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MEXICO |
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Current Issues
Introduction | Political Regime | Political Conflict and Competition | Society | Political Economy | Case and The World | Current Issues
Crime and Corruption: The "Colombianization" of Mexico?
The Mexican Revolution successfully strengthened state power and autonomy, and ended endemic violence in Mexico. However, the long domination of the PRI, its dependence on patron-client relations, its cooptation, and its electoral fraud all fostered a culture of corruption and lawlessness that now increasingly threaten the state and its capacity, autonomy, and legitimacy. The ability of the state to impose its authority has eroded because of the explosion of crime since the 1980s. In Mexico City, reported crimes doubled from 1993 to 1997, and an estimated 90 percent of all crime in the city goes unreported. Over a million muggings were reported there in 1997, and three thousand Mexicans were kidnapped and held for ransom in 1998. 1 Statistics like these have led some to wonder if Mexico is heading the way of its unruly Southern neighbor, an effective "Columbianization" 2 of the Mexican state.
The spectacular increase in crime has a variety of causes. To some extent it coincides with the economic crisis that began in the 1980s and was exacerbated by the 1994-95 economic depression. The governments of the 1980s and 1990s have pursued painful neo-liberal economic reforms while simultaneously weakening the welfare state established by the PRI. The rise in crime rates may also be related to the steady decline in the PRI's hegemony and the decentralization and democratization of the political system. As in the case of most post-authoritarian democracies, crime tends to flourish when the power of an authoritarian state is weakened and a painful economic transition is underway. The increase of drug trafficking has also been accompanied by a dramatic increase in violent crime.
What is perhaps most alarming from the perspective of the legitimacy of the state is that Mexico's various police forces (local, state, and federal) contribute directly to the crime problem. Mexican police are generally poorly trained and poorly paid, making them susceptible to corruption. Even worse, the police have been known to be involved in a wave of kidnapping and extortion crimes that have shocked Mexico. In 2002 Mexico City officials invited former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani to advise them on how to stem the twin problems of crime and corruption. A survey in the 1990s showed that between 1981 and 1990 the percentage of Mexicans who thought it acceptable to accept a bribe or buy stolen goods rose from 32 percent to 55 percent. 3
Crime and corruption not only weaken the capacity of the state, they weaken its autonomy. A good example is President Fox's aggressive prosecution of corruption in the union workers at the state oil monopoly, PEMEX. Many of the accused leaders are also members of the PRI's legislative delegation in Congress. The PRI retaliated by threatening to block Fox's proposed partial privatization of Mexico's inefficient energy sector.
The Erosion of Public Order
In 1998 an armed band stole a van and $50,000 worth of equipment from a CNN television crew directly outside the Mexican foreign ministry, where a meeting with U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey was taking place. The building was surrounded by dozens of Mexican police.
Over the last two decades Mexico has seen an alarming rise of drug trafficking, driven by the growing market for illegal drugs north of the border and facilitated by a Mexican legal system that is both weak and corrupt. 4 Mexico has experienced a dramatic growth of drug-related gang violence and a steady stream of corruption scandals involving drug money. The United States has been alarmed by the growing amount of drug traffic across the U.S.-Mexican border: it is estimated that about 70 percent of all marijuana and cocaine imported into the United States arrives through Mexico. American attempts to undertake anti-narcotics operations in Mexico have been attacked as abridging Mexico's sovereignty, and U.S. criticism of Mexico's anti-narcotics effort has often raised tensions between the two neighbors.
Migration
There is a long history of Mexicans emigrating across the two thousand mile U.S.-Mexico border. 5 Mexicans have long argued that the U.S. depends on their immigrants and that their right to work in the United States should be guaranteed through bilateral agreements. But many Americans have focused on the negative impacts of Mexican immigration to the United States. Why has there been such a steady flow of Mexicans into the U.S.? Most immigrants come because of the higher standard of living in U.S., although the first wave of immigrants also fled the violence of the Mexican Revolution. During the severe labor shortages of World War II, the U.S. established the Bracero Program, which allowed over four million Mexicans to work temporarily in the U.S. between 1942 and 1964. Today there are almost fifteen million Mexican Americans in the U.S. (about 8 percent of Mexico's total population).
From 1965 to 1986 an estimated 5.7 million Mexicans immigrated to the United States, of whom 81 percent were undocumented. 6 The United States operated a "de facto guest-worker program" whereby border enforcement was tough enough to prevent a flood of immigration, but not so strict as to prevent a steady flow of cheap and undocumented labor. 7 Most immigrants who tried to enter the United States succeeded, although not on the first try. The U.S. attempt to enforce border control was largely symbolic, but it never threatened the availability of cheap labor. The dramatic growth of undocumented Mexican immigrants, especially after the economic crisis in Mexico during the early 1980s, became a political crisis in the U.S. during the 1980s and 1990s. The result was the 1987 United States Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which imposed sanctions against employers of illegal aliens and toughened enforcement of immigration laws. At the same time, it provided an amnesty for longtime undocumented workers and legalized about 2.3 million Mexican immigrants. 8 However, in the late 1990s illegal immigration continued to skyrocket.
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