If there are no protective reasons to take these decisions, then why were they taken? Maybe they are due to the limited capacity of local governments to respond to the emergency; it's probable that they are granting another week to more efficiently prepare for the return to normal activities, even at a cost of the tranquility and economy of these entities. Or worse still, they are doing it to earn public notoriety (to add their grain of sand to the salvation of humanity), while the rest of the country returns to daily activity. But if I'm absolutely wrong and the truth is they are doing it to save lives, then that means that those local governments have information that does not line up align with what the Health Secretariat has stated. Which would be a far graver situation.Without enough evidence to be certain of the reasons for this discrepancy, I observe that nevertheless in other entities the logic was quite different: it consisted of doing virtually nothing, while there wasn't definite information about the local spread or about the number of deaths caused by this virus. I tend to believe that behind these differences there lies little information and much intuition; that there isn't shared information, but rather local sniffing and political pragmatism. The bad side is that those local decisions are now global news. And this virus has already caused a great deal of damage to the country and to Mexicans, so this is like tossing another log on the fire.
The broader point of this piece is that Mexico's federalism is a burden as long as state and local governments are so far behind the federal government. One obvious way to address this would be to allow reelection of city and state officials, but that would not be a magic bullet. At some point in the next three years, I'd like to see Calderón appoint a commission to study dysfunction in city and state governments, in regard to everything from security to tax collection.
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