Mexico's Corrupt government

Alexander Mora Venancio

Corruption in Mexico’s government is and has been a huge problem for many years. Take drugs for example, as we all know drugs are a big part of Mexico’s economy and due to this there are many drug transactions occurring. However, some of these drug traffickers are apprehended and pursued by police officers. This does not stop these powerful drug lords because, most police officials have been known to take bribes for keeping quiet. It is estimated that on average, one billion in bribes is paid to municipal police officers alone each year. In the last seven years, 144 agents and officers from the Customs and Border Protection have been arrested on corruption charges. Another example of police officers acting with corruption is in the case of Margarita Crispin, who collected roughly five million US dollars over three years for transporting marijuana through her checkpoint. CNN reports that Mexico came in 103rd place out of 175 nations in the previous year’s survey of corrupt countries, with a score of 35 on a scale from 0 to a hundred, 0 being highly corrupt and 100 being very clean/not corrupt. The least corrupt country scored a 92 on this scale so, to give you a clear picture of where Mexico is, they are not the most corrupt country but, they are pretty bad. It seems as if the only thing you need to protect you from the law is money. It appears as if the constitution or even the principles of this nation don’t come into play, you can basically get away with anything if you have money. So, how do the citizens feel about these numbers? They are not surprised, in a recent survey out of 1,000 Mexicans 90 percent felt the police were corrupt or extremely corrupt and 80 percent felt the current judiciary system is as well. Over 60 percent of the people surveyed confessed that someone in their household had paid a bribe to the police in the previous year. Numbers will only increase especially due to the recent prison break of the infamous drug lord ‘El Chapo’ through a mile-long tunnel and no doubt the help of security guards. There is no doubt there is corruption within the police force the real question is how far this corruption goes? In November, a news reports from the site Aristegui Noticas alleged that Mexico’s President had been living in a very expensive, fancy seven million dollar mansion owned by a contractor who has won “lucrative government politics”. The government responded to this accusation by saying that the money was from the wife, Angelica Rivera, who had been paying for the house through her acting career. It did not take long before Mrs. Rivera announced she would be selling the house. Recently, many scandals such as these have arose which makes us question how corrupt is Mexico, and is there any way to fix this country? Well, there has been some effort in trying to fix this, whether this has been affective or not is undetermined. One method to fix corruption was to employ women for jobs such as traffic officer because women are more trustworthy and less corrupt then men. However, women are not actually aloud to write tickets so, this method isn’t very effective. After the brutal killing of 43 students last year, President Pena Nieto proposed yet another reform to fix the problem, which could change the constitution so that the state would control local police in order to fight corruption. However, reforms such as these have not worked in the past so citizens have little hope for this one.