In Mexico governmental campaigns against corruption have occupied headlines for the past eighty years. So has U.S. condemnation of this same corruption. But throughout this period those condemning corruption and campaigning for political office as reformers have been entwined in the intricate web they purportedly are trying to break. The United States has strongly supported Mexico’s patriarchal system of government, backing executive control of policymaking, particularly oil exports and arming the federal military to combat drug commerce. Simultaneously, the U.S. government has refused to legislate arms sales or deal forcefully with its market for cocaine, marijuana, smack and designer drugs.
More damaging to Mexico’s poverty-wracked millions has been profit taking by the U.S. and multi-national firms that assumed control of Mexico’s banks, agriculture, and industry after the passage of NAFTA. Foreign-owned banks in Mexico register greater profits for their stockholders than those stockholders realize in their countries of origin, largely because the foreign firms entice those responsible for Mexico’s banking regulations—specifically the executive and legislative branches—to grant enormous concessions and minimize restrictions.
The green light given by NAFTA to U.S.-backed mega-corporations and agribusiness to “Walmartize” huge swaths of what formerly had been successful (or at least functional) small agriculture and industry, thrust millions into poverty, increasing the outflow of currency that no longer would be available for local investment and reducing labor to a non-unionized temporary and poorly paid workforce. With the cooperation of local caciques and politicos the NAFTA-backed entrepreneurs pollute waterways and transform formerly productive land into flood plains and grazing land.
Their actions—and attitudes—are not that much different from U.S. G.I.s and college students who cross the border to get drunk, buy drugs and/or go to whorehouses. “Who gives a damn about the people—or the country—as long as we get what we want?” The doors for corruption are open and foreign investors, principally U.S., Canadian and Spanish, have become major practitioners. Like their Mexican counterparts they keep most of their dealings debajo del agua while presenting surface morality. The business practices and financial dealings that many foreign investors and entrepreneurs adopt would net prison terms if the perpetrators attempted them in their home countries.
When a country’s business, social, and political leaders visibly engage in corrupt practices the majority of the citizenry, accepting that such practices are sanctioned, also become corrupt and no amount of patriotic bluster—either from Mexico City or Washington, D.C.—changes that dynamic.
