Mexico’s Finance Minister Carlos Urzúa
resigned this Tuesday , citing deep differences over economic issues , in a blow for the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador , who named a well-regarded deputy minister to replace him.
“Differences in economic issues, there were many. Some of them happened because in this administration public policy decisions were made without sufficient foundation,” Urzúa wrote in a scathing letter posted on Twitter.
Urzúa was also the Finances secretary from 2000 to 2003 , during the administration of López Obrador as governor of Mexico City. Since 2004, he is part of the National Researchers System (SNI) ; he is a member of the Mexican Academy of Science , since 2004; and apart from his theoretical research, he has specialized in Mexican economy.
The Mexican peso fell over 2% on the news and the benchmark index slid almost 1.5% .
López Obrador quickly promoted Deputy Finance Minister Arturo Herrera to the top job. Herrera is well known to investors and seen as a competent economic manager .
Investors have worried about López Obrador’s policy direction since he canceled a major airport project before even taking office, and the government has clashed with businesses on a number of occasions.
Urzúa cited “ extremism ” as a reason he felt forced to quit.
“I’m convinced that economic policies should always be evidence-based , careful of their potential impacts and free of extremism, either from the right or the left. However, these convictions did not resonate during my tenure in this administration,” Urzúa said.
For his part, President López Obrador said that Urzúa “does not agree with the decisions we’re taking and we have the commitment to change economic politics as they have been done for 36 years,” and that “since it’s a change, a transformation , sometimes it is not understood that we cannot follow the same strategies” The President accepted Urzúa’s resignation and presented Arturo Herrera as the new Finance Minister in a video.