#WhatHappenedWithAcapulco and Hurricane Otis, why was it so violent and how to help?
Otis made landfall in Acapulco as a category 5 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale in the first minutes of Wednesday, October 25, causing damage to hotels, businesses, homes and all infrastructure.
The federal government’s plan contemplates, among other things, delivery of weekly basic baskets 8,000 pesos for cleaning and painting the affected homes and between 35,000 and 60,000, depending on the damage suffered to the properties; In addition to a refrigerator, a fan, a sink, a stove and a set of dishes, 20,000 word loans of 25,000 pesos to small merchants without interest to be paid in three years, with a six-month grace period.
The challenges
A plan of this size brings with it a series of challenges that must be overcome so that it reaches those who really need it and, consequently, the desired results are obtained, from an effective damage count, census of the affected population and what needs.
Once the president announced this package of measures, Pablo Cotler, academic at the Department of Economics at the Universidad Iberoamericana (Ibero); and Janneth Quiroz, deputy director of economic analysis at Monex, shared with Expansión the challenges they see for the delivery of aid in kind and money.
The president appointed the Secretary of the Interior, Luisa María Alcalde, as those in charge of the aid plan; and the governor of Guerrero, Evelyn Salgado Pineda.
“Given the magnitude of the disaster in the area, people with knowledge of logistics and engineering are required; Know where you are going to start. You need a kind of czar, a person with enough knowledge and political support to be the administrator of all these resources,” says Cotler. “I consider that this is very far from the activities that both the secretary of the interior and the governor may have,” she added.
Next year, Mexicans will elect a president for the period 2024-2930, so another risk has to do with the electoral use of resources.
Something that has not been made known, Quiroz and Cotler pointed out, has to do with the rules for requesting and receiving aid in kind and cash.
In that sense, the Ibero academic recalled that, when credits were given to the word during the coronavirus pandemic, not all those who requested the loans paid.
“The most important thing is to remove all the rubble and start restoring the homes; many of them were left uninhabitable and make them habitable again,” said Quiroz.
Regarding the forgiveness of the payment of taxes such as VAT and ISR, among others, “we will have to see how much weight is collected from these two taxes at the national level, because there may be some type of compensation from states of the country that have a significant boom and the total collection is not diminished,” said Quiroz.