The General Health Council, the highest health authority in the country, has a new secretary general: Marcos Cantero Cortés.
The position he will occupy is the second most important position of this body, after that of president, which is always occupied by the Secretary of Health, in this case Jorge Alcocer.
Cantero Cortés comes to replace José Ignacio Santos Preciado, who submitted his resignation to the General Secretariat of this collegiate body, on July 6, amid discrepancies and accusations of corruption of his team.
According to sources consulted by Animal Político, Marcos Cantero Cortés is close to the Secretary of Health, Jorge Alcocer.
Although the agency has not yet made public the relay, this portal has information that yesterday, Cantero interviewed one by one the members of what will be his team to be clear about the activities and functions of all.
The new technical secretary of the CSG was head of the Economic Analysis Unit of this agency, to which he arrived in 2019 as coordinator of advisors of Alcocer.
But these have not been all his positions in the public administration, since in 2007 he was also in the SEP as an advisor to the Planning Directorate of the Undersecretariat of Public Education.
Cantero Cortés holds a PhD in Administrative Sciences from the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey. From 2011 to 2015 he was coordinator of Criminal Reform Planning in the Council of the Federal Judiciary.
The problems of the Health Council
The General Health Council is a collegiate body that deals with all public health issues, but also issues where they are impacted by an epidemic or problems of an economic, labor and migration nature; that is why the heads of the secretaries of state, the business sector, academia and medical organizations participate.
This change in the CSG -of which the Secretary of Health, Jorge Alcocer, is president- occurs in the midst of a crisis due to the departure of seven of its members.
Read also: Resignations, investigations into alleged irregularities and internal divisions threaten the Health Council
Although it must meet at least once every semester, the Health Council has not met in all of 2022. The first meeting of the year was scheduled for July 13 but was canceled due to the absence of 7 of its members.
Among the issues that were to be discussed in the July 13 session are those that generated discrepancies between Santos Preciado and Alberto Gómez with Jorge Alcocer and Hugo López-Gatell, undersecretary of health.
In addition to the discrepancies, the departure of Santos Preciado and six other people from his close team occurred right in the middle of investigations against César Cruz Santiago, technical secretary of the Commission to Define Treatments and Drugs Associated with Diseases that Cause Catastrophic Expenses, and Mario Moreno Nava, deputy area director.
The investigations opened are for inconsistencies in his patrimonial declarations and for having ordered the publication of the Compendium of Medicines and Healing Materials, apparently without permission.
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