Great NY Times article on Mexico with the headline, Mexico's Government is blocking its own Anti-Corruption Drive"!
This of course is the ultimate dog bites man story, especially under the current EPN government. Mexico has long been a country with beautiful laws that are not worth the paper they are printed on, and EPN is notorious for announcing major reforms to great fanfare that go nowhere.
But on to the specifics. How is the government blocking the corruption commission, you ask?
None of the 18 judges who are supposed to oversee anti-corruption cases have been appointed by lawmakers. The prosecutor empowered under the new system to pursue investigations independently has not been named. And members of the citizen commission say they have been routinely shut out of discussions about big corruption cases.
“It is a bad joke,” said Luis Manuel Perez de Acha, a tax lawyer on the commission. “I was naïve when the system launched. I believed and had hope that it would work.”
“I know now that they are trying to sabotage everything we do,” he added.
Here's a good summary. The guy gets it in the end. The system isn't broken, it's working exactly how the government intended.
“The Mexican government feeds us placebos and we believe they will cure us,” said Juan Pardinas, the president of the Mexico Institute for Competitiveness and one of the chief architects of the anti-corruption system. “I drank the Kool-Aid and I passed the jar to a lot of people, believing it was a path to change.”
Mr. Pardinas has been one of the most prominent public voices fighting corruption, its corrosive effect on democratic institutions, and the lives it sometimes claims. He ultimately became a target of the spying technology purchased by the Mexican government to surveil criminals and terrorists.
“I killed myself for three years to achieve this, and it’s basically broken,” he said of the anti-corruption effort. “Well, maybe the system isn’t broken. It’s actually working perfectly to allow impunity.”
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