US, Mexico hunt corrupt, drug-pushing officials
MEXICO CITY: Crooked cops, greedy governors and pusherprosecutors: corruption and drug crime reach to high places in Mexico, which is getting a jolt from US efforts to hunt down top suspects.
Analysts say officials have been getting away for decades with corruption in a country dominated by big, powerful drug gangs.
“There is a systemic problem of corruption among the local and state-level authorities,” said Alejandro Hope, a former Mexican intelligence agent who is now a security consultant.
In the latest high-profile case grabbing headlines this week, the former Tamaulipas state governor Tomas Yarrington was arrested in Italy on Sunday.
In 2000, he posed smiling with the then- governor of Texas and future US president, George W. Bush.
Expelled in December from Mexico’s governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, Yarrington is wanted on charges of drugrelated crimes by both Mexico and the United States.
Mexican authorities offered 800,000 for Yarrington’s capture. But analysts say what most speeded up his arrest was pressure from up north.
“His detention has happened because the United States wanted it to, not so much because the Mexican government made a decisive decision,” says Hope.
Opposition lawmaker Jorge Lopez Martin of the National Action Party called for Yarrington to be judged in the United States and not Mexico, “so that there can be no room for impunity.”
An “impunity index” study last year by the University of the Americas Puebla found that fewer than five percent of crimes reported in Mexico end up being punished.
“There is so much corruption, so much impunity, the judicial system is so easily corrupted and the penal system is so useless that it not only allows the drug trade but actually encourages many people to commit crimes,” said Jose Antonio Crespo, a political analyst at the Economic Research and Teaching Center.
“They know that the likelihood of being punished is minimal and that with a bit of luck they can buy off the judge and escape.” — AFP