believe that the reform is a total expropriation, that Mexico’s credibility and reliability abroad are at risk, and that the cancellation of existing contracts would jeopardize several international treaties, which would lead affected companies to resort to international courts.
The opposition also considers that CFE is unable to provide the service to the country, considering that the reform proposal says it must provide “at least” 54% of the country’s electricity. Furthermore, if approved, the reform would not allow Mexico to fulfill its commitments to the sustainability of the planet by favoring energy production in polluting power plants.
Energy secretary Rocío Nahle said in an interview with the newspaper El País: “no one from the outside will come to us and tell us whether the energy reform is right or wrong.” The official, who considers herself a nationalist and says that before thinking of an ideology, she thinks of her country, said: “Energy security is linked to national security, we are the government and the government is there to meet basic needs supply of all Mexicans”.
On the other hand, Manuel Barlett, the current director general of the CFE, who was secretary of the interior under Miguel de la Madrid (1982-1988) and secretary of education under Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1992), repeated this on several occasions , in a debate on Channel 14, that the reform being promoted to end neoliberalism was a matter of “national security”.
Will they be able to pass the reforms?
The difficulty that the Mexican administration faces in approving this and the other two constitutional reforms it intends to carry out -one on electoral issues and the other related to the integration of the National Guard into the Secretariat of National Defense- is that even with its allies it does not have enough votes in the legislature to approve them (another 57 deputies and 10 senators are missing).
The opportunity for the ruling Morena party is that it faces a divided PRI that needs to catch its breath to halt its electoral decline and return to the center of the political debate. The main opposition party has 71 deputies and 13 senators in its parliamentary groups, among which the ruling party could find the support that would allow it to achieve the necessary majority.
Another challenge that the ruling party will have to overcome is that one of its partners, the Green Ecological Party, which has 43 deputies and six senators, cannot afford to pass a reform that could be considered contrary to clean energy and the environment. environment.
For this reason, the leader of the government’s bench in the Chamber of Deputies, Ignacio Mier, indicated that his group is open to negotiations that do not affect the spirit of the reform. In the same vein, the leader of the Senate government, Ricardo Monreal, took on the challenge of negotiating with both his allies and members of the opposition.
AMLO turns to the Armed Forces again
In addition to the fact that the government is successful or not in this initiative, the serious thing is that the administration of President López Obrador is once again appealing – this time with the excuse of efficiency and national security – to the Armed Forces to face the problems of governance.
National security is related to the exceptional and public policy to the everyday. The governability of a nation cannot be permanently in the exceptional. “Nationalism” is a way of looking at the world, even if the Secretary of Energy wants to dissociate it from an ideology; and in this context, “national security” is a constant justification.
Governing a country by resorting to national security at all times weakens public administration and distracts the government from going about its daily activities as usual. The concept of “national security” is useful for many politicians to avoid their responsibilities, while for those with an authoritarian political culture, “militarization” is considered reasonable.
If Mexico’s energy sector reform is finally passed under the guise of being a national security issue, will we also see the military building power plants and distributing energy?
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