The Guadalajara Reporter

Mexico’s economic problem: despite busting two capos, its 1.3% growth in 2013 shows the cost of corruption  

Enrique Peña Nieto, Barack Obama and Stephen Harper, leaders of Mexico, the United States and Canada, went through a necessary political\economic ritual February 19 in Toluca.

Generally, media reports said little was accomplished;  it was symbolic rather than substantive.  However, it did re-emphasize the 20-year-old argument regarding whether  the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) had accomplished its major initial utopian claims made by leaders of all three nations in 1994. 

Many pro-NAFTA folk – government and big business spokespersons primarily – tend to seem self-centered, small and carping, while labor and agricultural representatives target the agreement’s harsh toll on broad “down-scale” sectors of Mexican society that have little or no influence on either local or federal governments.

Leading up to and following the NAFTA meeting, the media eagerly reported ancient facts that every Mexican knows, but which those at the top keep pretending are “equivocal.”   These, as anyone who’s seriously acquainted with Mexico recognizes well, are a corrupt and incoherent justice system – “justice system” for the untutored means a modicum of control over, particularly, maximum-security prisons.  This, as just busted “El Chapo” Guzman has dramatically demonstrated, is a condition that continues to to exist.  It also means corruption so vast in the business sector that it confuses foreign investors setting up manufacturing facilities here.  On average it costs 20 percent of the total price at every step of that process.  And then it costs millions to maintain a private security system that usually involves hiring personnel of questionable trustworthiness. 

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