A trillion pesos and the promise of change
President Claudia Sheinbaum launched a number that seeks to resonate: one trillion pesos. That is the historic figure that, as announced, will be allocated to federal programs this year. The official narrative is clear: this is giving back to the people what they generate.
“…previously, citizens were only taken into account during electoral periods; now, everyone has access to social benefits without conditions,” highlighted the president.
Sounds good, right? It’s the type of phrase designed to erase with your elbow what was written before. The question every press prosecutor asks is: how new this approach really is?
The programs behind the budget
Among the announced beneficiaries are women, with the ‘Women’s Wellbeing Pension’, and students. Scholarships are a backbone of the discourse.
Mention is made of the ‘Rita Cetina’ Universal Basic Education Scholarship (1,900 pesos every two months per family plus 700 per high school student) and the Benito Juárez Scholarship for High School (1,900 pesos every two months per student). The stated objective is to combat school dropouts.
Sheinbaum was emphatic: supporting women is her main program, recognizing “their work within the home.”
“These are the new welfare programs that are added to the previous ones, the ones we want in the Fourth Transformation, the well-being of the people of Mexico,” he said.
There’s the magic word again: Transformation. A trillion pesos is a mountain of public money. The true audit will not be in the announcement, but in the execution. In who really receives the support, in how old clientelism is avoided in new clothes and, above all, in whether this investment achieves something more than good headlines.
The historical memory is long. Many governments have come promising to break with the vices of the past. Informed cynicism is not born out of nowhere; It is born from seeing how these promises tend to fade between opacity and the repetition of schemes. We will see if this billion makes a real difference or just feeds the statistics.
