Photo: Unsplash

By KELIN DILLON

New reports show that Mexico’s federal government has invested nearly 2 billion pesos into the funding of new baseball fields for the country, while only giving 830 million pesos to the National Institute of Women, despite the country’s femicide rate rising by 7.1 percent in 2021 from the previous year.

The government has reportedly attempted to justify its whopping 1.7 billion peso investment into a dozen stadiums by claiming they were being saved from corrosion. This includes 207 million pesos in funding for a stadium in Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO) homeland of Villahermosa, Tabasco, and another 205 million pesos for a baseball complex in Veracruz.

Before this, funding was approved for baseball stadiums in Cancun, Campeche, Sonora, Chiapas, and several other areas of Tabasco. Interestingly enough, the stadium in Palenque, Chiapas, that received a budget of 103 million pesos, is run by AMLO’s own brother, Pio, who has recently been in the news for scandals of his own.

All in all, the 1.7 billion peso sports venture is more than double the budget of Mexico’s Executive Commission for Attention to Victims, and triple the amount of the National Commission for Continuous Improvement in Education’s annual funding.

Though the president has repeatedly expressed his commitment to social programs and the people of the country, it seems López Obrador, who is a diehard baseball fan, has decided that baseball takes clear precedence over women and education.