The government of Enrique Peña Nieto is considered one of the most corrupt in history, to the point that the scandals became the emblem of the PRIism of the time: Master Fraud, Operation Safiro, the White House, Odebrecht… Paradoxically, in the Peña Nieto administration the National Anti-Corruption System (SNA) was created, an unprecedented framework that promised to connect all the authorities fighting this crime and give citizens a central role in supervising the mechanism. With the arrival of Morena as president, first with Andrés Manuel López Obrador and now with Claudia Sheinbaum, the SNA is abandoned and obsolete. Grand corruption persists, as exemplified by the Huachicol fiscal and Segalmex cases, as does impunity, due to the fact that a minimum number of cases are tried by the courts.
The tragic fate of the SNA is linked to Morena’s conception of corruption in the public service. López Obrador believed that inequality was not the result of the expropriation of the value created by the worker, but rather of the corruption of the political class, which he called “the mafia of power.” With this he campaigned and won the government in 2018, on his third attempt. His solution to the problem, however, was messianic, according to his critics. He said corruption is “like stairs” and “sweeps from top to bottom.” “If the president is honest, governors will be honest,” he said. The axiom was not satisfied. A few days ago, the Superior Audit of the Federation (ASF) documented that more than 5,000 million pesos of the public budget were spent irregularly in the last year of its mandate.
Under López Obrador, the corruption investigation was centralized in the Executive, the INAI – the body for access to public information – was limited and the doors to citizen surveillance were closed. The Segalmex case, which resulted in a loss of at least 3 billion pesos, is emblematic and shows all the failures of the Morena governments’ anti-corruption strategy. The Prosecutor’s Office selectively prosecuted those responsible and excluded from the investigation the head of the agency, Ignacio Ovalle, an old friend of López Obrador, whom the former president had publicly defended, convinced, without evidence, of his innocence. To date, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, created under the impetus of the SNA, has closed more than a thousand files and presented only 3% of cases to judges, according to Millennium. At the beginning of his government, Sheinbaum had promised to create a Federal Anti-Corruption Agency, a sort of FBI with policemen specialized in that crime, which remained only on paper.
The SNA, which brings together representatives of various institutions, is colonized by the party in power. These officials blocked the efforts of the president of the Citizen Participation Committee of the SNA, Vania Pérez, to promote the investigation of some emblematic cases of corruption from the last six years of the mandate of the PRI and Morena. At the beginning of October, the lawyer submitted for the commission’s examination the review of deviations for 187 million pesos at the National Sports Commission (Conade), led by former athlete Ana Gabriela Guevara – now a Morena politician -; the irregular contracts at Pemex’s Salina Cruz refinery, which involved a cousin of López Obrador; the diversions in Segalmex and the Master Scam, as well as the bribes of the construction company Odebrecht to Mexican politicians.
At first, Pérez’s proposal did not move forward because the representative of the Administrative Justice Court told him that “it was not the right political moment” to raise a fuss about government corruption, according to what the official said in an interview with this newspaper. A few weeks later, the initiative was unblocked. However, internal resistance became evident again when Pérez published a statement asking the authorities to investigate the assets of the influential Morena senator Adán Augusto López, shrouded in doubt for not corresponding to his income as a public official. Immediately, another member of the committee stepped forward to disavow the statement and accuse its president of “grandstanding.” “There was a very important capture of the SNA. The system was born as a figure independent of power, the government or the party in power; however, what happened at the national and state level is that they captured it, it became a loot for the institutions,” explains Pérez.
The official notes that Mexico has remained disarmed in the face of corruption, which “has transformed into macrocriminal behavior that works at a transnational level.” “Unlike other countries with a strong rule of law, Mexico does not have sufficient controls to combat cases of corruption and, above all, to correct the conditions that generate them through public policies,” he explains. Mexico is already feeling the damage of institutional dismantling. In February, Transparency International placed the Latin American country in the worst place in its history in its corruption perception index, on par with Iraq, Uganda and Nigeria.
Eduardo Bohórquez, director of Transparencia Mexicana, underlines that the investigation into a case like that of the fiscal huachicol, which developed relatively quickly, responds to the old presidential model in which the institutions are structured around the issues that are of political interest to the Executive. “This shows that the great architect of the anti-corruption system is the president,” he comments. “But there are other social concerns that the SNA should address that do not necessarily concern the Executive, concerns that have to do with human rights or access to public services,” he underlines.
The academic agrees with Pérez in believing that SNA allows us to address the multiple variables of contemporary corruption, which is not limited to the level of administrative misconduct, but involves money laundering, financial crimes and organized crime. “It’s no longer just money that’s been stolen from the drawer,” he explains. Fighting crime, which abounds, requires a systemic, national and coordinated approach, and not the individual work of an auditor or prosecutor. Even less, the sole will of the president. “Mexico has lost the ability to deal with macrocriminal networks, which are much stronger and where corruption is only one of the factors in the functioning of such networks,” he observes. It’s like giving up seeing the forest to look at the tree, the branch, the leaf.
