Mexico Pandemic, the faces of unemployment

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Mario ‘blew up’ his credit card, owes his car and has been without work for 3 months

At 61, he is not yet part of the federal government’s program for older adults and regrets: “The Covid-19 is out of control and education in limbo.”

Without profits, without support, without any certainty, and at 61 years of age, Don Mario Morales Leañiz has not reopened his business, his trade, his almost 30-year-old job for three months, due to the pandemic.

Sanitary restrictions do not allow him to live on what he lives, to do what he knows how to do: teach. The eagerness, ability, and knowledge to offer private math, physics, and chemistry classes at home, online or from home are not enough today “to survive, not to live.”

Without a program, he says, for older adults, his credit card exhausted and overdrawn, with the debt over his car, without government support for this type of job, Mario also regrets that “due to the lack of a teaching strategy and emerging evaluation of the SEP for the national educational system, the students are in confusion, in limbo and suspended all kinds of consultancies. COVID-19 is out of control and education in limbo, like all people, like the whole country, ”claims Mario Morales.

- Economically, how did the pandemic affect you?

- Very strong. I work in two specific lines: one is the personalized consultancies in mathematics, physics and chemistry; and the other is the sale of books for schools. They are exercise books that I do and that I sell in schools. Today my consultancies are over. There are no orders either. no hope that there are.

- Do you consider yourself unemployed and victim of the Covid-19?

Sí- Yes, but more than the virus itself, the mismanagement that the authorities have done. In the beginning, the indications were good for people, the forecasts were clear, but over time I think they got out of control. They did not make a plan according to the situation that was being experienced, for example, in the second week of April, when the infections increased dramatically.

Then, regardless of the situation and people’s problems, decisions began to be made more to counter criticism than to help our personal finances. It seems to me that they did not make any opening plan according to the times, but rather that some governors were fed up and it was left to their discretion. So with openness, you have to be careful.

- And what about the government’s financial support?

Son- They are insufficient, I am not saying that I did not want them, of course I want them, in addition to being small monthly payments and without interest. But, although I don’t have access to them, if I did, I don’t see the way to pay for them, at least this year. My expenses amount to almost 15,000 pesos a month and the loans are 25,000 pesos. That lasts for two months, and then? I have a debt of 10 monthly payments of 3,500 pesos each, which I already stopped paying due to lack of resources.

- How do you see the 4T responses to the pandemic?

– Slow, unfortunately, I see it very slow. It has not been seen that she is determined or that she knows how to act quickly. It has not been seen how she proposes to resolve the economic or emotional situation of us. Just on Wednesday, almost 5,000 contagions and more than 700 deaths were registered again, and López-Gatell himself does not offer a plan B.

Source: elfinanciero.com.mx

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