IN Mexico, our Monuments shows government' corruption

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Official Corruption in Mexico, Once Rarely Exposed, Is Starting to Come to Light
By KARLA ZABLUDOVSKY
​
MEXICO CITY — Andrés Granier has a sumptuous wardrobe and lifestyle. He has bragged about owning 400 pairs of shoes, 300 suits and 1,000 shirts, collected from luxury stores in New York and Los Angeles. His purchases barely fit in his several properties, scattered throughout Mexico and abroad.
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Tapes of Andrés Granier, center, the former governor of Tabasco State, boasting of his lifestyle were leaked to a radio station.

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Cash that was found on a property linked to José Manuel Saiz, Mr. Granier’s treasurer. Mr. Saiz was arrested this month.
A tape recording of Mr. Granier’s boasts, making him sound like a highflying corporate executive, was leaked to a local radio station last month. But his job title, until December, was governor of a midsize southeastern Mexican state, a position that currently pays about $92,000 a year after taxes.
“We go to Fifth Avenue and buy a pair of shoes; $600,” Mr. Granier is heard saying about one of his trips abroad. “I took clothes to Miami, I took clothes to Cancún, I took clothes to my house, and I have leftovers,” he added, saying, “I’m going to auction them off.” (The day after the recording was made public, he said that he had been inebriated while making those statements in October.)
But just as eye-opening as the extravagances of a public official — now under investigation after Mr. Granier’s successor discovered that about $190 million in state funds was unaccounted for, the state government said this month — is that they came to light at all in a country where state and local corruption, a serious drag on Mexico’s development, run deep and are rarely exposed.
The case of Mr. Granier, who was taken into custody on June 14 at a Mexico City hospital where he is being treated for a heart ailment, is just the latest among several former governors and public officials who have recently found themselves under investigation or facing public scorn.
Watchdog groups are gaining strength, opposition parties are challenging and exposing the faults of the status quo, and social and traditional news media organizations are increasingly seeking to hold officials accountable.
“There will be more of these because the issue has taken off,” said Ricardo Corona, a public finance expert at the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness, a research group in Mexico City. “There is encouragement on the issues of transparency, accountability, access to information.”
Mr. Granier’s case is one of the more closely followed political spectacles here in recent years.
By January, when the new government in his state, Tabasco, found holes in the budget, Mr. Granier, 65, had retreated into obscurity. This month, after public shock and outrage over the recording reached a fever pitch, he suddenly resurfaced on television, saying he was in Miami.
“I’m going back to Mexico,” he declared in an interview on one of Mexico’s most-watched morning shows, Primero Noticias. “I don’t owe absolutely anything.”
Upon his arrival at the airport in the capital the following day, a chaotic news media swarm engulfed Mr. Granier — at one point he stumbled before the cameras — before he was whisked away in a white S.U.V., with camera crews on motorcycles giving chase.
Three days later, the Tabasco state attorney’s office issued an arraignment order for Mr. Granier on suspicion of embezzlement and improper exercise of public service.
His treasurer, José Manuel Saiz, already had been arrested this month on suspicion of embezzlement as he tried to cross the border into the United States, after boxes containing nearly $7 million in unexplained cash were discovered on a property linked to him....


To be continued...*
 
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A decade ago, such suspicious accounting would have most likely been kept under wraps, as Mexican officials tended to protect one another and the public took their malfeasance for granted. During the uninterrupted 71-year rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, governors, who often secured their appointments based on friendly ties with the autocratic presidents, were almost expected to pillage state treasuries.
When the party lost the 2000 presidential election, it left a political vacuum across the states. Governors around the country acquired unprecedented autonomy and almost no oversight, said Alfonso Zárate, the president of Grupo Consultor Interdisciplinario, a political consulting firm in Mexico.
State debt rose to $30 billion in 2012 from about $15 billion in 2008, according to the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit. Accounting for inflation, that was a 70.4 percent increase, according to an article in the online publication Animal Político by Marco Cancino, a political analyst in Mexico City. Governments have reported scant details of how they have spent the money from these loans.
But with governors from opposing political parties succeeding one another and doing away with the unspoken pact of the PRI years, in which incoming leaders protected departing ones, a system of checks and balances — some have called it political retribution — is emerging.
Freedom of information laws, recent legislative overhauls demanding more accountability from state governments and an increasingly technologically engaged society have been more successful at preventing murky finances from going unquestioned.
As a result, tales of disgraced former governors are becoming a staple of the news here, and are part of what Mr. Zárate calls an “incipient democracy.”
In 2011, the federal attorney general’s office opened an investigation into a $3 billion debt in the state of Coahuila, acquired mostly during the administration of Humberto Moreira, a former president of the PRI, which recovered the presidency in December. The former governor of the state of Aguascalientes, Luis Armando Reynoso, is being investigated over improper exercise of public service, news organizations have reported.
Last year, Mario Ernesto Villanueva Madrid, the former governor of the state of Quintana Roo who was extradited to the United States in 2010, pleaded guilty to conspiring to launder millions of dollars in bribes he received from the powerful Juárez drug organization, to ensure that its cocaine moved safely through his state, undisturbed by law enforcement.
Inroads in transparency, however, have yet to change the culture and mentality of “El que no tranza, no avanza,” or “He who does not cheat, does not get ahead,” a popular motto here. And these victories have yet to transform the country’s image abroad: Mexico fell in Transparency International’s corruption perception index to 105th place in 2012 from 57th in 2002, with a lower ranking indicating that the country is seen as more corrupt.
“We still don’t have accountability,” said Mr. Cancino, the political analyst, who warned that progress in transparency practices at the federal level would slowly make their way down to the local and state levels. “There are still 32 battles that we have to wage,” he said, referring to Mexico’s 31 states and one federal district.
Small gains in transparency, seen through scandals like the one enveloping Mr. Granier, have not translated into justice served, experts say. Governors are investigated but rarely charged.
“We know what is going on,” said Sergio Aguayo, a political analyst at the Colegio de México. “But no measures are being taken.”
Mexicans who are active on Twitter discuss these scandals for days and sometimes weeks, shaming politicians and pressing traditional news media to cover them extensively. But political analysts argue that there are no effective mechanisms yet to translate citizen participation into structural change.
“What do we do so that society goes from indignation to action?” Mr. Cancino asked.
In the meantime, former politicians who endure public scrutiny and a dose of humiliation often come out of these scandals largely unscathed. In April, the newspaper Reforma reported that Mr. Moreira, the repudiated former Coahuila governor, was living with his family in an upscale neighborhood in Barcelona, Spain, while attending a local university.
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Fighting Education Overhaul, Thousands of Teachers Disrupt Mexico City
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Teachers blocked access to a government building in Mexico City on Thursday. The city’s central square was also occupied.
By KARLA ZABLUDOVSKY
Published: August 24, 2013
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MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s highly anticipated education overhaul program — intended to weed out poorly performing teachers, establish professional hiring standards and weaken the powerful teachers’ union — is buckling under the tried-and-true tactic of huge street protests, throwing the heart of the capital into chaos.


A radical teachers’ group mobilized thousands of members in Mexico City last week, chasing lawmakers from their chambers, occupying the city’s historic central square, blocking access to hotels and the international airport, and threatening to bring an already congested city to a halt in the coming days.

These mobilizations, analysts said, suggest how difficult it may be for President Enrique Peña Nieto to get through this and other changes he has pushed since taking office in December, including an energy and telecommunications overhaul deemed vital to revving up the economy.

Already, lawmakers, who passed the principal outlines of the education program in December and are negotiating additional legislation needed to carry it out, have shelved one of the bill’s most vital provisions, an evaluation requirement aimed at halting the common practice of buying and selling teaching jobs and establishing mechanisms to fire poorly performing instructors.

“What has happened is very grave,” said Sergio Aguayo, a political analyst at the Colegio de México. “A kidnapped city and a dismantled reform.”


Mr. Peña Nieto had focused on the public education system because he and analysts have called it vital to moving more people into the middle class.

Mexico ranks last in standardized test scores among the countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Teachers buy, sell or inherit positions as though they were family heirlooms. Removing poorly performing teachers is virtually impossible, even over allegations of sexual or substance abuse.
But this year began with hope that change was coming.

The main political parties agreed to work together to pass the overhaul. In February, the seemingly untouchable leader of the powerful main teachers’ union, Elba Esther Gordillo, was ousted from her post and jailed on suspicion of embezzlement, a rare rebuke to powerful figures here.

But by April, members of a small but militant faction of the union began pushing back with violent protests in Guerrero State, including the shutdown of the highway connecting the tourist hub of Acapulco to Mexico City. Demonstrators then paralyzed parts of Oaxaca and Michoacán States, in the south and west.

Last week, they descended on Mexico City, where they turned the central square into a tent city, forcing the Mexico City Marathon, scheduled for Sunday, to be rerouted. And they blockaded the two buildings belonging to the chambers of Congress, forcing the legislature to meet at a convention center. “The president of the country, the secretary of education, they are not putting up a fight for the reform,” said Edna Jaime, director of México Evalúa, a public policy research group. “They threw it out and left it alone.”


Ms. Jaime said she believed the federal and state governments were afraid of heightening the conflict with a direct confrontation.

On Friday, Mr. Peña Nieto defended the proposal, saying that teachers who objected to the changes misunderstood them.

“The education reform will give them opportunities that they don’t have today,” he said. “The reform benefits Mexico’s teachers because it is designed to give them job stability, clear rules and certainty for ascending within the national education system.”

Much of the rancor from the teachers has focused on evaluations. The new law would make them obligatory every four years. Teachers who failed an evaluation could try again a year later, and again a year after that. After failing three times, tenured teachers would be moved to administrative positions while newer teachers would be fired.
“This evaluation is disguised to start firing our peers,” said Floriberto Alejo, 50, a teacher who came from Oaxaca State on Monday.


Mr. Alejo said the proposed overhaul poses a risk to teachers’ seniority. “The education reform, full of tricks, is on track to privatize education.” He said the change intends to fire many teachers and make it harder for parents to find fully staffed public schools, therefore forcing them to send their children to private ones.

Last week, Congress stripped that requirement from the bill, saying it would be taken up at a later date.

“If this content of the law is eliminated in order to avoid conflict, the reform will be practically inconclusive and have no effect,” said Sergio Cárdenas, an education expert at CIDE, a Mexico City research university.

By Friday, the city ground to a near standstill. Getting around the city, in some places, took two to three times as long as usual.


The country’s main airline, Aeroméxico, waived all change fees for passengers who missed their flights, while television stations showed alternate routes to the airport and other neighborhoods.

“This is the expression of a country that is drowning in violence,” said Mr. Aguayo, the political analyst. “There is no ability to impos
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