Politics: Legislative tide, failed security policy
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has achieved a great deal in Congress in the past few months and weeks to advance the cause of his broader political project. This week we look at a dozen of his most important legislative accomplishments to date as well as a number of lesser bills. While many of these are promoted on the basis of entirely justifiable reasons, many have implications that can be damaging to democracy and the proper functioning of government.
One of the more controversial of these was a proposal to crack down on the widespread use of fake tax receipts to deduct against an individual or entity’s tax bill by treating this practice as a form of organized crime and a threat to national security. Despite strong pushback from the business sector, as well as official promises that lawmakers would water down the provisions allowing anyone to be held without bail pending trial, the bill passed in its original version. A new Asset Forfeiture Law was also passed, empowering public prosecutors to conduct a preventative seizure of the assets of any person about whom they have a solid and reasonable belief that the funds or goods in question were the product of criminal activity. Another measure that passed was a constitutional amendment to prohibit discretionary decisions to waive tax bills, a longstanding practice that corporations and wealthy individuals have long benefited from.
Other measures include an austerity law for lowering the salaries of public officials and requiring that they abstain for an entire decade from assuming any private sector jobs in businesses related to the work they conducted while in office. This could obviously have dire consequences on the quality of top officials and the motives driving their interest in public service. In short, López Obrador is effectively using his congressional majority to promote his political project while accumulating further means he can employ to intimidate his adversaries, as well as governmental operating rules that can be used for questions of political control.
This week we also take a look at the international scandal surrounding a major public security debacle that has left the people of Culiacan, Sinaloa, terrified, federal troops humiliated, and the government’s pretense of a security strategy in shambles.
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