Politics: Budget Bodes Ill for Public Security

MEXICO - Report 22 Sep 2016 by Guillermo Valdes and Esteban Manteca

A good way to determine a government’s priorities is to see how it spends public resources; judging by the budgets and spending of the current administration public security does not appear to be one. The current presidential administration has from day one lacked a clear policy on security questions and failed to adopt well-defined goals, but during its first two years it provided continuous funding to the institutions responsible for public security. Since 2015, this has ceased to be the case even as crime rates have been trending higher for some time.

In the proposed expenditure budget for next year, all executive branch institutions responsible for public security are slated for major cutbacks. The budget for the federal police will be slashed by a real 10%, the country’s main security agency (Cisen) will see its funding cut by 16% in real terms, and the budget of the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System will be reduced by 17%. Nor did the programs that the administration tried to innovate in the field of public security escape the proverbial axe. The National Crime Prevention Program (Pronapred), which had a budget of 2.50 billion pesos at the start of the current administration, will not have a single peso to spend during 2017.

Obviously, the problem with the public security budget cannot only be reduced to the amount of resources available, but also to how much of the allocated funds are actually spent. According to information from the administration’s fourth State of the Nation Report, presented by President Peña Nieto on September 1, government programs aimed at preventing violence did not use all the funds allocated in their respective budgets. In 2014, 1.50 billion pesos available for preventing violence remained unused.
Along with the economy, security is one of the population’s major concerns. It is also the main obligation of the Mexican State. It is necessary to strengthen various aspects of public policy in this area, in order to reverse the growing trends that have occurred in the past few years. It is a wrong approach to begin by slashing the budgets and expenditures of the institutions responsible for public security.

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