Officials rarely solicit bribes. Instead, they work so slowly, sloppily and arbitrarily that people see no hope of getting the services they are entitled to without offering a tip “pa’ el refresco,” literally, “for a soda.”

Despite the complaints of citizens, the corruption accompanying an ordinary transaction in Mexico City usually begins with them. My garbage man, who demanded his weekly tip and let us know if we were a peso short, was an exception – officials rarely solicit bribes. Instead, they work so slowly, sloppily and arbitrarily that people see no hope of getting the services they are entitled to without offering a tip “pa’ el refresco,” literally, “for a soda.”

My experience trying to convert the registration of the used car we bought to our family’s name – it took five trips to government offices over the course of months – is more typical. So was our experience trying to get a birth certificate for our Mexican-born daughter. When my husband and I went to the civil registry in our district, dozens of people, most carrying infants, sat on precarious stacks of cardboard boxes in two tiny rooms filled with trash. There was no attempt to help people know where to start, no sign on the wall listing required documents, no take-a-number. One official told us we could not register the baby without the birth certificates of her grandparents. At the next desk, we were told we could. (In a neighboring registry, an official had offered to do it for a large bribe.) We paid a gestor, or coyote, to help us with the transaction, and at least got mostly done in one morning. An acquaintance who went alone needed four trips.

I am not the only fed-up resident of Mexico City. Everyone complains, all the time. But when bribery is the only way to get services without taking a week off work, people bribe.

What people really need, of course, is a system that doesn’t require bribery to get things done. But this is so far from people’s experience in places like Mexico City that they do not punish officials for failing to produce it. Nor do many people here believe in their own ability to influence a process of change. Mexico today suffers from double the usual Latin American fatalism, as it is also, in a way, a post-Soviet society. P.R.I. rule was not Marxist, but it was Leninist after a fashion, effectively eliminating civil society by swallowing up independent organizations. The hangover lingers, creating a vicious circle of corruption and inaction that makes fatalism entirely rational. Should I complain to my garbage man’s boss? He probably enjoys a percentage of my tips. General fed-upness is a useless emotion unless there is some channel for turning it into action, and there is none.

In theory, of course, there is one such channel – voting. Citizens can now throw out corrupt officials. But I don’t think it has ever happened in Mexico City. Officials here ignore corruption because they can — it doesn’t cost them at election time. Most voters have more urgent needs than clean government, like jobs, security and food. And if voters don’t really believe that corruption will ever disappear, then they figure they would be chumps not to get their own little piece.

Votes here are not won through good service but through caudillo-style favors to constituent groups. The P.R.I. no longer runs Mexico City, but its political system still does. Mexico City is a supersize version of the Daley machine in Chicago or New York’s Tammany Hall. Older people, for example, can get special income supplements – but it helps to be close to your local P.R.D. official. AMLO, the mayor, may be personally puritanical (so was Mayor Daley), but he relies on P.R.I.-style electoral games to maintain political support.

The strategy works. In midterm elections last month, Mexicans rewarded the nation’s two major political machines. Throughout the countryside, the P.R.I., which never stopped doling out goodies, made a comeback. And in Mexico City, the P.R.D. won an absolute majority in the City Council and control of 13 of its 16 districts. AMLO, with a popularity rating of more than 80 percent, is now the front-runner to replace President Fox.

In Mexico, then, democracy has not brought immediate gains. But slowly, I believe, it is helping the nation create a system of political pressure for the long run. Under dictators, reforms can happen, but they come at the pleasure of the leader, and disappear when he tires. In the Philippines, Efren Plana’s reforms slowly eroded, and they crashed completely when President Marcos apparently decided to install cronies in the tax bureau in the mid-1980’s to help his family avoid taxes and to produce money for his 1986 re-election campaign. Even in places where officials have the power, initiative and imagination to clean house, their work can dissolve into nothing when the desire flags.

In a democracy, citizens can become an ally of government reformers, exerting pressure to keep reform on track. This is happening – although infuriatingly slowly – in Mexico today.

Even before Fox became president, Mexico’s political opening-up was unleashing independent forces against corruption. Journalists used to have their salaries supplemented by a regular envelope of cash from whatever business or government ministry they covered. This was not a system that nurtured investigative reporting. Newspapers were tamed by their dependence on government advertising. Those arrangements died in the last years of the P.R.I. While most journalism is still embarrassingly awful in Mexico, newspapers are beginning to report on corruption.

Perhaps the single most important victory over corruption in Mexico is the electoral process itself. Mexico’s P.R.I. victories were the stuff of global infamy for decades. Today, Mexico’s electoral institute advises other nations on how to organize clean balloting. On the basics, like registration, voting and counting ballots, Mexico probably does better than the United States.

Still, I have yet to meet a Mexican who says that President Fox is doing much of anything to fight corruption, except those who work for him. The year after Fox took office, more people actually thought corruption was rising rather than going down. I believe that this public perception of Fox’s failure is wrong, but it is understandable. His is a notoriously lethargic presidency. Rooting out corruption was a theme – the theme – of his party. No one could have lived up to the hopes invested in him.

Another reason for the public perception that Fox has failed is that his administration has chosen not to attempt widespread prosecutions for corruption – and when it has gone after big fish, it has so far failed to land them. For most Mexicans, and indeed, people everywhere, jailing the big fish is synonymous with fighting corruption. But in general, Fox has been right to emphasize other strategies. Prosecutions of past thievery consume money and time better spent elsewhere. Especially in dysfunctional judicial systems like Mexico’s, they often fail, and even when people do go to prison, the event is so rare that it has no deterrent effect on the behavior of current officials.

But Fox has actually made important investments in the future of clean government. He is bringing the anticorruption agency up to global standards. And at his urging, this year Congress created a federal civil service. It will professionalize government and cut down on patronage, nepotism and jobs allocated by the applicant’s willingness to pay kickbacks to his superior.

Also, in June, Fox’s new access-to-information law went into effect. The law recognizes that government information is the property of citizens and establishes a mechanism to allow them to request it.

The law effectively transfers some of the burden of monitoring corruption from the government to society. It will be a continuing source of specific public pressure against corruption. And specificity is important. As Mexico City shows, general disgust about corruption does not produce change. Only when powerful sectors demand specific new ways of doing business do reforms occur.

To call Mexico, where civil society is barely breathing after years on the P.R.I. payroll, a successful example of corruption-fighting is an overstatement at this point. But it might not be in a few years. “In the past, presidents didn’t have civic organizations to hold them accountable,” says Stephen Morris, an expert on Mexico at the University of South Alabama. “Now the pace of reform escapes the administration. Civil society is increasing its demands and pointing out blemishes in the government’s program.”

Three years ago, long after Gil Díaz had left the Treasury and just before Vicente Fox took office, an elephant named Benny was smuggled from Texas into Mexico to perform in a circus, for a $4,500 bribe. Customs, it seems, is an institution inherently prone to corruption. But Francisco Gil Díaz is back – Fox appointed him treasury secretary – and he is once again pouncing on corruption in customs. He fired the entire top management of the bureau. Salaries have been doubled or tripled. The customs inspectors are rotated every 15 days. So far, more than 1 in 10 customs brokers have been stripped of their licenses.

Under Fox’s predecessor, Ernesto Zedillo, top officials in charge of customs changed almost yearly, and some were clearly unqualified. There were no new computers for six years. “Customs had been abandoned,” Gil Díaz says. “We reformed it under Salinas, and now we are doing it again.” The reforms are depressingly familiar. The people he is firing probably include many he hired more than a decade ago. On a recent trip to the port of Manzanillo, he was trying to get customs officials to put up a fence around the truck route from the docks.

Someone dedicated, like Gil Díaz, can keep putting fences back up. But they stay up only when there is pressure from businessmen worried that customs chaos will cost them trade deals and from a press that embarrasses the administration when a three-ton elephant is smuggled; or when there is public information about collected duties, a channel for the outrage of citizens who are shaken down and a court system that can actually put corrupt officials in jail. In short, the key to fighting corruption is to find sources of political pressure to balance the enormous we’ve-always-done-it-this-way weight of the corrupt.

In Mexico, as elsewhere, fences go up and fences fall. They remain standing only when a government knows that its fortunes are tied to the fences, that if the fences topple, the government topples along with them.

For “The taint of the greased palm” (Part I): https://journal.probeinternational.org/2003/08/10/the-taint-of-the-greased-palm-part-i/

Tina Rosenberg,  New York Times, August 10, 2003