On a wall outside the mayor’s office, on a complaint box at the police station, on a bus stop down the street, and all over town, a city-sponsored poster announces an unusual message.
“Nuevo Laredo,” it declares, “says no to the bite.”
The poster, which features a shiny red apple against a black backdrop, is railing against a centuries-old practice that permeates almost every facet of daily life in Mexico–from a routine traffic stop to getting a phone installed.
The bribe, also referred to as la mordida, or the bite, is so ingrained in Mexican culture that even President Ernesto Zedillo says it is a hard habit to break. He says the Spaniards brought the concept with them at the time of the Conquest.
Almost 500 years later, a national movement to weed out corruption is under way, and according to longtime Mexico watchers, it is largely the result of Mexican democracy.
With political competition today a lot more intense than in previous years, analysts say voters are holding politicians accountable as never before.
Professor John Bailey, a Mexico specialist at Georgetown University, said, “People are beginning to believe that they have a voice.”
And there are signs everywhere that politicians are listening.
In Nuevo Laredo, for example, Mayor Horacio Garza has plastered his city, a drug-smuggling point along the south Texas border, with the anti-bribe posters.
He also has filed formal complaints against the previous mayor for graft and has opened the city’s books to the public.
In Tamaulipas, the governor has initiated background checks for state employees. And in Chihuahua, the governor has cracked down on after-hour bars.
In Mexico City, a group of intellectuals and business people has formed a watchdog group to eradicate corruption, and a Mexico City borough president has ordered construction inspectors to stop demanding bribes.
Alejandro Gertz, the Mexico City police chief, has fired several members of his top brass for corruption and has gone so far as to urge the 91,000 police officers under his command to turn in their crooked bosses.
“The whole country is not totally corrupt . . .” Gertz said in an interview in Mexico City. “You find decent people in this country, and that number of people can be increased if they believe in their leaders.”
Garza, who took office in January, agreed. “We have to set the example that we are here to serve them, not to get rich.”
He acknowledged, however, that the demands of citizens, coupled with his own political ambitions, have forced his hand to move against corruption.
Because of a series of electoral reforms over the last few years, the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as PRI, is no longer the only game in town.
The opposition has been gaining ground, winning statehouses throughout the country, as well as the lower house of Congress and the mayor’s office in Mexico City.
Sensing vulnerability as the July 2000 presidential election approaches, analysts say that leaders of the various political parties are embracing anti-corruption in an effort to seize the moral high ground.
In an interview at City Hall, Garza noted that he had been mayor before, from 1992 to 1995. Asked why he had not clamped down on corruption then, he explained that he had owed too many people too many favors.
He was then a member of the ruling PRI, and the party leadership had selected him to run.
This time, he had to compete in a primary.
“We need to clean house,” Garza, 57, said in discussing his new philosophy. “Otherwise, people will not believe in our administration.”
But the level of corruption surprises even the most seasoned Mexico resident, including Gertz, the Mexico City police chief.
After he took the job eight months ago, Gertz said that he noticed police officials with modest salaries living on large estates.
He also noticed that gasoline supplies for squad cars were running low. An investigation discovered that officers were stealing about 84,500 gallons of gasoline a day, worth about $172,000.
Before long, Gertz had 35 police officers arrested on charges ranging from robbery to murder. He also issued an ultimatum to officers to clean up their act or face charges.
Gertz, 59, a lawyer and former university president, said economic downturns beginning in 1982 had exacerbated the graft problem.
“If you were with me every day,” he said, “you would see that corruption goes down to the bone.”
In discussing his work, the police chief said, “I want to live in a place where corruption does not eat my way of thinking.
“I don’t want to be destroyed morally.”
To accomplish his goals, Gertz has enlisted the support of civic organizations.
But for real change to occur, Gertz–who works for Mayor Cuauhtemoc Cardenas of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD–said Mexico would need to tear down its entire power structure, and attempt to change the way many people think.
On the street, Mexicans argue that abject poverty helps breed corruption.
Indeed, people who demand bribes say they do it to make ends meet.
People who pay the bribes say it is cheaper and easier than hassling with the system–a $5 bribe, for example, versus a $50 traffic ticket.
“People take the bribe for granted,” said Francis Diaz, 61, a merchant in Mexico City. “It’s a vicious cycle.”
In Nuevo Laredo, officials say the key to progress is to educate the young. Which is why schoolchildren are getting a lesson on the mayor’s anti-bribe campaign, and even a T-shirt emblazoned with the new message.
“If we want to change things, the answer lies in education,” said Gerardo Gonzalez, a local businessman who also serves on a citizens’ watchdog group charged with reviewing city expenditures and city contracts.
“We know that if we do not work with our children, they will face the same problem we are facing now.”
Gonzalez, 36, who is married with two children, said political competition had made Garza a better mayor. He said people in this city of 400,000 feel they finally have a mayor who is representing them.
In his five months in office, Garza has fired 200 out of 600 police officers for testing positive for drugs and having links to drug traffickers. He also has initiated lie-detector tests for his officers. To discourage shakedowns, Garza said, he plans to give police a pay increase, to $484 a month from $323.
Of the mayor’s governing style, Gonzalez said, “I don’t want to call it revolutionary, but innovative.”
While almost everyone agrees that it would take at least a generation for Mexican officials to clean up the system, people from various walks of life welcome the effort.
Bailey, the Georgetown professor, said the country could begin reducing corruption on a regional scale–in Nuevo Laredo, for example–and that the campaign could spread across the country. With the vote finally beginning to count in Mexico, he said, “There is a good basis for optimism.”
Not everyone welcomes the prospect.
Since taking office, Garza said he routinely has received warnings to back off through intermediaries of local drug barons.
“They have told me,” he said, “if something happens to such and such person, they will not be able to control their people, that something might happen to me.”
Garza, however, said he did not believe the drug traffickers would go after a mayor.
“Sometimes I worry a little bit,” he said, “but if I worry too much, I will not get anything done.”
