The Americas | Corruption in Mexico

The right place to start

In a crackdown, the president targets himself first

|MEXICO CITY

Update Feb 6th: There may be less to Mr Peña's anti-corruption drive than meets the eye

IT IS not every day that a president launches an investigation into his own affairs, but that is what Mexico’s leader, Enrique Peña Nieto, has just done. On February 3rd he announced that he, his wife and his finance minister will become the first subjects of a conflict-of-interest investigation. This startling decision was part of a package of anti-corruption measures that Mr Peña hopes will re-establish his credibility and popularity, which has been battered by scandal and public anger over crime.

To succeed, Mr Peña must first of all establish that he is blameless in a scandal triggered by revelations that he, his wife, and Luis Videgaray, the finance minister, bought houses on credit from affiliates of a building firm that has benefited from government contracts. All declare that they have done nothing wrong, though Mr Videgaray received a mortgage at below market rates. Now Mr Peña has opened an inquiry that he hopes will vindicate them.

It will be conducted by Virgilio Andrade Martínez, a civil servant. Mr Peña has appointed him minister of public administration, a post that has been vacant for more than two years. The ministry’s duty is to monitor whether government officials are abiding by the law.

Anti-corruption activists question how impartial Mr Andrade’s probe will be, since he owes his job to Mr Peña. A panel of experts will scrutinise his findings, which will provide some reassurance. In most countries, though, an independent commission would be doing the investigating, says Eduardo Bohórquez, head of Transparencia Mexicana, an NGO.

To complicate matters, the regulation of conflicts of interest is murky in Mexico, which means that the legal basis for the inquiry is unclear. Opposition parties in Congress say that Mr Peña’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has delayed the launch of their own investigation. But they have been conspicuously quiet on the affair because, experts suspect, many have skeletons in their own cupboards.

A whitewash could discredit a broader effort to cure systemic corruption that plagues Mexico from the highest tiers of government to the lowest. The president called on Congress swiftly to approve a constitutional reform, put forward by the opposition National Action Party (PAN), to create an interlocking system of enforcement and supervision, rather than a single anti-corruption agency. The PRI and the PAN are haggling over the details, but it is expected to include a strengthened auditor-general’s office, the Ministry of Public Administration, an anti-corruption agency to be created under a more autonomous attorney-general and a new tribunal. Mr Peña also wants to require all federal employees to disclose potential conflicts of interest in their annual declarations of assets.

The involvement of both parties suggests that the reform has a good chance of passing. It has the backing of many anti-corruption NGOs. But it is probably not enough to change the behaviour of politicians, which is rooted in using public office to make enough money to win elections. Mr Peña can improve those odds, if he clears his own name first.

This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline "The right place to start"

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