Saturday, June 24, 2006
"Down Mexico Way"
Hard to believe. And there's much more...
Writing in the Weekly Standard, James Thayer tells how it is:
"Let's start with corruption. In its entire history Mexico has seen only one peaceful regime change, six years ago when Vicente Fox of the National Action Party won the presidency, with hopes of ending what his advisor Sergio Aguayo termed '70 years of corruption.' The Economist pointed out that Mexico was, in Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa's words, 'a perfect dictatorship.' It had the superficial appearance of a democracy, but the president could choose all the party's candidates, and so enjoyed nearly absolute power. There was no incentive to clean up the system."
"'There is a total lack of control over the police forces,' says Hiram Escudero, a representative in the Legislative Assembly of Mexico City. In a University of Wisconsin--Madison paper, Valentine Anozie and his colleagues note that 60 percent of crimes in Mexico involve policemen, that a survey indicates 90 percent of Mexico City residents have little or no trust in the police, and that 78 percent of Mexicans say it is normally necessary to pay bribes to resolve issues with the government. 'Mexicans do not trust their police either to protect them from harm or to solve crimes,' said National Secretary of Public Security Alejandro Gertz Manero, quoted in the BBC. Nelson Arteaga Botello and Adrián López conclude that 'corruption in Mexico is by now thoroughly institutionalized and operates at the local and state as well as federal levels.'"
