Politics: Graft, A Many Ringed Circus
Federal officials have begun in recent days to respond to years of complaints regarding widespread corruption at the state level by issuing arrest warrants for two out of at least six high profile cases of gubernatorial malfeasance. It has yet to been seen just how seriously those and other cases might be prosecuted, but credit for such action clearly belongs to the society groups that have long struggled to document such crimes and push for major reforms, a responsibility that government authorities and political parties have shrugged off for far too long.
The parts of the incipient National Anticorruption System that have at long last made it through Congress came as a result of extensive campaigning by civil society groups including their call for full financial, tax and asset disclosures (commonly referred to locally as #3de3) by public officials. The federal government began to move in recent days to investigate and to possibly detain Duarte only after widespread public outrage over gross mismanagement, collapsing public programs and blatant corruption had risen to such heights that the PRI had been turned out of office in the state for the first time in 87 years, and the national political cost of failing to take action had become untenable. The discretionary deployment of prosecutorial power against corruption underscores at least two structural problems in Mexico: a propensity to deploy the justice system for political purposes and an institutional feebleness in investigating and prosecuting, much less punishing, acts of corruption.
There exists a broader problem of institutional weakness: the lack and ineffectiveness of legal and institutional mechanisms with which to investigate and punish corruption. While some progress has been made this year with the passage of a National Anticorruption System Law, much remains to be done to make that system a reality, with myriad bodies and even a cabinet level position yet to be filled.
The president and his government are responsible for finding and bringing to justice both Javier Duarte and Guillermo Padrés, as well as mounting solid and exemplary cases against both men and the other governors accused of similar practices. Political parties also bear a major responsibility in rooting out corruption from their ranks and pushing for NAS legislation at the state level.
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