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At least 10,000 Mexican employees in the health sector have been dismissed due to a 44% cut in this area decreed by the socialist president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). However, he has reached an agreement with the Cuban regime to import the doctors who were withdrawn from Brazil, in response to the denunciations of President Bolsonaro, who deemed their working conditions akin to slavery.
Just in the Prospera Program, which reached the most vulnerable sectors of society,1,300 health workers were dismissed; particularly those with medical specialties.
Up to 45% of Ministry of Health employees will not have their contracts renewed in tourist areas such as Quintana Roo (near Cancún and Playa del Carmen). Their contract ends on December 31st.
In addition, the Mexican government is in arrears with healthcare workers, because it has not fulfilled its contractual obligations, and has not payed salaries for services rendered.
There is no money for salaries or medicines
The lack of resources has particularly harmed patients with HIV, newborn or unborn babies, and patients with cancer. Since the beginning of the year, there are HIV patients who have received less than half of their necessary doses, while 15 newborns died in May, and a lack of basic supplies is pervasive.
The most affected of all are the children of the isolated indigenous populations who lost the transport previously provided and now must walk up to eight hours to reach the nearest hospital, since the ambulatory centers no longer have medication.
Additionally, due to a “lack of syringes” a report was issued announcing that scans were canceled at the National Institute of Neurology and Neurosurgery “Manuel Velasco Suárez” (INNNMVS). This institute had USD $800,000 cut from its budget, and is one of the institutions most affected by the AMLO administration.
The operability of the institute has been reduced to 70%. Of the 948 procedures scheduled in the first quarter of the year, 211 were canceled.
After leaving many doctors and hospitals without supplies, following the cut in health, the director of the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS), Germán Martínez, submitted his resignation saying: “I’m not going to dismiss the doctors. People are going to die in the streets.”
In his place, as CEO of the IMSS, AMLO appointed Zoé Robledo, a “progressive”, an ally of the ruling party. Robledo led the working meeting with the Minister of Public Health of Cuba, José Ángel Portal Miranda, and a delegation of Cuban officials to negotiate an agreement between both nations.
“It is a shared effort, which is one of the priorities of the new government, of this administration, to achieve the universalization of services,” he explained.
So while the administration of AMLO is firing Mexican doctors in droves, it is expected that by September a contingent of Cuban doctors will arrive in the country. However, there is no system in place to guarantee the quality of these doctors; an issue which has generated controversy in other countries.
For example, in Bolivia, one patient died at the hands of Cuban doctors, and they were sentenced to house arrest. Medical malpractice by a Bolivian doctor would result in imprisonment. In other words, not only are Cuban doctors not subject to medical certification; they are also not subject to local laws in Bolivia.
Currently, the export of doctors is the largest revenue stream for the Cuban dictatorship, even five times higher than tourism, as the government keeps between 75 and 90% of the salary of these doctors.
The president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, deemed the working conditions of these doctors to be slavery. They are prohibited from bringing their families with them abroad; indeed, the families are held as hostages back in Cuba, to ensure that the doctors do as the government says.
In response to President Bolsonaro, the Cuban government, indignant, recalled 11,000 doctors, of whom it is estimated that 3,000 will end up in Mexico.
AMLO, who took office on December 1, promised to improve the health system, which he termed “inefficient.” However, to date, he has not succeeded.
Mexico is experiencing the most violent months in its history, in terms of murders, kidnappings, and armed robberies, and the victims of violent crime are occupying so many hospital beds that other patients have been displaced.
Mexican politicians allied to the Cuban regime for decades
In order to reverse the collapse of the state health system, the coordinator of advisors to the Mexican presidency, Lázaro Cárdenas Batel, negotiated with members of the Workers’ Party (PT) – who were in charge of setting up the “Más Médicos” program in Brazil under the government of Dilma Rousseff, so that the Cuban doctors who were in Brazil may now work in Mexico.
Cárdenas Batel is the grandson of the constitutionalist army general and president of the republic, Lázaro Cárdenas, who amended the Constitution so that Article 3 went from saying “education is free” to “education will be socialist.”
His father, Cuahtémoc Cárdenas, had a longstanding friendship with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, and lamented his death as “a loss to the world.” He also deems Lula da Silva’s prison sentence for acts of corruption to be an “injustice.”
Lázaro Cárdenas was governor of Michoacán for the PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution), a party affiliated with the Socialist International.
As governor, 14 years ago, Cárdenas, who studied at the Higher Institute of Art in Havana and married a Cuban woman, affirmed that his “relationship with Cuba is not the relationship of the government of Michoacán or any authority of Michoacán with Cuba.”
While thousands of health professionals in Mexico are being left in the street despite the growing health crisis, Mexican allies of the Cuban regime, which enslaves their doctors, hire cheap labor so that the Castro dictatorship can enjoy sufficient resources to allow it to stay in power.
