A study by the UNAM concluded that, between 2012 and 2020, that fund shifted from a logic of gradual decentralization to one of recentralization and subordination to the federal government, with insufficient resources and a metropolitan agenda relegated to the background. This is not a partisan slogan: it is a diagnosis of the erosion of urban financing in Mexico. The warning was not only academic. Guadalajara today offers a clear version of that mechanism. In one of the great metropolises of Latin America, where the scale of problems demands institutional coordination, sustained financing, and a long-term vision, public debate has been impoverished, becoming a sequence of images. Instead of discussing how to rebuild the state's urban capacity, the deterioration is visually exploited. There is no deep reform, but there is a frame. And the frame works because it is based on a partial truth: yes, there is visible deterioration; what is hidden are the structural decisions that helped produce it. For years, the Metropolitan Fund was one of the few federal instruments designed to finance projects that municipalities could not sustain on their own: road infrastructure, parks, markets, mobility, planning, and regional-scale works. Yes, there are resources when the work can be centralized, inaugurated, and narrated from the capital. The same ambition does not exist when it comes to financing the most difficult and least glamorous task of keeping the cities where millions of people live alive. Guadalajara has already demanded the return of metropolitan funds and has warned that their absence impacts urban development. What it asks for is not indulgence, but instruments. First, they suffocate the cities, and then they film the ruins. A serious democracy should do exactly the opposite: rebuild capacities before turning the collapse into content. Mexican politics has perfected a particularly toxic trick for urban life: it strips cities of their capacity and then blames them for not solving, alone and on time, the consequences of that hollowing out. In the debate on the 2021 Expenditure Budget, voices in the Chamber of Deputies pointed out that eliminating the Metropolitan Fund meant leaving key projects without financing and weakening the governance of metropolitan areas. That was exactly what was at stake: not a marginal fund, but an incentive for municipalities and states to coordinate solutions that, by definition, transcend their administrative boundaries. When that incentive disappears, each city is left more alone, and each metropolitan problem becomes more expensive, slower, and more politically exploitable. The current contrast is brutal. The pothole becomes an argument; the camera, a substitute for the budget. The recent scene of a legislator filming herself while patching potholes in Guadalajara should not be read as a local curiosity or as an activist gesture. It should be read as the most visible symptom of a political culture that has replaced management with scenography. Where fiscal rules, metropolitan investment, and shared responsibilities should be discussed, the politics of the clip appears: shovel, mix, indignation, and video. Citizenship ceases to be treated as a political subject and begins to be treated as an audience. That is why the fundamental discussion is not who showed up with a shovel, but who dismantled the tools that could have prevented reaching this point. It does not demand that the Federation solve every pothole; it demands that it stop stripping away capacities and then using the deterioration as proof of local incompetence. That pattern is recognizable in many countries: first, the government closest to the people is financially strangled, and then it is used as a scapegoat. The result not only makes future repair more expensive; it also degrades public conversation. The underlying message is unequivocal. It had serious defects, including opacity. But its weakening and practical disappearance were not accompanied by a better mechanism. While cities lose tools to sustain their daily infrastructure, the federal government boasts a "Mega-Pothole-Filler" of 50 billion pesos to intervene in 18,000 kilometers of federal highways by 2026. It is worth highlighting: federal highways, not municipal urban streets.
