One-man protests in Mexico against corruption. The banner says:"as long as money is handed out, there will be no democracy." Armando Aguayo Rivera/Flickr. Some rights reserved.
This article belongs to our series "Mexico at the 2018 crossroads" coordinated by Gema Santamaría, Alejandro Velez and Francesc Badia.
When the curtain came crushing down on Javier Duarte’s reign over Mexico’s Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, what emerged looked an awful lot like a 101 for state capture. Duarte, the entity’s governor from 2010 until he fled an arrest warrant last year in October, and his inner circle of coconspirators had perfected it. Streamlining institutions of all branches of government, which proved readily available tools to serve criminal interests situated within and without the state, a sum no smaller than 1.75 billion U.S. Dollars of public funds was embezzled while scrutiny, let alone prosecution, was successfully impeded.
