ABSTRACT

Chapter 4 studies the risky innovation that represented the creation of the National Anticorruption System (SNA in Spanish) in Mexico. Rather than creating an anticorruption agency like in Argentina, in Mexico the idea is to force coordination among several different actors at the federal and national level. This is an ambitious idea, perhaps one so ambitious and complex that the failure of the system might become its logical scenario. Corruption, in a country like Mexico, can be a disruptive and illegal phenomenon, but at the same time, paradoxically, it is based on social exchange practices seen as substantive by people on a day-to-day basis. The SNA is presented as an exciting, daring, and innovative idea, but one that does not have similar referents at the international level (perhaps close only to the strategy created in Brazil in 2003 that the next chapter discusses) to predict whether it will work or not. The chapter points out how the SNA currently tends to be resisted and attacked, boycotted by the systemic logic of the corruption of the Mexican political system. The central issue of the chapter is to ask whether the conformation of the SNA will be able to resist the attacks and show reasonable and prompt results.