The constitutional reform promoted by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) currently being processed by the Mexican parliament eliminates seven autonomous bodies, among them the Federal Institute of Telecommunications (IFT) created in 2013 to replace COFEFE after the 2011 constitutional reform.
The proposal entails an important change in the institutional design and arises after the controversial approval of the judicial system reform. It remains to be seen whether this institutional reform will materialize after its initial approval in the Chamber of Deputies in August or whether the presidential shift from AMLO to Sheinbaum will mark a change in Morena’s position.
During the final stage of his term, AMLO has attacked the system of autonomous bodies that had consolidated in Mexico and served as benchmarks for other countries in the region.
In his opinion, these agencies have an excessive cost of about MX$ 1,000 million a year for tasks that can be performed by the federal government, which would allow allocating these resources to fund welfare pensions.
Additionally, he has described them as a symbol of neoliberalism and has employed expressions such as “they are useless” and “they are autonomous of the people, not of the oligarchy”. He has also made accusations that “a golden bureaucracy was created” with elevated salaries, in some cases, higher than the salary of the head of state himself.
In line with this, the executive developed an action plan called 100 Steps for Transformation based on his strategy to extinguish the autonomous bodies. In the case of the IFT, its powers and workers would go to the Secretariat of Infrastructure, Communications and Transport (SICT). In other words, there would be a return to the old model of competencies centralized in the executive power that is present in many countries of the region, such as in Chile with SUBTEL.
As this plan moves forward, the IFT has publicly stated its position, highlighting the importance of having autonomous government agencies and some of its achievements, such as a reduction of prices for consumers and the improvement of telecommunications services due to improved competition in the markets, as well as the expansion of the radio and television offering with the granting of new concessions, including 32 to indigenous peoples.
According to the agency, “savings for users were achieved for an equivalent to 805 billion pesos, so for each peso of assigned budget, 44 pesos of social benefit were generated”.
This incident underscores the debates and critical factors around the establishment of autonomous regulatory bodies. The development of this model was presented as an improvement to regulation and supervision in sectors like telecommunications through autonomous collegiate bodies that are, nonetheless, not exempt from the risk of being captured by the political or economic power and failing to respond to the democratic legitimacy of the popular vote.
In Mexico, its implementation was the result of a political consensus that is now breaking down, at the model’s moment of greatest development. The AMLO administration’s plan has criticized autonomous agencies from the perspective of effectiveness, maintaining that the executive power can perform these functions with a lower cost of public resources, and from an ideological perspective, arguing that this model responds to a neoliberal logic.
In my opinion, this discourse is really an excuse, and the underlying problem is the tension around the distribution of power. The model of autonomous or independent regulators entails taking powers away from the executive branch that it traditionally exercised, for instance, the decision to grant radio spectrum concessions or overseeing the functioning of telecommunications services. AMLO’s reform proposal seeks to concentrate more power and functions in the executive.
By Javier García, September 2024
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