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 Editorials | At Issue | August 2006 
Bribery a Way of Life in Mexico
 Marla Dickerson - LATimes
| | Luis Alfonso Sánchez Contreras, shown in June, said his restaurant license was held up because he wouldn't pay a bribe to Mexico City officials. (Don Bartletti/LATimes) |
Mexico City — Luis Alfonso Sánchez Contreras searched the capital's trendy Condesa neighborhood for two years to find the right spot for a pasta restaurant.
He registered his business with tax authorities. He got permits to remodel his restaurant's interior. He asked permission to set up sidewalk tables. He won approval to install a tank of natural gas.
"I wanted to do everything by the book," said Sánchez, 44, a former bank manager.
So when local officials solicited an under-the-table payment of $1,350 to speed approval of his business operating license, he balked.
More than five months later, authorities still haven't granted him permission to open. Sánchez's bills are mounting. But he refuses to pony up.
"It just perpetuates this rotten system," said Sánchez, who has sunk $70,000 into the venture. "They are public servants. Their job is to serve the people, not to enrich themselves."
Officials in the permit office of Sánchez's borough of Cuauhtémoc declined several requests for an interview.
Corruption remains a huge obstacle to Mexico's advancement. It is a hidden tax that stifles job creation and economic growth, erodes respect for law and order and poisons citizens' trust in their institutions.
To be sure, corruption is a global phenomenon affecting rich nations as well as poor ones. Witness the waste and fraud of the federal payouts from Hurricane Katrina in the United States.
But in Mexico, it is an ongoing disaster. Mexican officials have estimated that as much as 9 percent of Mexico's gross domestic product is siphoned off annually to corruption. In 2005 that would have amounted to $69 billion, or more than the nation spends on education and defense combined.
One of President Vicente Fox's first acts upon taking office in late 2000 was to create a Cabinet-level position for an anti-corruption czar. A landmark transparency law was implemented to give citizens access to public records.
Yet election authorities in 2003 imposed nearly $50 million in fines on Fox's Alliance for Change, the political coalition that helped get him elected, for campaign-finance violations.
Whoever succeeds him as president this December has his work cut out for him. Corruption in Mexico remains endemic and takes myriad forms, including kickbacks on government contracts, money looted from social programs and drug money that has compromised courts, cops and political candidates.
One out of every five businesses in Mexico admits to making "extra-official" payments to win public contracts, speed government paperwork or skirt regulations, according to a 2005 report by the Center for Economic Studies of the Private Sector in Mexico City.
The average Mexican's most frequent brush with the system is "la mordida," or "the bite." Those are the small bribes, "tips" and other handouts that public servants and others squeeze out of the citizenry to perform routine functions.
Last year more than one in 10 transactions for public services involved an under-the-table payment, according to Transparencia Mexicana, the Mexican chapter of the global anti-corruption group Transparency International.
Want to keep the tow-truck driver from hauling your car away? A quick $20 can get you off the hook in Mexico City.
Want your garbage collected? Some sanitation workers won't touch it without a weekly "tip."
Transparencia Mexicana estimates that Mexicans in 2005 paid out $2 billion to public servants in more than 115 million acts of corruption. That's equal to the entire 2006 budget of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the country's largest seat of higher learning.
That $2 billion "could have gone to private investment, opening new businesses and creating new jobs," said Eduardo Bohórquez, director of Transparencia Mexicana. "It creates a barrier to development."
The trend has worsened since 2003, when the nonprofit group calculated that only about one in 12 transactions involved payoffs.
Experts point to a variety of factors fueling the system, including low government salaries, a weak justice system and a culture of impunity born of seven decades of one-party rule.
The bite of la mordida is particularly painful for the poor. The average payout is about $16, or more than four times the daily minimum wage.
But far from being hapless victims, some Mexicans admit that they work the system.
Mexico City resident Omar Vargas López needed a copy of his birth certificate to renew his passport for a trip to Argentina. Told that it would take 10 days, the computer engineer asked the documents clerk in his borough of Coyoacán whether they could "reach an agreement." Four hours later and $15 lighter, he had a certified copy of his birth record.
"I know it's bad to do these kinds of things, but in cases of emergency there is no alternative," said Vargas, 27.
The good news, Bohórquez said, is that some regions of Mexico have made dramatic improvements, with the help of technology.
Five years ago, the central state of Querétaro was near the bottom of Transparencia Mexicana's ranking of the nation's 31 states and the federal district in terms of petty corruption. But in 2005, Querétaro topped the agency's list as Mexico's cleanest state, with only two out of every 100 transactions involving a payout.
Among the changes: Querétaro adopted an automated system for tracking public-works projects and paying suppliers. It also set up an online complaint service for citizens to blow the whistle on government workers who try to tap them for bribes.
The southern state of Chiapas has made similar strides, vaulting to No. 2 last year from the middle of the pack in 2001. It did it by installing public kiosks that allow citizens to renew driver's licenses, order birth certificates, pay taxes and complete government paperwork online, eliminating long lines and opportunistic public servants.
Corruption "isn't embedded in our genes," Bohórquez said. "Simple changes can have a big impact. People will respond." |
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