The Best and the Worst Mexican Governors

A new report, titled Encuesta Nacional 2008: Gobierno, Sociedad y Política, measures the level of trust Mexican governors receive from their constituents. The polling was built along an ingeniously simple premise: if voters had to leave town and the governor lived nearby, would they feel comfortable leaving the keys to their home to the state's highest elected official? Not surprisingly, Mario Marín of Puebla and Ulises Ruiz of Oaxaca wound up at the bottom of the list, with only three in ten voters saying that they'd feel OK about handing over the keys. And what did they do to merit such a ranking? The former keeps company with child molesters and kidnaps journalists, while the latter allegedly cheated his way to his post in 2005, and has since allowed his state to descend into something not quite as bad as anarchy. Rounding out the bottom three was Zeferino Torreblanca of Guerrero, whose more garden-variety poor governance has earned him widespread distrust, though not quite the notoriety of his counterparts.

On the plus side, Coahuila's own Humberto Moreira was among the three most highly rated, so good work Beto! Or maybe we're just suckers here.