| | |  News Around the Republic of Mexico | January 2009 
Mexico Awards Cash for Worst Gov't Red-Tape Sagas
 Alexandra Olson - Associated Press
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| | President Felipe Calderón attends prize giving ceremony for citizens’ competition to identify most useless procedure. (Presidencia de la República) | |
Mexico City — Ana Maria Calvo has fought unsuccessfully for seven months to correct her husband's name on her child's birth certificate.
When she burst into tears after standing in line for hours one day, a bureaucrat told her he did not help crying women.
For her red-tape horror story, Calvo was one of three winners Thursday in a government contest to find Mexico's worst examples of bureaucracy and corruption.
"I was crying, telling them what I needed fixed was just a silly thing, putting in 'Juan,'" Calvo said after receiving a 100,000 peso ($7,500) prize from President Felipe Calderon.
Mexico's epic red tape keeps small businesses from getting off the ground, encourages bribes and corruption and drives off investment, Calderon said. Bribes move about 10 percent of all government transactions – including those to obtain construction licenses, vehicle inspection stickers and street-vending permits, according to the nonprofit group Transparency Mexico.
Calderon thought up the contest in September as part of his administration's efforts to streamline government requirements. The goal is to reduce the federal government's more than 4,200 bureaucratic forms to 3,000 by the time Calderon leaves office in 2012.
A citizens' panel shuffled through more than 20,000 entries to choose the three worst bureaucratic nightmares, one each at the federal, state and municipal level.
Civil servants were not punished, but Calderon promised his government would try to fix problems recounted by contestants.
Calvo's saga still drags on. She first showed up at Mexico City's civil registry office with her husband's original birth certificate, their marriage certificate and more papers – surely enough, she thought, to fix her husband's first name from Antonio to Juan Antonio on her child's birth certificate. Mexican officials refused to issue her child a passport because of the name discrepancy.
The first official said she would have to go through the courts to correct the mistake. When she expressed astonishment, the official told her he didn't like her attitude and sent her to another line. By the time she reached the front of that line, she was crying.
"The second official told me, 'You know what, I don't help crying women. Go see if my colleague will help you,'" Calvo said.
She eventually learned that she would need a notarized copy of her husband's birth certificate to even start the court process. And her husband was born in Spain, adding months of delays.
At the federal level, Cecilia Deyanira Velazquez won 300,000 pesos ($22,000) for the ordeal she goes through every month to get medicine for her son's immunodeficiency syndrome. It takes her at least four days each time.
"This procedure goes through eight hands, between stamps, authorizations, copies," Velazquez said. "But they say that's the way it is, and that there is no other option."
Calderon said he loved the solution Velazquez proposed: a computerized database of patients who need prescription drugs. He said work already has begun to create such a database. |
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