“Mexico will soon come out of this coronavirus health emergency”
MEXICO (Agencies) – During the morning conference, the President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, considered the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic in the country to be a transitory economic and public health crisis. He assured that his government was preparing to face the crisis with hospitals, beds, and equipment to attend to patients with this virus.
The health strategy is not being dictated by politicians, but by specialists. Morning conference.
“I want first to give the people of Mexico confidence that this is a temporary situation, if we wanted to be more profound I would say a temporary crisis of public health, I would also include the economic.”
“This means that we are going to get out soon, that it is not a debacle, that it is much more our strengths than our weaknesses or flaws,” said AMLO. He assured that his government is dedicated full time to attending to this health emergency “so that we do not lack beds, fans, and we can attend to those who are seriously infected. We have projections of what is needed, and we are doing well in that regard,” he said.
AMLO calls to stay home for coronavirus
López Obrador urged citizens to reinforce the measures established in the National Day of Healthy Distance, mainly not to leave their homes if it is not necessary -in order- to avoid the propagation of Covid-19. He said, “people are behaving well; they are showing that they are a conscious people; they are not irresponsible, indolent people.”
However, this goes beyond a financial crisis; it is, above all, a crisis of confidence. Few things can provoke greater distrust in the markets than a President of the Republic, saying that, amid a pandemic, he does not know the information disclosed by his Ministry of Finance. Furthermore, he does not believe the data that that body publicizes.
And that happened yesterday when President Lopez Obrador said he did not know the economic policy criteria of the Secretariat of Finance for 2021, which were released a day earlier by the Secretariat itself, predicting a fall of 3.9% of GDP, according to the SHCP itself.
The President added that he did not believe in that data, that the Treasury was wrong.
If the President does not believe his Treasury Secretary, who does he think? Already last year, when all quarters were claiming that economic growth in 2019 would be harmful, the President “bet” that we would grow by two percent. Of course, his own government’s analysts and financial officials were right, but the President never took notice and, of course, neither acknowledged his mistake nor paid for his bet.
Yesterday, after rejecting the forecasts of the Treasury, the President, smiling, said that what we are living is a “transitional crisis, not an economic debacle,” and added that “they (?) are not going to change us, we will come out stronger in our purpose of ending corruption and that there is justice … that is, this came as “a ring to the finger” (SIC) to strengthen the purpose of the transformation.
President López Obrador does not believe in the market economy or business people, nor does he seem to understand his specialists in the subject. It remains to be seen whether the businessmen he gathered with yesterday managed to make him see all that is at stake and to modify his perception of reality, which was wrong. Or if he still thinks that the crisis “came as a surprise” to strengthen his “ideological project.”
The Yucatan Times
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