State of Welfare: On Mexico's fastest growing ministry
Is the Welfare Secretariat carrying out popular redistribution or becoming a partisan tool?
“For the good of all, the poor come first.” It is the most popular slogan attributed to former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024). His figure still looms large in Mexico; as the founder of the powerful ruling Morena party and as a left-wing ideologue who turned the State down a more redistributive road.
As a towering figure of Mexican politics, López Obrador led the charge himself, often through executive power. One of the core steps towards institutionalising his vision for a new Mexican State was through the creation of a new ministry in the executive branch: the Secretaría del Bienestar, the Welfare Secretariat.
Its job is—as many of its similar institutional predecessors’ had been—to help the poor, vulnerable, and disadvantaged. Unlike its predecessors, its approach was far more wide reaching—”sprawling” critics would say; “inclusive” fans would counter.
Even the government’s language regarding Mexico’s worst off changed with the Welfare Secretariat. There was shift from seeing the poor as a project to be uplifted by their betters through the Secretariat of Social Development (Sedesol) to the present-day perspective of considering them a valuable citizens simply in need of wellbeing and dignity.
With this in mind, the Welfare Secretariat replaced many conditional aid programmes with direct aid. This was heavily criticised by many as inefficient and regressive: The rich would suddenly be getting as much as Mexico’s very poorest.
The Morena government rebutted, arguing against the bloated and corrupt bureaucracies that made the poor leap through hoops to determine whether they were worthy of help. Subsequent research did find that the very poorest Mexicans in urban areas had indeed been excluded from otherwise successful conditional cash-transfer programmes.
The question now is, has the Welfare Secretariat been any better or has it been led down other less lofty paths?
