The “modus operandi” that has more holes than Swiss cheese
Make yourself comfortable, because what I am going to tell you is the script of a bureaucratic soap opera where the protagonists are public money and a pinch of “I didn’t know anything”. It turns out that the Anti-Corruption and Good Government Secretariat did its job (yes, sometimes it happens) and audited the famous Consolidated Purchase of Medicines. The star find? A festival of irregularities at Birmex that includes improper payments, bulk opacity and the classic play of endorsing million-dollar overprices for pharmaceutical companies. Basically, the manual of what NOT to do with everyone’s taxes.
The thing was so monumental that even the president ordered to restart the purchasing process from scratch. A new competition was held, and the government, in its best “everything under control” pose, ensures that the supply of medicines is guaranteed. But the audit, with the juicy file number 2025-02-0IC-12-277-AAD-001, drops the bomb: there are 21 serious observations and, attention, none have been corrected. Among the crown jewels is the detail that contracts were given to companies that presented letters of support from… other companies that were disqualified! It’s the corporate equivalent of submitting a reference from a friend who’s in jail.
The official excuse: “It was a lack of training” (and an epic lack of knowledge)
In a plot twist that no one expected, the audit conclusions point to the lack of training and ignorance of the regulations on the part of the officials involved. That is, the defense would be: “We are not corrupt, we were just extremely incompetent.” This cocktail of inability and opacity had a predictable result: it could not be guaranteed that public resources were used efficiently, economically and honestly. A trio of concepts that, it seems, are as elusive as getting a Taylor Swift concert.
Meanwhile, in an interview published in mid-December, Undersecretary Eduardo Clark came forward to calm the waters, reiterating that supply is assured. A statement that, compared to the audit report, sounds with the same credibility as “I’m almost there” in a WhatsApp group. The disconnection between the official discourse and the documented findings is wider than the Sumidero Canyon.
This case is the textbook example of why government procurement processes need magnifying lenses, radical transparency and less cronyism. It is not just a matter of numbers, but of lives that depend on these medications arriving on time and at a fair price. The report makes it clear that the road to accountability and integrity in public administration is still full of potholes, and resolving the 21 outstanding observations would be a good first step to begin paving it.
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