Photo: Coneval

By THE PULSE NEWS MEXICO STAFF

In the nearly three years that leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has been in power, an additional 3.8 million Mexicans have fallen into poverty, and of those, 55 percent have dropped below the extreme poverty line, according to a report issued Thursday, Aug. 5, by the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (Coneval).

In total, Mexico’s poor population increased by 7.3 percent between 2018 and 2020.

In 2018, when AMLO first took office, there were 51.9 million Mexicans living below the poverty line, said the Coneval, which is a semi-autonomous government agency.

By 2020, that number has risen to 55.7 million.

In the case of extreme poverty — defined by the World Bank as those living on $1.90 a day or less — at the beginning of the AMLO administration, there were 8.7 million Mexicans that fell into this category, the Coneval said.

But by 2020, the number of extreme poor had grown by more than 2 million people.

The total number of Mexicans living in extreme poverty in 2020, according to Coneval’s measurement, was 10.8 million, representing a 24 percent rise.

The suspension of economic activities due to the health contingency derived from the covid-19 pandemic had a significant impact on a drop in income for the country’s population, particularly in its poorest sectors.

According to the Coneval measurements, total per capita income fell 6.9 percent, but in income referred to as paid work, it decreased 10.3 percent.

However, other types of income, such as remittances from abroad and other nongovernmental transfers, increased 16.2 percent.

Income from government social programs decreased among the poorest, from 22.4 to 14.8 percent of the total.

Not surprisingly, AMLO responded to the Coneval report by saying he had “different information.”