Finance Secretary Arturo Herrera pledged to address the lack of resources for scholarships for master’s and doctoral students abroad, following the extinction of trusts.
Three days after leaving office, the secretary said that unlike previous economic crises, today there is money for these scholarships so there is no reason to cut them.
“This has to be corrected, you can’t make decisions of this nature. There are examples of students in the eighties who were stranded in the face of economic crises and today the money does exist. It is one of the outstanding issues that I have to deal with in these three days that I have left,” he told journalist Denise Maerker in Grupo Fórmula’s Atando Cabos.
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Herrera maintained that the decision to leave the scholarship students without resources was made by the National Council of Science and Technology (Conacyt), but that this had to be consulted with the Ministry of Finance.
“The trust obtained a certain level of autonomy and no longer reported to the Treasury what it was doing, so that this decision of the trust that had to do with people was made by Conacyt without us being consulted. When expenses are made outside the trust, as is normally the case, we have to be consulted, and I learned about this from the press,” Herrera said.
The finance minister acknowledged that on the issue of the extinction of several trusts “there were things that we explained badly or that we explained less,” and he also gave as an example the trust fund for which former Olympic athletes who have obtained medals are paid.
“We are not going to stop paying him either, but there was a lot of anxiety in many of them for a few weeks about whether we were going to pay them, if we were going to pay them on time and they were not delayed for a day, in fact they only see a transfer in their bank account,” he explained.
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