Corruption In Mexico Threatens Peña Nieto’s Presidency
Ya me cansé. I’ve had enough. These are the words carried by protestors in Mexico City who are sick and tired of corrupt authorities and the federal government’s failure to act against them. This week has arguably been the hardest week in Peña Nieto’s presidency with scandals relating to the government’s involvement in the disappearance of 43 students in Ayotzinapa
and suspicions of the President accepting gifts for the concession to build a high speed train in Mexico. What started as a spark has now turned to a fire with calls for Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto to resign.
As the Caravel reported early in October, 43 students were allegedly kidnapped and later massacred by a cartel in the Mexican state of Guerrero. Reports now confirm, however, that the Mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca, ordered the police to attack the students because he was afraid that they would disrupt an event meant to promote his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda as his successor in 2015. The police murdered 6 of the students and turned over the remaining 43 to a local cartel, Los Guerreros Unidos. Though there is no evidence that President Peña Nieto has ties to the incident and shares little political ties with Abarca, yet calls for Peña Nieto’s removal have become rampant in Mexico. Citizens perceive that the President has behaved incompetently and indifferently towards the crime. The President hasn’t held a press conference, given any interviews, or answered any questions from independent journalists regarding the incident. Further, it took him 11 days to address the case after the story broke in the media and another 23 days to meet with the parents of the missing students.
On the heels of this news, was another scandal in Mexico regarding a contract to build a high-speed train line. Mexico awarded a $3.75 billion dollar contract to a Chinese-led consortium to build a high-speed passenger rail between Mexico City and Queretaro. However, news broke that President Peña Nieto’s $7 million dollar mansion is owned by the very construction company that would earn millions from the railway contract. After the news broke, President Peña Nieto abruptly canceled the contract to avoid “any doubts about the legitimacy and transparency” of the bidding process. Citizens, however, perceive an ever-greater degree of corruption in the Mexican government, even at the highest levels.
In order to understand the degree of corruption in Mexico one must understand that Mexico only became a full-fledged democracy in 2000. For seven decades prior to 2000, President Nieto’s party the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ruled Mexico under a competitive authoritarian regime. As a result many in the PRI act with impunity and often use the police and judicial courts to enforce political control but not to investigate cartels and crime. While Peña Nieto has argued that rule of law cannot be imposed overnight, the events that preceded this past week have led many Mexican citizens to believe that Peña Nieto isn’t even trying to create rule of law in Mexico.
Though Peña Nieto has been struggling with charges of corruption over the course of the past week, he has been relatively successful in combatting drug cartels and violence in Mexico throughout his presidency. Since Peña Nieto took office in 2012, there has been a 12.5% drop in homicides. Leaders of crime syndicates such as Los Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel have been falling to federal troops with unusual frequency. In February of this year for instance, government succesfully arrested most-wanted kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
Peña Nieto also has been successful in implementing educational, legal and telecommunication reform. On his second day in office, Peña Nieto passed the “Pact for Mexico” which furthers three principal goals in Mexican society: the strengthening of the Mexican state, increasing democratization, and citizen involvement. The pact is made up of 95 public-policy proposals including one that established Mexico’s national education evaluation system and introduced a competitive process for the hiring, promotion, recognition, and tenure of teachers, principals, and administrators.
Peña Nieto has also had a certain degree of success in administrating the Mexican economy. He liberalized the oil industry by opening the state-owned Pemex up to private and foreign investment. This allowed Mexicans to take advantage of new reserves in deep-water and shale gas that Pemex preciously lacked the equipment and technology to explore. As a result Peña Nieto expects growth rates close to 5 percent by the end of his term in 2018. Though there is still a great deal of poverty and underemployment in Mexico, the unemployment rate has fallen even lower than the United States’ at 4.9%.
Though it appears that President Peña Nieto has taken significant steps to reduce violence, update the education system, and improve the economy in Mexico, Mexico remains rife in corruption. Ya me cansé. People have had enough. If he doesn’t make concerted efforts to eliminate corruption and make the government more transparent, Mr. Nieto will put his presidency in jeopardy.