Tour shines unflattering light on graft in Mexico
Look to your right: There’s the Pillar of Light, a towering monument shaped like a vanilla wafer cookie. A company was allegedly allowed to overcharge the equivalent of millions of dollars for steel used in its construction.
Look to your left: A sculpture commemorating 43 teachers’ college students who were “disappeared” in 2014 in the southern state of Guerrero, by police officers allegedly in league with drug cartel thugs and corrupt local officials.
This is the newest addition to the ubiquitous open-air tour buses crisscrossing Mexico City each day: The Corruptour, which instead of taking folks to historic plazas and churches, shines an unflattering spotlight on the murky world of graft.
“The goal is to awaken Mexicans’ consciousness about the problem of corruption, which is so serious and seems to be getting more and more expansive,” said Tania Sanchez, a 44-year-old volunteer guide. “It’s about informing the people who ride about practices of corruption, illustrating it with the places we visit — only in a fun way.”
Mexico ranked 123rd out of 176 countries on Transparency International’s 2016 Corruption Perceptions Index, released last month, and people here commonly cite graft as a major concern along with other issues like security.
Corruption in Mexico runs the gamut from daily annoyances — a police officer shaking you down for a few bucks to avoid a traffic ticket, a city inspector demanding a bribe not to shut down a business — to shocking scandals involving government contracts worth billions of dollars.