MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Mexican Congress passes AMLO's first budget

AMLO drew 311 votes from his supporting coalition while the opposition aligned 154 deputies.

The Mexican House of Deputies Monday gave its final green light to the spending law bill - that is one week before the legal deadline - with funds relocated from autonomous bodies to sensitive areas such as agriculture, environment and public universities, it was announced.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's (AMLO) support came from his own leftwing Morena party and its ultraconservative PES allies as well as the leftwing PT and the Green Party for a total 311 votes against 154 from the opposing PAN, PRI, PRD and Movimiento Ciudadano.

The first of the two legs on which the Mexican budget is based, the income law, had already been approved last week amid criticism from the opposition groups for the cuts in several areas and the swiftness with which the accounts were processed.

Bitterness between rival factions was unchanged by Monday at voting time.

The total Mexican budget will be 5.8 trillion pesos, (around 1.2 billion dollars).

It contemplates a decrease in the items that had originally been budgeted for autonomous organizations, such as the electoral arbitrator and the transparency agency of Mexico, to allocate more money to the Secretariat of Agriculture, Livestock, Rural Development, Fisheries and Food -8,000 million pesos more, 400 million dollars-, to public universities -such as the UNAM, which had suffered an important snip on its economic allocation over previous years- as well as to other cultural matters.

The Environment and Natural Resources agency will receive 4,500 million pesos (around 225 million US dollars) above the amount drafted at first, while the UNAM gets 2,500 million pesos, an allocation similar the the one in the previoys year.

Among those most affected by the relocations are the judiciary, with a reduction of around 1,700 million pesos, the Inegi Statistics Bureau and the National Electoral Institute (INE).

In total, 23,800 million pesos will go somewhere different than their originally intended receivers.