Historic dialogue between Minister Lenia Batres and Polytechnic students

Nestor Pinacho

In a historic event, the Instituto Politécnico Nacional received the first visit from a member of the Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación (SCJN), Minister Lenia Batres Guadarrama, who delivered the conference "Social Rights and Justice Administration" to the Polytechnic audience. During the lecture, she reviewed the evolution and implementation of these guarantees at an international level and in Mexico, as well as the role that educational institutions play in this field.

Minister Batres Guadarrama explained that social rights are those that facilitate people in various situations of inequality or disadvantage to develop in a more just and inclusive society. She noted that these guarantees have come a long way to be incorporated into the Mexican legal framework, although there is still much work to be done to achieve their effective compliance.

During her presentation, she pointed out that one of the ideological biases associated with social rights is that they imply investing a lot of resources and it is justified that they are not implemented due to lack of budget, which "has to do with an old Malthusian idea that population grows arithmetically and the goods to meet their needs grow at a different pace, at a different proportion."

Addressing the General, Academic, Research, and Graduate Secretaries, as well as the heads of the Polytechnic Unit for Gender Perspective Management and the Polytechnic Rights Defense Office, the minister stated that institutions like the Polytechnic, as well as others dedicated to scientific and technological advancement in countries, have managed to generate technologies that accelerate the production of goods that satisfy human needs.

"We have perfect conditions to meet the social rights of all humanity, what we do not have are public policy instruments built for that to happen; we do not have the main thing, which is an ideological political agreement, an agreement of this humanity to not allow wealth to continue concentrating and to be distributed under rational conditions."

In an open dialogue with the attendees, she pointed out that there are various challenges to satisfactorily developing basic social rights, such as education, health, housing, and employment.

"We have formidable challenges of imagination, legal construction, and fundamentally of generating new convictions around social rights; if we accept what has already been accepted in the international community, which starts from the idea that social rights are the main condition to execute individual rights and therefore to be able to exercise our dignity as human beings, then I believe that a strong, interesting, and urgent task is to advance in the construction of these dimensions of social policy."

Gaceta Politécnica #1788. (April 30th, 2024). IPN Imagen Institucional: Read the full magazine in Spanish here.