Despite rampant graft in many Central American and Caribbean nations, Mexico has the dubious honor of being Latin America’s most corrupt country, according to a study by Transparencia Mexicana.
The NGO, which grew off the trunk of anti-corruption organization Transparency International in 1999, interviewed 22,302 people in 20 countries in Latin America (including the Caribbean) from May to December of last year. What sent Mexico galloping ahead of the competition (which included, from second to fifth place, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Venezuela and Panama) was the amount of bribes and/or “ gifts” being paid to public officials in charge of basic services, to ensure those services’ continued smooth operation. Fifty-one percent of interviewees reported dispensing said bribes.
Furthermore, 31-40 percent of those questioned for the study said they had paid bribes for hospital, educational or document-obtaining services, and 21-30 percent reported paying bribes to the police.
However, for such a bleak set of figures, optimism regarding the feasibility of the layman’s ability to combat corruption overruled what one could easily see as rational, empirically-based pessimism, with 74 percent saying they believe that the actions of ordinary people can make a difference in the fight against corruption.
Public perceptions over the scale of corruption in Mexico have hardened during the administration of current President Enrique Peña Nieto. With a series of scandals causing his approval ratings to dip to record lows, the president has been unable to convince the nation that his administration has turned over a new leaf and is not lining its pockets like Mexican politicians of old. Even the high-profile arrests of several corrupt state governors has failed to earn his government much kudos.
The public clamor for effective measures to combat corruption appeared to have been answered to a degree when a people’s initiative led to the creation of the National Anticorruption System (SNA), signed into law in July 2016. However, more than a year later, the system – which was supposed to create special anti-corruption prosecutors and courts, overseen by private citizens – is still struggling to be established at both federal and state levels.
In Jalisco, the State Anticorruption System (SEA) is still in diapers, with persisting concerns over the selection process for the oversight committee. A shortlist of around 74 names from the private sector is being whittled down to 15 “finalists,” expected to be announced on October 23. The nine-member selection panel – comprising five figures from academia, three from business and industry and one from the media (six male, three females) – then have until November 1 to choose the final five “upright” citizens who will serve as representatives on the SEA’s Comite de Participacion Social (Social Participation Committee).
Like many of Mexico’s laws that are barely enforced, the anticorruption system offers no hard-and-fast guarantees that graft will diminish significantly in the short-term. Mexico may continue to be “Latin America’s most corrupt nation” for a while longer, experts anticipate. Nonetheless, the initiatives are a welcome start, most agree. The SNA, said Viridiana Rios, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, is “a much more solid institution to identify, prosecute and sanction acts of corruption than anything the country has had before.”