The promised Fourth Port Transformation never arrived. Rather, the six-year term of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been the scene of a widely criticized recomposition of the administration of the maritime-port sector in Mexico and which, according to specialists in the matter, has resulted in operational setbacks and substantial increases in costs for companies with activities in foreign trade, at a time when the country requires greater agility in the handling of merchandise, mainly in the face of the growing wave of Asian imports that has impacted the ports of the Mexican Pacific.
In an interview for T21 magazine published in its January 2019 edition (volume 233), Héctor López Gutiérrez , appointed a month earlier as head of the General Coordination of Ports and Merchant Marine (CGPMM) – at that time still in the hands of the Ministry of Communications and Transportation (SCT) – outlined the strategy that the incoming federal administration would follow.
In its route plan, the creation of the Coastal Port Intermodal Systems (Sipcos) had been roughly outlined , that is, the main cargo handling ports in the country would be grouped into five regional blocks that would encourage the comprehensive development of coastal businesses, maritime and port. In the vision of Héctor López, this “renewal” would give a twist to the exhausted model of the Comprehensive Port Administrations (API) that were born with the Ports Law of 1993, at the same time that it would be focused on granting a socioeconomic benefit to the towns interconnected with the ports.
The Sipcos would never see the light of day, since the federal government was preparing an alternative strategy that would resonate in all business sectors, even those related to maritime-port activity, that is, the entry of the Armed Forces into public administration.
In this way and after six months in which various legislative changes were made, on June 7, 2021, the transfer of the CGPMM to the Secretariat of the Navy (Semar) was completed , a movement whose main objective was the fight against the introduction of illegal merchandise into ports, as precursors for the production of synthetic drugs; although the idea was also raised in President López Obrador’s morning conferences that the ports had been “privatized”, so the State would come to “recover” their control , despite the fact that the government itself is the one who had been granting port concessions, hand in hand with the APIs, to the different private players.
However, as administrator of Mexican ports, the Navy would enter a terrain in which it would still have to begin a pronounced learning curve , hand in hand with the introduction of sailors also in the administration of maritime customs, both facts unprecedented in the country, which would end up doubly affecting the operation in the ports.
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