Politics: Anti-graft talk yields first charges
Word of an arrest warrant for a former Pemex official last week sparked speculation that Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s career-long denunciations of graft might yet lead to prosecutions of other major figures in the last government, but political history and Mexican prosecutors’ disappointing record in prosecuting such cases suggests no such reckoning is in the cards.
The Federal Attorney General's Office obtained arrest warrants against Emilio Lozoya, who helped run Enrique Peña Nieto's presidential election campaign before being appointed Pemex CEO (2012-2016), where he became the target of fraud accusations related to the massive Odebrecht-Car Wash scandal and accusations he had helped funnel funds into the campaign coffers of the governing party. The recent warrants, however involve a different case for which the head of a major Mexican steel firm has been arrested.
There is an old tradition in Mexico of new presidents affirming their newfound power through arrests of high profile members of the previous government or other troublesome figures, such as Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s imprisonment of the head of the oil workers union, or Peña Nieto’s arrest of the head of the teacher’s union, both accused of malfeasance. But such arrests have never produced broader anticorruption crackdowns, and this time is probably no exception. There are serious doubts whether prosecutors can ever arrest, much less make a case stick against Lozoya, whose lawyer, former Deputy Federal Attorney General Javier Coello Trejo, has even argued that prosecutors would have to "…summon President Peña Nieto" because "...nothing in this country is done unless there were instructions from the president."
It doesn’t help that the new government has done very little to activate the country’s incipient National Anti-Corruption System or anything else that might give prosecutors a fighting chance against such well-connected and deep-pocketed defendants. López Obrador seems to believe that he can root out corruption simply by setting a personal example of honesty that will filter down to all levels of government, rather than pursuing cases through institutional means. The administration's anti-corruption agenda has focused more on centralizing administrative processes (public procurement, in particular) than on codifying internal control mechanisms and the external monitoring of government institutions.
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