Monday, October 18, 2010

The Scot-Free Bunch

Against the backdrop of the Julio César Godoy case, Leo Zuckermann notices that Mexican politicians very rarely face jail time for their links with drug traffickers:
[I]n Mexico, there must be politicians that protect members of organized crime. Despite that, on this task the state has failed. We haven't seen in Mexico, as happened in Colombia, the discovery, processing, and jailing of heavyweight politicians linked to organized crime. That task, then, remains. And if what happened in the embarrassing case of Godoy Toscano is a show of how difficult it is to catch a politician allegedly corrupted by drug-traffic, we shouldn't hope for much either.
This point also screams for a proper accounting of what went wrong with the michoacanazo. But it also should be pointed out that Godoy isn't really a big-time politician. What about the governors? Senators? Party leaders?

2 comments:

jd said...

Links to the drug trade are obviously one of the worst and most common forms of corruption in Mexico, but the real problem is that the odd, generally politicized case aside, Mexican politicians haven't really ever been consistently held accountable for ANY type of corruption.

pc said...

Yeah that definitely seems correct. If there had been punishment for corruption in general, and not necessarily even legal punishment but at least frequent ostracization (is that a word) a la Arturo Montiel, than we'd probably have more dirty pols in jail for links with narcos. One will probably have to come accompanied by the other.