A few days after the start of the electoral process, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced that Mexico’s universal pension for the elderly will begin at 65, moving eligibility ahead by three years, starting in July.
Pension checks will eventually double to 6,000 pesos every two months in 2024.
The plan also includes updating the Measurement and Update Units (UMAs) in accordance with annual inflation and a continuous increase in the minimum wage until it recovers “everything lost during the neoliberal period.”
He also promised to increase pensions and wages without increasing the national debt, taxes or gas prices. Mexico’s austerity plan has made the pension and UMA plan feasible, he said.
The announcement was made at a ceremony for the 215th anniversary of the birth of Benito Juárez, which happens to fall on the first day of spring.
“For one of those coincidences of life, the birth of our worthy one has traditionally coincided with the spring equinox, a day when darkness and light have the same duration, plants flourish and life on earth sprouts with new energies,” said AMLO, by which he is affectionately known.
“And not by coincidence … our country today lives a political and social spring in which we establish freedoms, swept away the filth of corruption and recovered the priorities of the Mexican state that should never have been lost, that of serving the most destitute in the first place.”
Source: El Universal
