The New Your Times reports on an incident of corruption that occurred in Mexico some years ago. The NYT writes:
The allegation landed like a bombshell in the United States: One of the world’s biggest drug kingpins had paid a $100 million bribe to the former president of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto.
Yet in Mexico, the claim — made on Tuesday in a Brooklyn courtroom by a former ally of the drug lord, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo — was met with barely a shrug.
The news did not lead any of Mexico’s major daily newspapers on Wednesday. Nobody raised the issue at the morning news conference of the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, usually a daily billboard of the nation’s most pressing political issues.
Mexicans were far more concerned with quotidian [mundane] matters, such as whether they would be able to refuel their cars — a gas crisis has crippled supplies around the country — and whether the new government would get the votes it needs to create a new national security apparatus, part of its plan to curb violence.
Ensuring justice is done “is not in our hands,” said Dolores Haro, 59, who was eating lunch at a taco counter in Mexico City on Wednesday. She said most people she knew had more pressing worries, like the gas shortage.
And allegations of corruption — even on such a monumental scale — are not that surprising, added Pedro Rodríguez, 28, a marketing executive eating at the same counter.
“We Mexicans are no longer shocked,” he said. “We know that there won’t be a response.”
If this is evidence that the Mexican people have become accepting of the inevitability of corruption in their country, could that happen in the US? Given the deep corruption of the Trump administration, that possibility looks far less remote than it did just three years ago.
Thieves: In her book, Thieves of State, Sarah Chayes described in ghastly detail the kleptocracy called Afghanistan and how corruption rendered any US efforts at nation, democracy and civil society building as utterly futile right from the get go. My review of <em>Thieves</em> includes this:
It turns out that kleptocrats like Qayum and his kleptocrat brother, president Hamid Karzai and the rest of the entire Afghan government know two things very, very well. First, they present themselves as a safe, rational, sincere refuge in the face of a vicious throat-cutting population. Chayes was terrified for a long time and another Afghani kleptocrat Chayes worked with did that number on her to keep her on a short leash. Kleptocrats need to keep outsiders like Chayes from directly interacting with average Afghanis as much as possible. Outsider and even leaders speaking directly to the people that non-leader kleptocrats have feared for centuries.
Second, all high level kleptocrats learned to speak English. They work hard to learn the jargon and acronyms that Western minds want to hear. On other words, they tell us exactly what we wanted to hear. The poison sounded so true and rational because it sounded so much like us.
It took years before the US even came to understand the deep degree of systemic corruption in Afghanistan and how it neutered all US efforts in that country. To some extent, the US fostered the corruption by directly supporting known kleptocratic oligarchs and politicians, thus earning the US the hate of many average Afghan people. To the extent there are forces in Mexico working against corruption, they are probably fighting a bloody, losing battle. The forces of civilization are betrayed at the very top of the Mexican government.
An existential threat?: Is corruption an existential threat to civil society and maybe even the human species? Corruption arguably is destabilizing because it invariably leads to a very small group of very wealthy people or families with the rest living with low to modest income.
Is global corruption a global problem? Seems so.
Is wealth distribution in the US what Americans think it is? No, and it is going in the opposite direction from public desires.
Does that distribution of wealth reflect honest government, corruption or some combination of the two? Opinions will differ.
B&B orig: 1/1719
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