Laughing ‘Til it Hurts

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In Mexico, “we have a whole vocabulary that tries to normalize corruption,” Javier Treviño-Rangel told 100Reporters. “For instance, ‘That is how we do things here.  It could be worse. Everybody does it. As long as it does not affect me,’ and so on.”

Indeed, Mexican humor has also contributed to that vocabulary. Take the popular Mexican saying “Hidalgo’s year,” mistakenly traced in the popular imagination to Miguel Hidalgo de Costilla, one of Mexico’s founding fathers.

In reality, the phrase has its roots in what one drinker tells another as the bottle of tequila runs down: “Chingue su madre el que deje algo” (loosely translated: Damn the one who leaves something behind). “Algo” rhymes with Hidalgo, who surely never expected his name to be associated with corruption, but then again, this is Mexico.

So, during the long 70-year-old “perfect dictatorship” (to quote Nobel prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa) of the left-of-center Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, Mexicans began applying the phrase to the final year in office of all presidents, a time when voters were convinced government employees at the federal, state and municipal level would steal their offices bare, leaving nothing behind for their successors. The PRI lost power in 2000, but the belief did not.

Lo and behold, 2012 is “Hidalgo’s year” for Mexican President Felipe Calderón.

“I have leftist friends who are convinced that (the Mexican system) allows ‘Hidalgo’s year’ and corruption in general, because it is actually an ‘odd way to redistribute wealth,’ far from illegal or corrupt,” commented Treviño-Rangel, shaking his head and staring in disbelief, as if at some absent culprit.

 

Coming Home to Corruption

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Coming Home to Corruption
Mexican authorities fired 10 percent of the federal police force in 2010, in an effort to clean house. / REUTERS

México City – Javier Treviño-Rangel, a doctoral candidate in sociology, landed at Benito Juárez Airport here after five years in London, and found himself greeted by an old friend he had hoped never to see again: corruption.

No sooner had the 33-year-old scholar retrieved his luggage than he felt “back in the country where surrealism is real life.” A set of lights controlled whether his bags would sail past a luggage inspection or not. He would push a button: if it flashed green, he’d be free to go; if red, an official would rummage through his suitcases.

“The perfect metaphor for the rule of law in Mexico: it is determined by the Wheel of Fortune!” Treviño-Rangel said, still fuming at the memory.

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Blame the Past

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Most historians believe that corruption is woven deep in the culture and history of Mexico, dating to the Spanish colonization of the New World in the XVI century.

Historical records show that the king’s viceroys would sometimes reply to royal decrees by saying, “I obey but [do] not comply.”

Today, the phrase still describes “the attitude of Mexican public officials towards government, who behave as if they own their post,” Aguayo told 100Reporters.

Much more than that phrase comes from those days as well. In Mexico, exaggerated bureaucracy has its origins in the Spanish Crown, which countered the power of its conquering soldiers by dispatching legions of royal officials to insure the crown controlled decisions made in its colonies.

This resulted in an avalanche of paperwork, with witnesses going back and forth between the viceroys and the royal envoys. Long journeys were made and stacks of documents written for all procedures, big and small.

Old habits die hard. Since then, regular citizens in Mexico’s XXI Century have to fill out complicated forms for all transactions, always stamped, sealed and signed by the right authorities -most of whom are seldom available -often in triplicate.

Small wonder that, rather than going through an exhaustive and possibly costly legal process to ensure that all rules have been followed to the letter, there is often the temptation to bypass them by placing money in someone’s hands or in a brown envelope. MLP

Venezuela’s Vanishing Billions

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Venezuela’s Vanishing Billions
By Maria L. Pallais

Nearly $30 billion is missing from a Venezuelan national development fund controlled by President Hugo Chávez, who appears to have diverted some of the missing money to his political allies in other countries, while much of the rest remains unaccounted for.

The money came from a $69.4 billion fund for development aid, known as Fonden, which is designed to take public money, largely from Venezuela’s state-run oil company and its Central Bank, and use it on domestic development projects such as highways, schools, factories and hospitals.

For years in Venezuela, critics of the president have nicknamed Fonden “Chávez’s slush fund.” Information only now becoming public shows that is not far off the mark: El Fondo de Desarrollo Nacional, as it is formally known, operates outside the Venezuelan National Assembly’s budget process and largely beyond public scrutiny, answerable only to a board of directors and to Chávez himself.

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