Mexico's president was elected for one very good reason: His promise to end a culture of corruption that has long held Mexico back. But two years in, it increasingly looks like he's unwilling or unable to deliver. wsj.com/articles/mexic… via @WSJ
We have a pretty solid body of evidence building up: He has steadfastly ignored the institutional solutions to corruption. Rather than name a strong, independent anti-corruption prosecutor, he named a party hack. Funding cut for transparency agency and elsewhere.
Mexicans self-report that they are being asked more often for bribes. The government is resorting increasingly to directly assigned projects rather than public bidding. Government agencies are increasingly denying requests for transparency.
When high-profile allies of the president are accused of corruption, he has defended them and cleared them of wrongdoing without real probes. His zest for going after graft seems limited to his rivals.
And now he wants to hold a referendum asking Mexicans if they want to try several ex presidents for corruption, as if rule of law should be a Roman circus.
I strongly believe past administrations were very, very corrupt. His diagnosis was right. One can only hope he sees that the solution, as everywhere, lies in creating strong and independent institutions to systematically punish graft, not leave it up to the whims of one man.
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We have just left Mexico after 22 wonderful years there with The Wall Street Journal. I am now in London with Helena and the kids and will be UK bureau chief at the WSJ. As Monty Python says, “And now for something completely different.”
I will continue to watch Latin America and Mexico in particular with keen interest, and still post stuff about the region, too, if that’s OK. But my feed will also have a healthy dose of UK and Europe, too.
I am deeply grateful to the WSJ for letting me stay so long in Mexico, land of my birth. I arrived a few days before Vicente Fox became the country’s first democratically elected leader. It would be a full year before I got a blackberry. Twitter was still a few years away.
THREAD: Mexico's gov't of Lopez Obrador wants to jail 31 eminent scientists - from astrophysicists to microbiologists - in a max security federal prison that housed "El Chapo" Guzman and still holds some of country's most dangerous criminals.
The scientists are members of an advisory body that helps the gov't get an impartial view from the scientific community on government policy and the direction of Mexican scientific research. Since its creation in 2002, it carried out that role with no problem.
But AMLO appointed a biologist to head the gov't run National Science and Technology Commission, Conacyt, that some describe as an ideologue - she wants to direct science funding to social/political/economic ends. Science in service of AMLO's "Fourth Transformation" of Mexico.
It's worth re-reading past stories with his confident (some might say arrogant?) predictions over how things would play out. Here's our story from a year ago with @HLGatell saying it was likely no worse than the flu:
And here is @HLGatell saying, after 2,271 Mexicans had already died from Covid in early May, that we were halfway through the epidemic and a total of 6,000 people would die.
Thread: Mexico's president AMLO made his career railing against the country's legendary corruption, describing what he said was a "mafia of power' between wealthy businessmen and corrupt politicians. This story gives a detailed look at how that works. wsj.com/articles/how-a…
Business stories with complicated financial transactions can make your eyes glaze over. But if you stand back and connect the dots on this story, as @PerezEnMexico and @RWhelanWSJ do here capably, it's shockingly brazen. It says so much about Mexico's crony capitalism.
Start with a flawed privatization process that sold state firms to politically connected elites. Salinas Pliego bought a state TV network in part using a loan from the then president's corrupt brother! Since, critics say he has used the network to further his biz interests.
Thread: Brazil is ranked number two in the world lists of Covid fatalities, behind the USA. But that is almost certainly wrong. Mexico is almost surely number two. And in this story, we explain why. wsj.com/articles/29-fa… via @WSJ
Mexico is failing to accurately record the majority of those who die from Covid. How do we know? Because the surge of excess deaths in 2020 in Mexico was roughly 2.4 times the official Covid toll. On Dec 12, excess deaths were 274,486 compared to Covid toll of 113,704.
Some of the additional deaths, of course, may not be Covid but from people who put off treatment for chronic disease, for instance. But health experts say the majority of those were likely killed by Covid. Other countries have a far smaller gap between excess deaths and Covid.
THREAD: Since the issue of Mexico's 2006 election has come up again given AMLO's refusal to recognize Biden until all the legal issues around the election are settled, I thought I'd share my experiences during that vote b/c I covered it closely.
AMLO lost the election by about 234,000 votes out of nearly 42 million - a slender 0.56% of the vote (and a similar margin to Biden's win in Pennsylvania). Most pre-election polls showed AMLO winning, but others showed a toss up, and the race clearly tightened at the end.
But AMLO and his team were so confident of victory, they had a hard time accepting they lost. They cried fraud. Many international media believed the claims at first. After all, this was Mexico, right? But as the days went on, it became clear they didn't have any real evidence.