In Non-Development
This editorial by Rolando Cordera Campos originally appeared in the October 5, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Mexico Solidarity Project.
It’s possible to paraphrase the great scholar Tito Monterroso and say that after more than 40 years, Mexican growth has still failed to unleash its potential and, worse still, is tied to its worst nightmares and dogmas. Years passed, governments and even their pronouncements changed, but growth remained stagnant.
With less than mediocre GDP growth, almost always below 2%, socially unsatisfactory, as evidenced by the trail of informal employment and disguised unemployment, and without any driving forces for social mobility and productive diversification, the various heads of finance have maintained, and continue to maintain, six-year term after six-year term, their maxims: overall financial and fiscal stability comes first, in keeping with the beliefs of the “rating agencies.” Hence the sustained reduction in public investment and, now, in public spending as a whole, whether or not it involves the provision of essential goods for minimum human development.
The Economic Program for 2026 maintains its sworn allegiance to the mythical fiscal consolidation, without considering the necessary drive and development of expansion and structural change platforms for growth, development, and their expanded reproduction. Upon its presentation to society (read: Congress), the Budget and its corresponding Revenue Law will face various, somewhat hastily updated assessments by private sector analysts. Their lowest common denominator is and will continue to be alarm over the weight that debt service has acquired, a growing monopoly on state revenues and, therefore, a detractor from other necessary or vital programs and allocations.
We are being forced into a financial and fiscal cacophony, which are not always the same, resulting in the image of an automaton, autistic State, victim of a chronic lack of revenue. Let us repeat: this absence of this vital liquid impacts the structure of spending and the reflexes of those responsible for its implementation; the damage to the State’s capacity to make social rights a reality in hospitals and schools, in drainage and infrastructure, in technology and training, is now a reality across virtually the entire state, prey to a pernicious anemia that is already clearly affecting the reflexes and imagination of State leaders.
My respected colleague Enrique Quintana confirmed this to me: “(…) when presenting the 2025 Economic Package, a consolidation path was announced: the deficit would fall to 3.9% in 2025, to 3.2% in 2026, and would stabilize around 2.9% starting in 2027.”
“However,” he adds, “reality has already deviated from the promise (…) The crux of the matter lies in the rigidity of spending. Social programs, which are the basis of political legitimacy, have become the straitjacket of public finances (…) With these commitments, the margin for public investment or discretionary spending is increasingly smaller. It is not credible that, under this scenario, the deficit can be reduced without fundamental changes to the tax structure. (Enrique Quintana, “Promises and Risks in Government Finances,” El Financiero, 09/30/25).
On the contrary, the “solution” that those in charge of finance have found is to cut the blanket, to do more – they insist – with less, which has left us stranded in a chronic fiscal insufficiency, opening up bigger gaps in fundamental areas such as social security and education, ports, roads… Non-development, then, which is driven by meager growth and takes over minds and wills here, there, everywhere.
Rest in peace, historic state. Welcome to economic and social famine.
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