Mexico's president touts austerity on his way out of office but lavishes largesse on friends
Mexico's outgoing president has always taken pride in his reputation as a penny-pincher, cutting funds for most government agencies and states
MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s outgoing president has always taken pride in his reputation as a penny-pincher but on Friday, three days before leaving office, Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced generous cash giveaways for his allies in a radical union movement.
It was part of what analysts call López Obrador's contradictory policies of cutting some government services to the bone while handing out vast amounts for his own pet projects and to political supporters.
He granted an electrical workers' union about $95 million a year in unearned pension benefits, describing it as “an act of justice.”
In 2009, some 7,000 of the unionized workers from the debt-ridden, corrupt and overstaffed government power company were laid off. Still, they spent the next decade supporting López Obrador's two subsequent presidential campaigns.
At the time they were sacked, the workers had not accumulated enough years to retire, under policies allowing retirement after 25 years of service. On Friday, López Obrador gave them pensions anyway.
The action was in line with his generosity to those who support him.
Last year, he gave about $45 million to former workers of a defunct government-owned airline, Mexicana, in order to acquire the trademark rights to the airline's name, Mexicana de Aviacion.
Experts say the name had essentially no commercial value after the airline went bankrupt in 2010, but the workers — whose pensions were wiped out by the company's collapse — had been been strong supporters of López Obrador in his presidential bids. He has since spent hundreds of millions of dollars more to revive a
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