Ruling Party Faces Difficult Task Convincing Voters Its Anti-Corruption Efforts Are Sincere Carin Zissis - Americas Quarterly
go to original October 13, 2016

Javier Duarte (R) with President Enrique Peña Nieto (Gobierno del Estado de Veracruz)

Just four years ago, Mexico's President Enrique Peña Nieto, then a candidate for office, considered Javier Duarte part of a “new generation of politics” that would help shepherd his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) toward a more transparent future. On October 12, facing charges ranging from embezzlement to document forgery, Duarte stepped down as the governor of Veracruz to fight what he called a “campaign” against his leadership.

He will have to wage that fight without the support of his party. In September, the PRI stripped Duarte of his membership rights, a prelude to removing him from the party entirely. Duarte is not the only PRI politician whose standing is in jeopardy; over the past three months, the PRI has begun processes to remove at least two other governors accused of corruption from its ranks.

Does all this mean that the PRI, so known for corruption and cronyism as it dominated Mexican politics for the better part of the past century, is ready to clean up its act? Recent moves suggest the party may be coming to terms with the fact that, if they don’t, Mexicans will hold them to account at the voting booth.

In the first years of his six-year term, Peña Nieto was internationally hailed for ushering through a series of reforms to tackle difficult areas such as energy and telecommunications. But an anti-corruption package was not among his priorities. It wasn’t until the early summer of 2016, when a third of the country’s states were preparing for June gubernatorial elections, that Mexico’s Congress took up debate of idling anti-corruption legislation. Under the PRI’s leadership, that legislation was watered down so that government officials could avoid making public declarations of assets, taxes and conflicts of interest.

Meanwhile, Duarte’s Veracruz, where spending irregularities abound and public debt more than doubled during his time in office, became a symbol of the PRI’s transparency problem. Two weeks before the June 5 gubernatorial elections, an investigative report by a Mexican news outlet found that Duarte’s administration had siphoned off some $35 million to shell companies.

It was an inauspicious sign of what was to come for the PRI. By the time the dust cleared, the party had lost six of the nine governorships it held going into the election. Veracruz - Mexico's second most-populous state and the biggest prize up for grabs - was among the constituencies that the PRI had lost for the first time in its history.

Read the rest at Americas Quarterly

Related: Veracruz Governor Duarte Steps Down to Defend Himself Against Charges of Corruption (Mexico News Daily)

Related: Don’t Write Off the Scandal-Ridden Enrique Peña Nieto: How Mexico’s President May Have Rescued His Country (The Washington Post)

Related: No Answers for Scores Who Vanished on Mexican Governor Javier Duarte's Watch (teleSUR)

Related: Mexico's Ruling Party Just Totally Failed at Being Cool (The Washington Post)

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!