[D66] Mexico and the Gods of Corruption

[R.O.]

NY Times Op-Ed, Sept. 29, 2020
Mexico and the Gods of Corruption
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has a chance to fight corruption 
at the top. But he needs to uphold the law on all sides to be effective.
By Ioan Grillo

MEXICO CITY — I’ve spent two decades trying to make sense of the 
economics of Mexico’s drug trafficking. During that time I have often 
heard a phrase muttered by gangsters and crime journalists: “Who needs 
the angels, when you have God.” If cartels pay off the top levels of 
government, or the gods, then the lower levels, like the police 
officers, are already taken care of. Money rises up like gas, and power 
flows down like water.

When Andrés Manuel López Obrador won the presidency in 2018 on a 
platform of ridding Mexico of corruption, he duly recognized that change 
had to start at the top. “We are going to clean up the government like a 
staircase,” he famously said, meaning from the top down. He said that 
Mexico would no longer suffer at the hands of corrupt leaders, whom he 
called, “a mafia of power.”

Corruption tears at the soul of Mexico, and many here see it as one of 
the country’s leading problems. It’s the reason killer cartels flourish, 
roads have potholes, and doctors treating Covid-19 don’t have better 
protective gear.

It also pervades everyday life, with bribes functioning as the grease 
that keeps the system moving, and in this way it makes a large part of 
the country complicit. Bureaucrats get cash tips for issuing birth 
certificates, for example, and the police pocket cash for turning a 
blind eye to motorists running red lights. The “angels” at the bottom 
take bribes, too.

But when the “gods” at the top are rotten it has the most devastating 
consequences. The former governor of Veracruz, Javier Duarte, was 
accused of skimming billions of dollars from state coffers when he was 
in office between 2010 and 2016, and later convicted on various charges. 
During his term, poverty increased and 17 journalists were murdered. 
After he left office, the biggest mass grave in Mexico’s recent history 
was discovered.

While former governors and generals have been jailed, corruption charges 
have never been filed against those at the very top: the presidents. 
That could now change.

On Sept. 15, the eve of Mexico’s independence day, Mr. López Obrador 
delivered a document to the Senate calling for a referendum on whether 
to indict former presidents if there is evidence of crimes that did 
grave harm during their administrations. It was backed by what activists 
claimed were 2.5 million signatures written on piles of paper that were 
hauled into the building in boxes, an image shared in enthusiastic 
tweets by the president’s supporters.

Critics retorted that you shouldn’t need a referendum on whether justice 
is served, and that it is a distraction from high pandemic deaths and a 
double-digit recession. And as the vote could coincide with midterm 
elections in 2021, it might be a tool to get voters to the polls in 
support of the president’s National Regeneration Movement party, or 
Morena. The thinking there is that people will be more motivated to cast 
a ballot in a historic plebiscite than just a regular midterm.

I think a referendum could give citizen support to what may become very 
politically divisive cases. And going after the gods of corruption is 
certainly a good thing, forcing Mexico to catch up with an anti-graft 
drive across Latin America. In the last half-decade, former presidents 
have been convicted of crimes involving corruption in Honduras, El 
Salvador and Brazil, and charged with similar crimes in Guatemala, Peru, 
Argentina, Panama and Bolivia. Justice could help deter future leaders 
from succumbing to temptation, while acting as a catalyst in cleaning up 
the system, and pushing Mexico to finally live up to its great potential.

Yet there is the danger, as in other Latin American countries, that 
politicians could wield the anticorruption club against their enemies — 
giving yet another weapon to the powerful. Cases need to be open and 
fair, which is especially challenging in a divisive partisan 
environment. And the president’s own allies in Morena need to face the 
same scrutiny. Otherwise, there is a danger of replacing one “mafia of 
power” with another.

There are various accusations against Mexico’s former presidents. The 
biggest case centers on Emilio Lozoya, the former head of the state oil 
company Pemex. Recently extradited from Spain on bribery charges, Mr. 
Lozoya filed a deposition last month claiming that former leaders were 
involved in taking handouts from Pemex and other companies for awarding 
them lucrative contracts.

His harshest accusation was against former President Enrique Peña Nieto, 
alleging that he “created a scheme of corruption in the federal 
government” during his term between 2012 to 2018. Mr. Lozoya also said 
that former President Felipe Calderón had knowledge of bribes when he 
was president between 2006 and 2012. Mr. Peña Nieto has not commented 
publicly on the deposition but he previously denied any misconduct.

In a separate case, Mr. Calderón’s former public security secretary, a 
key figure in his war on drug cartels, has himself been imprisoned in 
the United States on drug-trafficking charges filed there. Mr. Calderón 
has denied wrongdoing and said in a tweet that Mr. Lozoya’s accusations 
are “an instrument of vengeance and political persecution.”

The challenge with fighting corruption, however, is that it can affect 
all sides. When Mr. Lozoya dominated the news, videos emerged of Mr. 
López Obrador’s brother receiving paper bags of cash back in 2015. The 
president said he thought that the money was Morena campaign 
contributions to candidates in local elections but he also said that 
electoral officials should investigate. “If a family member commits a 
crime, they should be judged, whether it’s my son, my wife, my brothers 
or whoever,” he said.

With accusations seeming to touch all of the country’s politicians, it’s 
easy to lose hope that things will change. In his 1984 book “Distant 
Neighbors,” Alan Riding, a former New York Times bureau chief here, 
described corruption as the “oil and glue” that keep the machine in motion.

However, I find hope in the wave of civil society groups that have grown 
in recent years, including Mexicans Against Corruption, which was formed 
by journalists, academics and others in 2015. They are, among other 
things, working to expose cases of graft, which can lead to government 
investigations.

With more eyes on them, Mexican officials are unable to get away with 
such flagrant abuses, the group’s communications director, Darío 
Ramírez, told me. “It’s about how we can have a change so corruption is 
not part of our culture,” he said. “I am optimistic because I believe in 
the evolution of societies.”

Mr. Ramírez said he thought improvements have occurred under President 
López Obrador, who has cut the budgets of various agencies to limit 
waste and embezzlement. But in the long term, he said, it would be best 
to create more independent prosecutors; Mexico’s federal attorney 
general is currently proposed by the president and ratified by the 
Senate. Another potent action would be to expand the online posting of 
all government spending and contracts, which would be intended to make 
it harder to conceal bribes and other fraudulent activity.

“There are more and more tools, above all from civil society and 
journalism, to create the public pressure necessary to change the 
system,” Mr. Ramírez said. “So corruption stops being the oil of all the 
social, political and economic relations in Mexico.”

These tools need to be used against the ruling party as well as former 
leaders. Mr. López Obrador has an opportunity to clean house. But unless 
he is thorough, the effort could be in vain.

Ioan Grillo, a contributing opinion writer, is the author of “El Narco: 
Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency” and, most recently, “Gangster 
Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin 
America.”