Targeting and Conditionalities in Mexico: the End of a Cash Transfer Model?

C H A P T E R 3

Targeting and Conditionalities in Mexico: The End of a Cash Transfer Model?

P a b l o Y a n e s

Mexico presents a noteworthy persistence in its conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs. The federal government’s main program, Oportunidades , is a continuation from the Zedillo administration’s (1994–2000) Progresa, implemented in 1997. The Progresa replaced Solidaridad or Pronasol program from the Carlos Salinas´ government (1988–1994). History was made when Vicente Fox, a member of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), became president in 2000 (2000– 2006). He was the first president in 70 years who was not a member of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). It was during his term as president (2000–2006) that Oportunidades as Oportunidades/Progresa began. Thus there was continuity between the last PRI government and the first nonPRI government with respect to the main poverty-fighting program. During the government of Ernesto Zedillo, Progresa operated on a relatively small scale and exclusively in rural communities with high levels of poverty. The governments of Vicente Fox and his successor Felipe Calderón (2006–2012) greatly broadened the program but kept its con- ceptual body and fundamental orientation intact. During the administration of these two governments, the coverage provided by Oportunidades reached 5.8 million families with an annual budget of 4.8 billion dollars. On average, each household received a transfer equivalent to 65 dollars a month. The amount of the transfers varies greatly but the maximum that can be granted, when a household includes middle-school children with scholarships, is 203 dollars a month R. L. Vuolo (ed.), Citizen’s Income and Welfare Regimes in Latin America © Rubén Lo Vuolo 2013 68 PABLO YANES per household. Even if Oportunidades is a large program in absolute terms, it represents a small fraction of the federal government’s budget. Oportunidades is a typical conditional CCT, created to fight the intergenerational transfer of poverty and to promote the accumulation of “human capital” of children and youngsters, under the hypothesis that higher levels of education will create better employment and income in the future. Conditionality and targeting are two of the program’s main characteristics. The targeting applies only to households that meet the conditions of poverty defined by the program itself. The conditionality comes into play as the transfers hinge upon the fulfillment of so-called co-responsibilities (corresponsabilidades ) by beneficiaries. These mainly include that children do not miss more than three days of school per month and that family members attend a medical clinic at least once a month for either checkups or talks on health care. Failure to comply with these conditions results in being dropped from the program and loss of the transfer. Oportunidades is frequently noted as an example of good practices by the multilateral credit organizations. It has been receiving several awards from these organizations and is being held as a model for the world to follow. With this program, Mexico has become, at least in Latin America, an exporter of “social technology.” However, in opposition to the essentially positive view of Oportunidades that is prevalent among multilateral credit organizations, international agencies, academic groups, and the program’s own evaluation structure (it is one of the most studied programs in Mexican history), there have been various criticisms against the program. The main critiques focus on the rigid targeting and the low impact that the program has on reducing poverty. With respect to targeting, errors of inclusion and exclusion are high- lighted. Attention is also drawn to the social fragmentation that is produced in communities with very high poverty where there are beneficiaries and nonbeneficiaries with minimal differences between them.1 The well known problems relating to the poverty trap are also noted. The debate around Oportunidades , however, has not included a broader reflection on the usefulness, sense, or implications of conditionality. Even so, a small window for broaching the subject opened up in Mexico due to the events of the Sierra Tarahumara in the state of Chihuahua in 2012, where starvation was declared at the beginning of the year amongst the Rarámuri people.

Starvation in the SIERRA TARAHUMARA : Conditionality on Trial In 2011, several media outlets reported that 20 thousand indigenous people belonging to the Rarámuri people who had been fed with TARGETING AND CONDITIONALITIES IN MEXICO 69 emergency foodstuffs due to starvation, had earlier been dropped from the Oportunidades program for failing to comply with the conditions. During 2011, 20 percent of the Rarámuri population living in 11 thousand locations was dropped from the program. The program’s national coordinator, Salvador Escobedo, remarked in an article in the newspaper Milenio on Feburay 8, 2012 2 : “Yes, they have been dropped as they are not meeting their commitments to their co-responsibilities, because the nearest hospital is a 12 hour walk away and you can’t build a hospital for three families. They also need to walk 12 hours to pick up their food, for us it would take 36 hours to go up.” So, they lost the Oportunidades cash transfers, even though the situation was so dire that they had to be sent food and emergency supplies to overcome starvation, because they could not fulfill the co-responsibilities. This measure was taken because there are no hospitals nearby, they live in scattered settlement patterns and thus, they can’t be provided with services. They can’t pick up the transfer because they have to walk 12 hours to do so and the institutions are not willing to invest 36 hours in getting it to them. It was precisely in the Sierra Tarahumara, in the town of Batopilas, the second poorest municipality in the country, where, in front of members of the Rarámuri people, President Felipe Calderón announced, on November 2011, the “bankarization” of the program. This event remains relevant because it means the delivery of a bank card for withdrawing the aid in a region where there are no banks and where according to the program’s own national coordinator, Rarámuri women (the titular holders of the transfer) must walk at least 12 hours to use the cards. 3 After this announcement, and faced with reality, the program was modified so that withdrawals could be made at Linconsa or Conasupo stores. The matter does not end there. The aforementioned article points out: “They also lack nearby schools (continues saying the National Coordinator). This is very complicated because you can’t change the rules. There is a lot of dispersion in the 17 municipalities where they live, there are almost 11 thousand locations [ . . . ] the conditions of remoteness in which they live makes it so that they don’t fulfill their co-responsibilities or so that they can’t go and pick up the support, and when they don’t do it for three bimesters, we have to drop them from the program, we’ll probably reinstate them in the coming months, and they won’t leave again.” The Rarámuri failed to comply with the co-responsibilities because the state does not provide the services needed to do so, but this is the Rarámuri’s problem and so they are dropped from the program. They are punished for living in an isolated and remote manner and for not using services that are usually nonexistent, remote, and culturally inappropriate. 70 PABLO YANES

In this case, with the demand of co-responsibilites from the under- priviledged and indigenous people, the state seems to have turned the logic of the CCT programs on its head. In this case, the state, without fulfilling its responsibilities, demands that the people, especially poor people, fulfill obligations in exchange for a small cash transfer. Peoples and communities, in this case one of the indigenous peoples of Mexico, are those who must adapt to the institutions, policies, and programs, and not the other way around. This is so because it is assumed that the CCTs are, in addition to being instruments of social control, also tools for an authoritarian pedagogy, where the state instructs the poor to fulfill their obligations, sees to their best interests, teaches them to accumulate human capital, and punishes them for lack of compliance or disobedience. During the early decades of the twentieth century the “Mexican indi- genism” began; a theory stated that indigenous people should be inte- grated and assimilated into the so-called national culture. At that time the expression “headquarters civilizes the Indian” was common; today it seems that the CCT must “civilize the Indians,” giving them education and making them take care of their health so that, in the dominant vocabulary, they can accumulate human capital. This demonstrates that the official concept of the treatment of indigenous people by the state has barely changed in a century. An apt example of this is the nature of the press release by the government of the state of Chihuahua denying essentially false stories of suicides among the Rarámuri due to starvation. In it, the government states that these stories “are not aware of the idio- syncrasies of the Tarahumara race, ” using a nineteenth-century name for the Rarámuri people that is loaded with disdain. 4 This exposes the fact that the political powers see the recipients of Oportunidades not as right holders but as beneficiaries with obligations, punishable subjects that were not excluded from the program; they abandoned it. This general characteristic of the program’s design is aggravated in the case of indigenous peoples, where poverty is more concentrated and population dispersed. The coverage provided by public services makes fulfilling the co-responsibilities much more difficult and impedes access to quality services, thus creating a heavier burden on indigenous women than the program’s average. All the additional difficulties faced by the indigenous population are not considered by the program. They are just seen as a population that is not fulfilling its co-responsibilities and so must be dropped from the program. As quoted before, it is not surprising that the program’s national coordinator said: “we will probably reinstate them in the coming months, and they will not leave again.” In fact, after dropping 20 thousand Rarámuris and before the starvation crisis, the federal government decided to reinstate the Rarámuris into some of the components of the program, as TARGETING AND CONDITIONALITIES IN MEXICO 71 well as into other programs that do not require the fulfillment of conditions such as nutritional programs (22 dollars per month per family), energy support (3.50 dollars per month per family), and child support (7.5 dollars per month per child under nine years, with a limit of three children per family). However, the Rarámuris are still excluded from the program’s main transfer, scholarships. This is not a minor issue in the analysis of the program’s functioning. People, families, and communities known for their high levels of poverty are deliberately kept from a monetary benefit due to reasons outside of their poverty. This decision is taken despite the well-known fact that their political and administrative exclusion will negatively impact their situation. The obligation and public responsibility to combat poverty turns into a tool for punishing private behavior, knowing full well that this punishment will add to the social and personal conditions that led these families into being included in the program in the first place. In brief, they are incorporated into the program because they are poor and deserve help (being poor) and they are dropped from the same program because they cannot fulfill the program’s conditionalities (being poor). Ironically, the beneficiaries deserve help and deserve punishment, the consequence of their poverty. Public institutions thus work under a system of administrative deci- sions and not under a system of guarantees. In this way, the authorities decide who is poor enough to be in the program and who deserves to be dropped; they excuse themselves by saying that the operational rules are hard to change. The motto seems to be, from each one according to his/her condition/needs, to each one according to his/her behavior. Everything is approved based on a set of rules created by the political powers. Faced with suggestions to alter the program’s “Operational Rules,” the national coordinator stated: “The rules will not be changed or made more flexible, because it is legally very complicated and would cause problems. There are single women that do next to impossible things to meet their co-responsibilities, (so) benefiting some would lead others to not want to comply.”5 The truth is that there is no such difficulty, as no law would have to be altered and no parliamentary paperwork would have to be dealt with. The publication of the modification is an annual exercise, the responsibility for which falls on the Federal Government. The legal-technical argument is an excuse to defend a public policy. Within the program’s value scale and underlying anthropology there seems to be no room for the idea that the problem is not that people are not fulfilling the conditionalities, but the problem is the conditionalities themselves. The state of the Rarámuri people has drawn the attention of people to the subject of hunger in the country and has made the relevance of 72 PABLO YANES the limitations of poverty measurement in Mexico more poignant. In particular, it serves to question some aspects of the method used by the CONEVAL (National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy) to calculate poverty. According to this method, the poor are those who are below a certain income threshold. This minimum income considered necessary for acquiring a certain group of essential goods is called the “Welfare Line”. 6 “Lack of sufficient income” is one of the six dimensions considered for calculating poverty. Access to social security, medical services, educational lag, basic household services, and access to food are the other dimensions. Those who are under the “Minimal Welfare Line” and are deficient in at least three of the criteria are considered “extremely poor.”7 According to this method, only 10.4 percent of the country’s population was “extremely poor” in 2012. In brief, even if a person or family lacks sufficient income to acquire basic goods, the person or family could not be classified as poor. This is evident in the calculations of poverty “by income line” made by CONEVAL. In 2010, it was estimated that 24.9 percent of the population was in some degree lacking (severe, grave, or lesser) in access to food, 19.4 percent under the “minimal welfare line,” and 18.8 percent in a situation of “nutritional poverty.” Beyond the issue of whether the set of goods used calculated by CONEVAL is adequate and sufficient to define accurately the poverty line,8 according to the income line calculations, one in five (22.4 million people) of the country’s inhabitants is in a situation of nutritional poverty and one in four (28 million people) lack proper access to food. These numbers are not only much higher than those from the multidimen- sional analysis; they also show that nutritional insecurity is still a grave issue in Mexico after a full decade of CCT programs. This is so because, in practice, CCTs (due to their amount, coverage, and conditions) have a small effect on overcoming poverty itself. Their more relevant and lasting effects are on the reduction of the intensity of poverty. As a study about Oportunidades notes (Cortés, Banegas and Solís, 2007 : 32), “the relative effects tend to be larger on the attenuation of the intensity of poverty rather than the incidence of poverty, which suggests that Oportunidades tends to “make the poor less poor” rather than taking them out of poverty.”

Two Concepts in Play: Between the Federal and the Local It is important to remember that, Oportunidades is neither the only social program in Mexico nor are its guiding principles unique concepts TARGETING AND CONDITIONALITIES IN MEXICO 73 in social policy. 9 Broadly speaking, we can say that there are two basic ideas regarding social policy in Mexico: those of the federal government and those of Mexico City government.10 The dominant ideal within the federal government perspective is characterized by targeting and is centered on fighting poverty. It is neither universal nor guaranteed, but based on the principles of subsidiarity and its design relates to market categories (cost, benefit, incentive, actives, human capital, social capital), with a theoretical foundation on methodological individualism and rational choice. Within the federal government, social policy is seen as programs, unrelated to rights, that are increasingly thought of as services from the state for the population (such as education or health care). In this way, social policy is not articulated with economic policy, while at the same time it is separated from the construction of an equal society due to the exclusionary logic of compensatory measures. Based on the underlying principle of the conditionalities, citizen participation is an abstract idea of co-responsibilities in which the state’s own responsibilities become diluted. What is public is seen as a zero sum game between the state and society. Through the CCTs, the state aims at the achievement of equality of opportunity, understood as the creation of favorable environments for an equal start to the “accumulation of human capital” for all people and achieving the most egalitarian insertion into the job market. It is assumed that differences in income (and achievements) will be the outcome of different levels of human capital and of the efficient redistribution of monetary resources. This means the state is responsible for preparing people to compete, but it should not interfere with the results of the said competition. In the case of Mexico City, social policy is fundamentally upheld on the recognition, exercise, and demandability of social rights; the guaranteed character of state action; and the recovery of the beneficiaries’ social responsibilities. It is assumed that the construction of citizenship is a process of exercising rights, defending their universal nature, and building policies and programs according to this philosophy. Because of this, social policies and rights are articulated, and then linked to economic policy. The fundamental value of policy in this area is to achieve equality of rights and results. At the same time that the central nature of equality is stated, the diversity and heterogeneity of society is seen as a fundamental fact of contemporary societies. Thus, the promotion of social equity is bound to the quest for social equality. They are not interchangeable processes but rather complementary ones; equality is not replaceable with equity. They are two aspects of a public policy seeking to achieve equality in differ- ence (as a guarantee of universality) and to recognize particularities with 74 PABLO YANES rights. Citizen participation is seen as a constitutive element of social policy. Authorities must be regularly held accountable while the growing citizen participation is checked through the demandability of rights and the involvement in the processes of decision making in policies, plans, and programs. Table 3.1 summarizes the two ideas and displays the contrast between the policies designed and implemented since 1997 by the three governments of Mexico City on the one hand and the dominant social policy within the federal government on the other. The underpinnings of Mexico City’s policy has been expressly stated in the Social Development Law of Mexico City, created in October of 2000 and reformed in May of 2005.11 The policy is formally defined in the Social Development Program 2007–2012, which took wing during the Marcelo Ebrard administration. This perspective advanced while the mainstream pro- moted targeting and subsidiarity as the the ruling principles in Latin America and Mexico’s Federal government. In a context that disquali- fied any policy or program with a universal nature as populist, regres- sive, and nonviable; the Mexico City experience has placed the debate on different grounds. Not only has the debate on universality been relocated, it has impacted the design of policies and programs in other entities including the federal government, creating a growing international interest in learning more about this experience. 12 Consequently, just as Oportunidades is the best example of the federal ideal of social policy, so is the Universal Citizen Pension program ( Pensión Ciudadana Universal ), as it was originally known, or Food Pension for Senior Citizens ( Pensión Alimentaria de Adultos Mayores )s, the program that best summarizes Mexico City’s alternate concept. So it is useful to compare and contrast the two programs.

Table 3.1 Main characteristics of Mexico City Government and Federal Government social policies

Mexico City Government Federal Government

Equality of rights and results Equality of opportunities Social responsibilities from the state Co-responsibilities Universality in the enjoyment of programs Individual targeting as a rule and rights or territorial regional targeting Demandability of rights Support is conditional Rights are institutional Programs are transitory Support no smaller than half a Small support and limits per minimum wage households TARGETING AND CONDITIONALITIES IN MEXICO 75

The Contrast between O PORTUNIDADES (Federal) and Universal Pension (Mexico City): Two Concepts for Social Policy in Practice Oportunidades is SEDESOL’s (Secretaría de Desarrollo Social ) star program, and it receives most of the available funding for cash transfers. It is a program designed and executed by the federal government where federal entities, with the exception of Mexico City, are responsible in the areas of health care and education. Mexico City, in 2004, began a modest version of the program under the control of the federal government. Toward the middle of 2009, it reached its highest coverage in Mexico City (25 thousand households, around 1 percent of the total in the city); two years later the number dropped to around 22.5 thousand, mainly due to the fact that many beneficiaries failed to meet the co-responsibilities. Oportunidades initially served only boys and girls from the third year of elementary school (nine years old) up to the last year of high school, through cash transfers differentiated by grade and gender. The transfers are administered by women, most of them being the heads of the household. Recently, a new component has been added to the tune of seven and a half dollars a month for every child under the age of nine, with a limit of three per household. The initial selection of beneficiaries is carried out by means tested methods, and the inclusion or exclusion decision is left to the authorities. Oportunidades is a targeted program with an essentially rural concept of poverty, although it has recently expanded into urban areas. As was mentioned, another of the program’s central characteristics is the conditional nature of both its design and operation. Conditionality transforms rights into services, so that demandability by the citizens turns into conditional access to a cash transfer. Because of this, the promotion of citizen autonomy becomes forced compliance with the program’s conditions. Conditionality makes relevant the question “who demands?” Does the state demand from the citizens or the citizens from the state? The ex-president Vicente Fox began the massive expansion of Oportunidades in 2001. At the same time, the government of Mexico City launched the Pensión Ciudadana Universal or Pensión Alimentaria de Adultos Mayores , as it was defined in the corresponding law on November 18, 2003. The law only has five articles, which establish the nature of the pension as a right, the requirements for having access, the mandatory nature of its inclusion into budgets, and the obligation of public servants to enforce it while respecting the principles of equality and fairness (threat of sanctions if the pension is not fairly distributed). 76 PABLO YANES

The original beneficiaries were all adult persons aged 70 or over in Mexico City, but in 2008 the law was reformed to extend benefits to those aged 68 and over. The benefit consists of a monthly transfer, through an electronic wallet, of at least half a minimum wage (65 dollars, approximately). It is universal, unconditional, and demandable as a right. The senior citizen even has the right not to receive it, but it is his/ her personal choice. The term “universal” means that the benefit can be received by all persons that meet the requisite age criteria and have previ- ous residence of three years in Mexico City; “unconditional” means that the pension is not dependent on levels of poverty or income and does not include any tests (it does not even demand Mexican nationality). 13 The Pensión Alimentaria seeks to create an effective network of social protection and security that is universal, as well as to recognize that social rights are for the entire society and not only for those chosen by the political authorities. The program was complemented with another law that established the right to medical services and free medication for people without work-related social security, in order to achieve universality in health care, protection, and social security. The senior citizens’ pension considers that all senior citizens, through different forms of work and not only paid work, contributed towards the construction and functioning of society, their communities, and families. Thus, it has been received as a first step towards the social recognition of community work, the invisible domestic work of women, and the contributions of people from other countries towards the development of the city. It also aims to show that the city can create a new urban citizenship. By February 2012, the pension reached 466 thousand people, around 90 percent of the eligible population; thus, it is a nearly universal service for this group. However, between the years of 2010 and 2012, the program registered signs of stagnation and even a small reduction in coverage derived from financial pressures on the city’s social spending. As a result, the program did not accomplish full universality, which would mean that it should have catered to 520 thousand beneficiaries. instead of the 480 thousand that will be enrolled by the end of 2012. The different perception polls on the Pensión Alimentaria that the Institute for Senior Citizens takes annually highlight, among other results, the importance of the improvements in nutrition, access to pre- viously unreachable goods, and improved health care that the pension provides. 14 Similar consequences are found in the external evaluations of the design and operation of the program (Duhau, 2009 ). In addition to the improvements in income and consumption, different positive effects in social dynamic are found, such as a higher degree of autonomy, height- ened respect within the family environments, higher visibility in public spaces, an improved self-perception, and social respect. TARGETING AND CONDITIONALITIES IN MEXICO 77

However, the road towards the social acceptance and institutional- ization of the program has been a complex one. Proof of this is that in the first years of implementation (2001–2002) the middle and upper class sectors rejected the program, as they thought that it labeled them “poor.” However, two years later, these same social groups demanded to be included in the program, to the point that the rejection rate among senior citizens is estimated at 2 percent. Another example of the change in social perception is that, according to polls, in 2003 only 30 percent of senior citizens saw the citizen’s pension as a right; they mostly considered it as a “government aid”. In contrast, in 2006, 78 percent of senior citizens saw the benefit as a right. Accordingly, in 2003 the law was passed with votes from only the con- gressmen who were members of the ruling party (Democratic Revolution Party, PRD), while in 2008 the reform to increase the coverage and was passed unanimously by members of all parties. Notwithstanding these achievements, the program shows limitations and problems with regard to their declared aims. According to an external evaluation (Duhau, 2009 ) and the recommendations and contro- versy imposed by the Mexico City Social Development Policy Evaluation Council (EVALÚA-DF), the pension has three aspects that should be improved. First, the transfer is still carried out via an electronic wallet that is usable only in affiliated establishments, making it “semi-money”; the recommendation is to make the transfer in cash to improve the free- dom and decision-making ability of beneficiaries. Second, the amount is insufficient; 15 strictly speaking, the program does not live up to its name as a “food pension” and even less so as a noncontributive basic pension. Third, access to the benefit depends on continuous residence in Mexico; if the beneficiary leaves the city to the neighboring municipalities, the benefit would be lost. Thus, a supposedly unconditional right can be taken away and this feature could be interpreted as a condition. To summarize, Oportunidades and the Pensión Alimentaria for senior citizens symbolize the two dominant concepts of social policy in the country, particularly regarding cash transfers. Oportunidades is targeted, conditional, and temporary. Pensión Alimentaria is universal, demandable, and permanent. The first one implies duties for the citizen, while the second one for the state. One reproduces the logic of social subordination; the other one helps to build citizenship and social autonomy. This contrast is not merely descriptive; the existence of both concepts and programs has led to changes in the country’s social policies. For instance, in the last years Oportunidades has changed from its original design and the federal government incorporated and increased coverage for senior citizens. 78 PABLO YANES

Imitation? The Hybridization of Cash Transfers by the Federal Government In 2005, Oportunidades introduced a senior citizen dimension, transfer- ring approximately 20 dollars a month to people over 70 years of age (a third of the amount of Mexico City’s program) and conditioned to the senior citizen’s use of health care services.16 This change took place as a result of a social movement named El campo no aguanta más, in which several rural organizations gathered to demand a set of petitions aimed at reactivating the countryside and improving the living conditions of the rural population. Among their most heartfelt petitions, they demanded a pension for rural senior citizens. This was an important change in Oportunidades , since it represents an adjustment made to one of the program’s stated objectives: to serve minors in order to stop the intergenerational transfer of poverty. Since then, the program is no longer just about today’s children, but also about today’s senior citizens. In any case, this component of the program is in the closing stages, due to the creation of a separate transfer program for senior citizens called “Seventy and over” ( Setenta y Más ). Since 2007, other modifications were made to Oportunidades . For example, the inclusion of the “energetic component”; this cash transfer is paid to compensate spending on sources of energy (power, coal, wood, gas, or candles). 17 In addition, the biggest change in Oportunidades came in 2010 with a new transfer called “Better Life Child Aid” (Apoyo Infantil Vivir Mejor ). This new transfer consists of seven dollars per month to each child under the age of nine (with a maximum of three transfers per household) and challenges the original idea of a program built around accumulating human capital, understood as fundamentally schooling. Until this change, the benefit began in the third year of elementary school (children around nine years of age) and lasted until age twenty. The lower limit was strongly criticized, as families with very small children require the aid the most. The counterargument was that the program could not build incentives that would translate into higher birth rates, under the assumption that the aid would lead the poor to have more children in order to obtain more transfers. This original refusal to help families with small children was not based on proven evidence. Thus, with the financial crisis of 2008 and its sharp effect on poor families, the federal government extended Oportunidades ’s to children under nine years of age. Parallely, the change that began with the incorporation of benefits for senior citizens was then continued by Setenta y Más . Strictly speaking, this program was not designed by the federal government; it was a response by Congress to the rural mobilizations of 2004 and 2005 that demanded a rural pension. Setenta y Más is a program with universal TARGETING AND CONDITIONALITIES IN MEXICO 79 coverage for all people over seventy years of age who reside in localities of up to 30 thousand inhabitants; in 2011 the program reached coverage of little over 2.3 million people. In contrast to Oportunidades , Setenta y Más does not include any kind of co-responsibility or compensation and represents the transition from an individually targeted, conditional program to a territorially targeted, unconditional program. Therefore, Oportunidades has being changing some of its original ideas without renouncing its essence of being a targeted CCT. First, by granting benefits to senior citizens, it left its objective of halting the intergenerational transfer of poverty by the wayside. Then, by incorporating benefits for children the program abandoned its “birthing” concept and the idea of focusing on those attending school. Both changes involved important budgetary commitments. 18 In particular, the strong budgetary increase for 2012 and the extension into urban areas, as well as the increase in the size of localities where the program functions imply the political decision of increasing the Setenta y Más coverage. However, this program does not receive the interest and publicity that Oportunidades does in academic and institutional circles, because it reveals an important change in some of the original ideals of the mainstream social policy. Setenta y Más shows the possibility of transitioning from an individually targeted approach to a territorially targeted approach as a pit stop towards universality; at the same time, the program offers the possibility of transitioning from conditionality to unconditionality. In other words, two simultaneously occurring models of cash transfers can be identified inside the federal Social Development Ministery. To better understand this point, it is useful to analyze the ruling framework pertaining to the nature, reach, and implications of the conditionalities. In relation to Oportunidades ’s operational rules for 2011, the chapter regarding the obligations of beneficiary families is of particular interest. According to this chapter, families must “support those receiving a schol- arship, so that they attend school regularly and take maximum advantage of it.” (Diario Oficial de la Federación, 2010 : 30) Here, it is interesting to note how responsibility is transferred from the state towards women. Not only is the meaning of “support” vague, but it is also questionable to make families responsible for taking advantage of schooling, which should be the responsibility of the school system and not a mother’s obligation. It should be noted that “helping the beneficiaries to attend both school and community workshops on self care, as well as in participating in a dynamic manner in activities marked in plans and study programs for each federal entity” is also an obligation. How can anyone be responsible for young people “participating in a dynamic manner in activities marked in plans and study programs” when this depends more on the real quality, relevance, and attractiveness of the education being offered? 80 PABLO YANES

Likewise, in the same chapter it is stated that “receiving and consum- ing nutritional supplements delivered in health clinics to children and women who are pregnant or breast feeding” is a conditionality (Diario Oficial de la Federación, 2010 : 30). This establishes an obligation to con- sume supplements regardless of will, taste, or flavor. In addition, there is a condition for women who receive the cash transfer for the household: “Deliver to the senior citizens the cash aid destined for them”. Like the mother of small children, the titular holder of the Oportunidades benefits must absurdly deliver the money to her parents. This introduces a relation of power within the family, in which the senior citizen is made to be a child and has no direct access to the resources that he or she is enti- tled to, save by means of his or her daughter. Even worse, according to these same operational rules, the cash aid is definitively suspended once the senior citizen “leaves the home” (Diario Oficial de la Federación, 2010 : 33). In other words, senior citizens are punished for having an autonomous life or their own home. Under Oportunidades rules, senior citizens receive the aid from their daughters and lose it should they begin to live in a different home. This serves to illustrate the hybrid nature of Mexican social policy. Programs are built using different organizational principles and programs aimed at the same group of people are organized differently. While the senior citizen component of Oportunidades gives a monthly transfer of 25 dollars, Setenta y Mas pays 35; the first program is conditional, the second one is not; one makes people get the aid from their daughters and the other gives the aid to them directly; in one program they lose the aid should they move out of the house while within the other the only way to lose the transfer is to move to a location with more than 30 thousand inhabitants. These contradictions do nothing but heighten the questioning of the principles of CCT programs, of which Oportunidades is a main exponent. In fact, its objectives and operational rules are under increasing attack, even those connected to well-known argument that links conditionalities to the “accumulation of human capital” and to social mobility.

The Mexican Experience and the Possibilities of Citizen’s Income The Mexican experience is one of the richest ones for understanding the current Latin American trends and debates in cash transfer programs and social policies in general. In the same country, one can find programs with different ideals and operational rules running simultaneously, so a comparison can be made between the functioning of different perspec- tives and their results. TARGETING AND CONDITIONALITIES IN MEXICO 81

The situation of the Rarámuri People, the experience of the citizen’s pension of Mexico City, the evaluations of Oportunidades program, and the changes and contradictions within the federal government’s social policy, are all elements that have placed the efficiency of CCTs at the cen- ter of the debate. These programs do not reduce poverty in a significant and lasting manner and their very operational strategy does not build citizenship, social cohesion, and personal autonomy. Even the economic merits of these programs are questionable, especially the aim of halting the intergenerational transfer of poverty with the accumulation of human capital by educating young people and the sub- sequent access to better jobs and incomes than their predecessors. This hypothesis hinges on the assumption that the labor market functions in an almost perfect manner, that wages are the result mostly of individual negotiations between the employer and the employee who possesses skills that the market will reward accurately. This theoretical framework believes that the labor market is a place for individual exchanges and not for social conglomerates; thus, salary regulations, collective bargaining and recruitment and promotion networks are not taken into account. This vision clashes with the perspective that sees education as a posi- tional good in which everyone moves. Thus, even if the poorer sectors increase their education, so will the richer sectors, maintaining the educational gaps, both in quality and in quantity. This concept questions the idea that education guarantees social mobility and states that education is a necessary but not sufficient condition for improving salaries, produc- tivity, and the distributive structure of society. For example, analyzing the link between educational and income poverty for Oportunidades and Progresa , Julio Boltvinik ( 2004 , 35) holds that: “Several matters need to be noted. First, while the educational poverty of adults decreased rap- idly during these thirty years (1968–2000), income poverty remained practically constant during the period (going from 72.6 percent to 68.5 percent). Comparing only the extremes, the premise that the low level of education is the main cause income poverty (the main premise behind Progresa) should be rejected. In the period 1980 to 2000, we find that while educational poverty dropped by 60 percent from 43.7 percent to 26.3 percent, income poverty actually increased by 41 percent from 48.5 percent in 1981 to 68.5 percent in the year 2000. At least in recent history, we can state that the evolution of incomes by households (and thus their income poverty) is not associated with the educational level of adults. Thus if Oportunidades had been designed in 1980, they would have lost the gambit: the children who were students in 1980 and beyond were unable to join productive activities and well paid jobs” (Boltvinik, 2004 : 345). This weakness adds to the existing criticisms levelled against CCT programs: the errors of exclusion that are common in targeted programs, 82 PABLO YANES the ex-post intervention only for identified poor, the lack of a preven- tive dimension, and the presumption that the fight against poverty is a straight line in which those who leave poverty never return and thus policies and programs forget about those who cross the threshold. It is also about pro-cycle programs that get results, however modest, during economic growth spurts and lose all the ground gained in one or two years of economic crisis. Seen in medium-length terms, we can’t state that we are, at least in the case of Mexico and Oportunidades , in front of a strategy that guarantees a firm and sustained drop in poverty. The most positive effect of its impact is the attenuation of the intensity of poverty. The program seems to help poor people to be less poor, but neither does it reduce the number of poor nor does it promote inter-generational social mobility. If to this we add the vulnerability of economic cycles, an alternative vision for these policies is imposed. Consequently, the limitations of CCTs for preventing and abating poverty and the weakness of their central premise, calls for a different orientation for cash transfer policies. Within the context of the crisis of the wage society, the deterioration of workers’ income in combination with massive and prolonged unemployment, the citizen’s income proposal becomes pertinent and relevant because it answers these challenges in a more consistent manner. In this sense, the citizen’s pension in Mexico City is an unavoidable reference for an alternative strategy that shows notable affinity with the citizen’s income proposal. Even though the program is not, strictly speaking, a citizen’s income since it limits its coverage to a certain population group, it shares its basic principles: universality, unconditionality, atemporality, and demandability. Experience shows that these principles are gaining grounds. The senior citizen’s pension of Mexico City gained widespread social acceptance, getting a very strong national projection that forced the electoral candidates of 2006 to include it in their manifestos in varying degrees. Another indi- cation is the changes in the federal government policies, First, on the eve of the 2006 electoral year, the federal government began its own program for senior citizens, but focused only on the families in the Oportunidades program, with conditions and a small transfer. After that, with the ini- tiative of Congress, it launched a noncontributive transfer rural pension ( Setenta y Mas ) which continues to expand. Moreover, the campaigns of all 2012 presidential candidates include a noncontributive universal pension for senior citizens, with a different emphasis for each one. The experience of the Pensión Alimentaria was able to show, in a relatively short time, that universal policies help to build citizenship and social cohesion, as opposed to targeted policies that divide communities. TARGETING AND CONDITIONALITIES IN MEXICO 83

This approach conquered a new social legitimacy in favor of the universal and guaranteed approach. However, the citizen’s pension is far from building a sufficiently solid argument in favor of a Citizen’s Income. The acceptance and social legitimacy of the citizen’s pension are mainly derived from being a transfer to people who are no longer considered to be in working age. The idea of a universal and unconditional pension is already accepted in Mexico, but the idea of people in working age having access to a guaranteed income is altogether different. Surely, the social resistance will be much higher as this puts into question the idea that income should be dependent on the market, or as is usually said, “one must earn his bread with the sweat from his brow, and he or she who does not work does not eat.” However, the Citizen’s Income debate has acquired notoriety in the country public policy debates. There are two initiatives of law in Congress in favor of citizen’s income. In the Letter for the City’s Rights of Mexico City, the proposal was explicitly included. Senator Manlio Fabio Beltrones proposed it as part of his campaign for the PRI 2012 presidential nomination, and an important group of academicians study- ing social policies gathered for the “ Dialogues for a Social Mexico” at the National Autonomous University of Mexico included the proposal as part of the new welfare state to be built in Mexico. During the course of a few years, the Citizen’s Income proposal in Mexico went from a small, relatively unknown proposal to being part of all of the political and academic agendas. This may represent the construction of the basis for a coalition that can drive the proposal as part of the social and political transformations that Mexico needs. In any case, the presence of the citizen’s income proposal on the nation’s public agenda and the growing acceptance of noncontributive and unconditional pensions, such as the Mexico City one, have reinvigorated the social debate, allowing us to think beyond CCTs and opening new paths in which basic income (BI) will play a part for years to come.

Notes 1 . See Boltvinik ( 2004: 315–347). Likewise, one may read author’s articles on the matter at La Jornada (www.jornada.unam.mx). 2 . “Sedesol: 20 mil rarámuris, fuera de Oportunidades ”. Periódico Milenio, febrero 8, 2012. México. www.milenio.com.mx. 3 . In order to address this reality, the program was altered so that the withdrawals could be made at non-banking institutions. 4 . Rarámuri is the name they give to themselves. Tarahumara is a foreign denomination with a disdainful tone and “ Tarahumara race” includes a racist context that belongs in the state parlance of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 84 PABLO YANES

5 . “Sedesol: 20 mil rarámuris, fuera de Oportunidades ”. Periódico Milenio, febrero 8, 2012. México. www.milenio.com.mx. 6 . The welfare line constitutes the income needed to purchase basic goods, not limited to food. 7 . The minimum welfare line is defined as insufficient income to acquire only basic foodstuffs, under the premise that all income in the house will go exclusively to that purpose. In other words, it assumes that the so-called “Engel coefficient” is equivalent to 1. Thus, if the coefficient tends toward 1, poverty increases, and decreases as the coefficient tends toward 0; the poorer the person is, the higher the income percentage that is dedicated to purchasing food. 8 . The cost of basic goods is $1.90 per capita in the countryside and $2.70 per capita in the cities. 9 . Some of the ideas expressed here were originally examined in Yanes (2006). 10 . For more, see the unedited work of Martínez Mendizábal ( 2011). 11 . The Social Development Law for Mexico City defines the aforementioned concepts as follows: (1) Universality: The social development policy is aimed at all inhabitants of the city and its purpose is to grant every person access to the exercise of social rights, the use and enjoyment of urban goods, and a better quality of life (2) Equality: This is the main objective of social development and is expressed in a continuous improvement in the distribution of wealth, income, and property; in the access to the set of public goods; and the abatement of the great differences between people, families, social groups, and territories; (3) Demandability: The right of inhabitants to, through a set of rules and procedures, make social rights progressively demandable within the framework of the different policies and programs and the available budget. 12 . An example of this is the International Conference of March 2012 organized by ECLAC (United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) and the Mexico City government for the analysis of the experience in the framework of the rights of senior citizens. 13 . In 2012, about 1,200 beneficiaries are from other nationalities. 14 . See www.adultomayor.df.gob.mx 15 . The amount of the Pensión Alimentaria ’s benefits—at least half a minimum wage—is one of the country’s highest transfers (around $65 a month, in comparison to $35 in the case of the federal program “Setenta y Más ”. However, still it is low for the purchase of basic goods and the necessary fuel for cooking them. Dollar estimations vary according to the exchange rate. 16 . This section follows the arguments on Yanes ( 2011). 17 . Even when energy could be considered as part of the program’s food dimension, it implies a new dimension. 18 . By 2011 the budget for Apoyo Infantil Vivir Mejor was $649 million and that of Setenta y Más was $ 1.1 billion. Both components made up around 25 percent of Oportunidades ’s budget. TARGETING AND CONDITIONALITIES IN MEXICO 85

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