Opinion Archive

What to Make of Mafias in Mexico

November 26, 2008

There is a tendency in Mexico (and in many developing countries) for all types of organizations, public and private, to adopt Mafia-like characteristics. This "mafia-ization" occurs wherever you have strongmen (plus a few strong-women) and weak institutions. Mafias tend to distort the transmission of power away from open democratic processes, blocking meritocracy and generally stunting social and economic development.

The dictionary is not very helpful for understanding this pervasive phenomenon. It talks about the Cosa Nostra and about trafficking in contraband. More generally it says that a Mafia can be a "group of people of similar interests or backgrounds prominent in a particular field or enterprise". That is surely true, but it is not nearly descriptive enough. To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's observation regarding pornography, "I know a Mafia when I see it".

Mafias are more than just cliques. In the media, "Mafia" implies the use of unethical (and often illegal) means on behalf of an organization's leadership in order to maintain power within the organization. It includes the perpetuation of a boss (a "Don"), his or her confidants and, often, their family. Most Mafias use clientelism to achieve these ends. Clientelism is characterized by powerful patrons controlling weak "clients", usually through some sort of implied debt or coercion.

In Mexico, complicity is often the mechanism through which patrons govern their clients. There is a dark saying here that, in politics, there are no friends, only accomplices. Patrons (the equivalent of Mafia "Dons") are allowed to be rapacious because their "clients" are given their own fiefdoms all the way down the pecking order. The entire Mexican public education establishment is a case in point, with even the humblest teacher being able to "inherit" his or her teaching job, to the detriment of quality education.

But even the Mexican private sector, because of its un-meritocratic reliance on the family firm model of organization, suffers from a type of "mafia-ization". Some of Mexico's most important corporations lose top-notch executives because they know, either explicitly or implicitly, that if they don't have the correct last name, they have no chance of making it to the top.

In politics, during the long reign of the PRI, it was not uncommon to hear about the "revolutionary family", a privileged class of bureaucrats who were practically assured jobs for life because of their connections (or complicities?). Today, despite the best efforts of both the Federal Electoral Institute and the Federal Electoral Tribunal, most parties suffer from a heavy dose of "mafia-ization", from the PRI's obvious clientelism, through strongman vice grips in the PRD and the "founding families" of the PAN, all the way to cacique tactics among small parties.

Then, of course there are the honest to bad-ness criminal Mafias. This column is primarily concerned with negative patterns of behavior that affect society in general, but there is no doubt that Mexico's criminal Mafias are, today, among the most dangerous in the world. College of William & Mary Professor George Greyson has just written a disturbing book on the topic, with a helpful history of the phenomenon.

But criminal Mafias can be analyzed with a simpler "good versus evil" lens. The tendency of Mexico's interest groups to develop Mafia-like characteristics contains a disorienting amount of grey area. It includes victimized campesinos who use extortionary tactics to advance their popular cause. And it extends into the political manipulation that often motivates these "social" conflicts.

What lies behind much of the benefit brought about by the Rule of Law is the simple concept of effective, efficient, and legitimate conflict resolution. It is the ability of society to put its disputes behind it in a way that is considered definitive and just.

Last week's column talked about the fact that Gobernación had lost its enforcement role during Mexico's transition to democracy. A successful transition would have replaced its strong-arm tactics with a toothy independent judiciary. Muscular trust-busting and Congressional oversight of unions would have been a part of this package, as would a massive and aggressive purge of the law enforcement establishment. This did not happen. Worse, in its weakness, government has allowed social blackmail to become very profitable. For as long as this is true, every interest group in Mexico will tend to act like a Mafia.

Naming suggestions

Albert Lin, a reader from San Francisco, offered the best English name for Gobernación which, as it was noted in last week's column, does not currently have an appropriate English translation. Says Lin: "it seems like the best definition of the Gobernación of yore might be: 'Special Executive Services'".

Thanks to all of our readers for their feedback.

For the latest thought-provoking article by Agustin Barrios Gomez please go to our Opinion Column page

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