Mexico’s president is ge ing a li le sloppy in the rush to nish projects before his term ends

BY MARK STEVENSON - MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s president is in a rush to nish the big legislative and building projects he promised before his term ends in September, and experts say o cials are getting a bit sloppy amid all the haste.

This week, legislators from the governing Morena party mistakenly submitted the wrong bill on pension reform for a vote in Congress, before sheepishly admitting the error and rescheduling the vote. They claimed Thursday that aides had mistaken one set of papers for another, but the bill almost got approved before the opposition noticed the error.

“In the legislative process, as in life and all activities, human mistakes are made that aren’t premeditated, that aren’t ill-intentioned,” said Sen. Ignacio Mier, the point man for President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s party in the Senate.

The rushed atmosphere extends to infrastructure, with the president’s beloved train projects suffering glaring construction errors in recent months. Cranes have crashed off bridges and pilings have been sunk into supposedly protected cave systems. With the June 2 presidential election approaching, the president wants to @nish his administration’s projects, fast.

“There is this rush, because López Obrador wants to put as much in place as possible to assure his own policies, so that ... whoever wins (the election), they won’t be able to backtrack on it, at least not easily,” political analyst José Antonio Crespo said.

But the pension reform especially has become a lightning rod for criticism, because it would essentially seize unclaimed pension funds if a worker doesn’t start drawing them by age 70.

López Obrador says the seized funds — which he wants to put into a pot for employees whose pensions are too small — would always be available for return if a worker or his dependents show up later to claim them.

“Even if time has passed, they can @le a request for the funds to be returned to them,” López Obrador said Thursday.

But the bill mistakenly submitted for a vote late Wednesday actually would have removed some of those protections. For example, employees who didn’t draw their pensions by age 70 or 75 because they were still working could still have had their pensions seized.

And because pension withdrawals are already so bureaucratic and restrictive — dependents in Mexico often have to go to court to access a deceased worker’s pension fund — the idea that a simple request will get the money returned has been met with derision.

“We are against this, because they are going to loot everybody’s account,” said opposition Sen. Rubén Moreira, a member of the old ruling PRI party. “First, because the money in the individual accounts is the personal property of many people, and secondly, because this won’t solve the pension problem.”

The tension involves López Obrador’s disdain for private or individual bene@t programs. The president frequently rails against “individualism” and “aspirationalism,” a term in Spanish roughly equivalent to “getting ahead” or “pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.” He prefers large, government-run programs.