On Corruption in Mexico

The presidential campaign season just got started in Mexico. Although the questions that follow are posed to the candidates, the questions themselves are eye-opening to people outside Mexico who seek to increase their understanding of this complicated and complex society. 

Adapted from post in Mexico Voices blog, translated from editorial published in the Mexican newspaper, El Universal. 

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Agustín Basave holds a Ph.D. in political science from Oxford University. He is Director of Graduate Studies of the Iberoamerican University in Mexico City. His most recent book is 'Mexicanness and Schizophrenia'.

Introduction: Now that the campaigns have started, it has become fashionable for citizens to question the presidential candidates. I want to put to some questions to the candidates about what I believe is Mexico's cancer: corruption.

1. Do you think that conditions in our country are such that it is easier and more convenient to violate or evade the law than to obey it?

2. If yes: Do you agree that under such conditions, to expect most people to act with honesty is to bet on them being a company of saints.

3. If yes: Do you think that the cause of this situation is that the law is often so far from reality, or so convoluted, that codes of unwritten rules have had to be created to actually give functionality to our social life?

    If yes: I suppose it's because you accept that we have perverse incentives that punish adherence to the law and reward illegal behavior.

4. So then: Do you believe that the evil began five centuries ago with the [cultural norm that prevailed in the Spanish] colony, "The law is respected, but not obeyed," (Acátese pero no se cumpla) or, at least, that there is a cultural inertia that reverts to that norm?

2. If you answered ‘Yes' to the previous four questions:

1. What would you do to make legislation more realistic, simple and able to be complied with? 

2. How would you change the mentality that assumes "not dealing means not advancing," and "the crook doesn't do battle"? 

3. Most importantly, if you recognize that informal rules are more functional than the formal ones, how would you make it possible that corruption benefit most Mexicans to a greater or lesser extent?

Context: When we talk about corruption, we generally evoke the politician or union leader who has become obscenely rich by awarding contracts for public works or selling positions, and assume that everybody is against corruption. We don't usually think  about the children of a bureaucrat or a policeman who are able to have school supplies because their father took enough bribes, or the daughter of a manufacturer of pirated products whose earnings have allowed her a Fifteenth Birthday Party, or the woman who is able to have a kidney transplant because her husband sold short weight in his little shop, or the mother who stopped suffering because one of her nephews bribed a judge to get his cousin out of jail.

And if we undertake the mental effort to consider the most corrupting power, organized crime, it will present to us the horror of scenes of violence, and we will fail to notice the peasants who no longer die of hunger because they cultivate drugs, or the number of families that have raised their standard of living because they went into drug dealing. This includes the Ninis [youth who neither study nor work] who, by being assassins or lookouts, have found opportunities that the universities and the labor market deny to them.

One cannot understand the roots and proliferation of corruption in Mexico without understanding that, while eating away at society, it also brings benefits to many people. There are narcocorridos [popular folk ballads] because astute drug lords build playgrounds or churches in the villages—and, of course, because in our value system, wealth and power have a disproportionate value.

1. What do you propose to counteract this situation?

1. Do you realize that to enter the Mexican game of illegality has become a rational decision?

2. Are you aware that the sum of these individual reasonings results in collective irrationality?

Comment: I know that it would be political suicide for you to dare to remind us that not only members of the elites are beneficiaries of corruption, but that the tacit acquiescence to the web of complicity that surrounds us is as wide as the population that, at some point in their lives, takes advantage of it.

3. Do you really want to eliminate the possibility of evading taxes or of paying a bribe to avoid punishment? Why?

2. Do you think that we need a new Constitution—one that is more realistic, concise and functional, containing only the broad outlines of our legal framework and not operating as a national project for the future [as legal experts describe the current Constitution as doing], but as a guide to present behavior?

1. Without taking refuge in the pretext of it being an assumed impossibility, do you think Mexico needs a new Constitution?

2. Do you deem essential a crusade for legislative simplification, a review and adaptation of laws and regulations that gives us transparency and effective legal tools for discouraging bribes and unwritten rules in general?

3. Finally, would you carry out an educational reform that will teach new generations that honesty pays, that the law ought to be obeyed while it is in force, even when it may harm us?

Of course, Mr. and Mrs. Candidate, you can discard my analysis or not answer all my questions. But if you do so, I only ask that you give us your interpretation of the phenomenon of Mexican corruption and your strategy for combatting it—at the bottom, at its roots.