NEOLIBERALISM has been “abolished” in Mexico according to President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (Amlo) who introduced the country’s new economic plan yesterday.

He explained: “The neoliberal model and its economic policy of pillage and handouts are abolished” in Mexico promising that “the market won’t replace the state.”

Amlo, who pledged to end corruption and reverse privatisation after being elected last year said “the nightmare” of neoliberalism was over.

“We formally declare, from the National Palace, the end of the neoliberal policy,” he said.

Former Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto signed a law in 2014 that privatised large swathes of the country’s energy sector including the state oil company Pemex.

He presided over a series of neoliberal reforms that were described by Amlo as “complete failures, especially in the last few years and more precisely last year.”

The National Development Plan 2019-2024 was branded a new “post-neoliberal” inclusive economic project aimed at driving development with people at its centre.

“We must show that modernity can be forged from below, and without excluding anyone, and that development does not have to be contrary to social justice,” he said.

Interior Ministry spokesman Alejandro Encinas said the new plan would reverse four decades of the state “abandoning the people” to the laws of the market.

He claimed that this was essential in tackling the violence that is reaching crisis levels in Mexico, with the plan centred around three pillars: gender equality, inclusion and non-discrimination.

“Human rights must impregnate all public actions and policies of this government in a transversal manner, as proposed in the National Development Plan,” he said.

According to government statistics there were 154,557 murders between 2010 and 2016, with almost 95 per cent of them without convictions.