Politics: Public Prosecutors. The Weakest Link?

MEXICO - Report 13 Nov 2017 by Guillermo Valdes and Esteban Manteca

The extent to which the public has expressed growing concern over worsening corruption and security indicators leads us to expect those two issues to dominate the upcoming presidential contest. As always, the economy will also be a major point of debate, but with GDP at acceptable levels it may not carry the same weight in people’s minds, unless the US decides to derail trade renegotiations or just pull the plug on Nafta, thereby undercutting Mexico’s growth expectations and stoking the sort of financial turbulence that plagued past presidential election years. In such an event, we could expect the incumbent PRI to play a nationalist card and try to use the adversarial image of Donald J. Trump to distract the public from graft scandals, and concerns about the safety of their families and neighbors at a time of record criminal violence.

This week we initiate a series in which we will be analyzing all three major topics in depth. On this occasion we begin to take up security matters with an initial assessment of the criminal justice system and the as yet far-from-complete transition from a slow and impersonal inquisitorial system to a more transparent accusatory one. Only four states have completely adopted the new system, and two have not even begun the process, so the penal system is currently functioning as a hybrid of the old and new arrangements.

According to a jurimetrics study by researcher Guillermo Zepeda Lecuona, there is a higher level of prosecutions in states that have made the transition, but his analysis concludes that the rate of prosecutorial effectiveness is the same under both systems, and there remains a greater than 99% probability that people whom prosecutors deem guilty of crimes will never serve a single day of a sentence.

The research points to many weak links in the system, including a lack of public prosecutors and resources, but a simple expansion of personnel and budgets will be squandered if they are not applied more efficiently in the context of a sustained proactive strategy for strengthening human resources and building public confidence in the system.

Now read on...

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