The Sneaky Way Mexico's Drug Cartels Are Trying to Gain Political Control Scott Johnson - TakePart
go to original April 8, 2014

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto (Rodrigo Arangua/AFP/Getty Images)

An interesting argument was once overheard among representatives of Mexico’s three main political parties. The three were sitting outside the headquarters of the Federal Electoral Institute in 2009, on the southern edge of Mexico City, within earshot of Jason Johnson, a political scientist at Hiram College in Ohio and a Mexico observer.

The disagreement was “not about who was taking the most money from cartels, but how they used the cartel money they were all getting. One said, ‘We use it for voter education.…’ One accused the other of using the money to get cars. But no one was denying that they were taking cartel money," Johnson recalled recently. "I thought to myself, Are they literally saying this?”

It’s exactly the kind of shadowy deal making - even when it comes to the political dealings of Mexico's bloody drug cartels - that often gets recorded in the minutiae of financial disclosures. But advocates of transparency and government accountability in Mexico are facing a potentially major setback if the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto goes forward with a plan to change the structure, purview, and legal status of the country’s main transparency institute, the Federal Institute for Access to Information.   

Similar in scope and reach to America’s Freedom of Information Act, Mexico’s institute has been, since its creation in 2002, an independent and powerful force for getting to the truth in a country famous for its ability to obscure it or, worse, corrupt it altogether. I first heard about it when I was based in Mexico for Newsweek that year.

Read the rest at TakePart

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!