During 2019 and 2020, the country’s anti-corruption prosecutors’ offices initiated almost 18,000 investigation folders for possible acts of corruption of public officials. However, in that same period only 67 cases (less than 1%) were clarified with a sentence against those responsible. On the other hand, the vast majority of the inquiries (9 out of 10) remain ongoing without reaching a judge or were shelved due to the impossibility of the prosecutor’s offices to obtain more evidence.
Multiple obstacles enhance these poor results. Insufficient human resources, budget cuts, inadequate investigation procedures, incomplete legislation, failures in training and little or no autonomy, are some of the deficiencies that prosecutors’ offices specialized in the investigation of these cases face on a daily basis.
Read more | Of the $76 billion pesos that will receive anti-corruption instances, only 4.6% will be invested in combating it.
A joint investigation carried out by the civil association TOJIL and the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness (IMCO) diagnosed for the first time the conditions of operation, performance and results of the country’s specialized prosecutor’s office in combating corruption. These prosecutors’ offices are a key part of the national anti-corruption system, since they are responsible for investigating irregular acts that could have led to crimes, and if necessary proceed against those responsible so that the damage is repaired.
Join us for the presentation of the report that we made together with @TojilAJ with the support of @USAIDMX and @conafamexico.
We analyze the conditions of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Offices of Mexico, their legal framework, resources, processes and results.
📆Thurso December 2
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— IMCO (@imcomx) November 30, 2021
However, despite this primary function, the study identified that most of these areas of research operate in the midst of deficiencies and with poor results. That is: although by law they already exist in most states, their performance is far from expected.
Although, on average, each entity initiated 749 investigation folders for possible acts of corruption, only 35 of them (4.6%) advanced enough to reach a judge and that a process was opened, and only in three cases (0.4%) a conviction was reached.
“Although there are Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Offices at the regulatory level, in reality they do not have a minimum of resources to be an operational and functional institution. Although there are efforts at the national level, currently no Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office meets the standards analyzed at its optimal level,” the study concludes.
To arrive at these results, the organizations responsible for the study sent requests for information to all prosecutors’ offices in the country; they also met with prosecutors, police and experts from five states selected as a sample. Below are the key points of the analysis carried out by these organizations in the five axes that were studied.
Under-staffed and poorly trained
According to the report, the country’s anti-corruption prosecutors’ offices have, on average, up to 12 agents of the Public Ministry to deal with complaints. This figure is aggravated if one takes into account that these prosecutors have to distribute their cases among the 7 investigative police officers and four experts that these prosecutors have on average.
Added to this are shortcomings in training. Only five anti-corruption prosecutors’ offices had experts who received any training or reinforcement of their skills to investigate this type of crime between 2019 and 2020, while only 11 provided any special preparation for their police. Half of the prosecutors’ offices trained their assigned prosecutors.
Outside the averages, when analyzing each case separately, it is noted that only the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office of Sonora has a satisfactory human capital, that is, with a sufficient number of prosecutors, police and experts, who have also been adequately trained. There are 13 states that are considered to have regular human resources.
On the other hand, there are 13 entities where the study concludes that human capital is deficient quantitatively and qualitatively: Campeche, Coahuila, Chiapas, Chihuahua, Guanajuato, Michoacán, Morelos, Nuevo León, Oaxaca, Quintana Roo, Tabasco, Tlaxcala and Yucatán.
The State of Mexico is the entity in the country with the most agents of the MP in its anti-corruption prosecutor’s office with 53, although in turn these have to divide the 6,266 inquiries initiated in the two years analyzed; is an average of 118 investigation folders for each prosecutor. In the other Extreme is the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office of San Luis Potosí that barely has two agents of the MP, or the prosecutor’s offices of Querétaro, Guerrero and Colima that barely have three.
“Having the quantity and quality of human capital for the investigation of acts of corruption is essential for the attention of workloads and response times. Without sufficient and well-trained personnel, it is difficult for acts of corruption to be investigated with opportunity and suitability,” the analysis warns.
Little money and counted
The study concludes that only five states have anti-corruption prosecutors’ offices with material resources that are considered satisfactory: Chihuahua, Durango, Jalisco, Tlaxcala and Veracruz. Instead, there are 12 states with a regular level and eight states with a deficient level: Aguascalientes, Colima, Guanajuato, Mexico State, Michoacán, Nayarit, Oaxaca and Sinaloa.
On average, the annual budget of the country’s anti-corruption prosecutor’s offices amounts to 24.5 million pesos, which the organizations consider insufficient, and more if it is considered that there are entities such as Tamaulipas where the resources do not reach even three million pesos. Another negative fact is that of 20 states that provided data from their budgets in 2019 and 2020, there are eight in which there were resource cuts.
A red light: only five states (Durango, Jalisco, Campeche, Coahuila and Veracruz) have anti-corruption prosecutors’ offices with budgets that are allocated independently. The rest of the prosecutor’s offices do not have their own budget, but with allocations that are made from another unit or from the Attorney General’s Office.
“The lack of resources necessary to carry out investigations into acts of corruption generates a budgetary dependence on the Attorney General’s Office, which in some cases may represent a risk in the autonomy to exercise its powers and limit its operational capacity due to lack of resources,” the report states.
Inadequate rules and lack of autonomy
The common denominator is that the country’s anti-corruption prosecutors operate with a poor legal framework. None of the 29 analyzed have a hearing protocol, a witness protection protocol, or an undercover investigations protocol. There are 10 states where, in addition, the appointment of the anti-corruption prosecutor is not autonomous, but is a direct appointment of the attorney general.
“This data is relevant, since, although there is no evidence of the impact that this organizational model has had, this could be an element that limits or restricts the autonomy of Anti-Corruption Prosecutors by not having a certainty in the stability of their position, so they can be subject to decisions of a political nature,” warns the study.
Another important deficiency is that there are seven states where the penal codes do not have an independent classification of crimes that represent acts of corruption such as embezzlement, abuse of authority, improper exercise of public service, bribery, among others. This is an important shortcoming because it makes it difficult to identify cases that fall within the competence of their anti-corruption prosecutors’ offices.
According to the score that the report assigned in this section, there are ten state anti-corruption prosecutors’ offices that operate with a deficient legal framework: Aguascalientes, Chiapas, Guanajuato, State of Mexico, Nayarit, Sinaloa, Tabasco, Tlaxcala, Veracruz and Zacatecas.
“It is also highlighted that most of the prosecutor’s offices do not have the necessary reforms to carry out the investigation and prosecution of companies autonomously. So this implies further limiting the possibilities of carrying out investigations of greater complexity in which individuals and public servants are involved,” said the IMCO.
Investigating the “there it goes”
The analysis identified shortcomings in the way prosecutors’ offices investigate cases of possible corruption. In general, inquiries are carried out with discretionary procedures, without specific or approved mechanisms or a well-defined methodology.
It highlights, for example, that 45% of prosecutors’ offices lack electronic platforms to record and monitor their actions. In fact, there are only three entities where prosecutors’ offices have clear records of the investigations they have underway.
Although reporting is a fundamental mechanism from which an investigation can be initiated, only 18 states have three or more avenues of complaint. The rest have very limited ways to file complaints and there are three cases (Guanajuato, Morelos and Querétaro) where it is not possible to file complaints anonymously.
Another negative aspect is that there are 11 prosecutors’ offices that do not haven the capacities to initiate inquiries ex officio. That is, even if they are aware that an act of corruption may have been committed (for example in a report in the press) they cannot initiate an investigation unless someone does not report it directly.
“In general, prosecutors’ offices are limited to investigating the facts that are directly and formally denounced to them without generating various mechanisms for investigating the criminal phenomenon in each specific case,” the report states.
The anti-corruption prosecutors’ offices of Veracruz, Querétaro, Nayarit and Morelos have – in general – deficient investigation processes. There are nine more states with regular procedures, and fifteen states whose processes are considered satisfactory.
Impunity prevails
Despite the fact that corruption crimes have specialized prosecutors’ offices for investigation in most of the country, the reality is that the proportion of cases that are clarified is minimal even when they are reported and the corresponding investigations are opened. The general rule is impunity.
As already stated at the beginning, only 0.4% of the reported cases reached a conviction; in proportion it is only 1 in 200 cases. The anti-corruption prosecutors’ offices barely managed to convert 5% of the files initiated into firm judicial processes.
There are only two anti-corruption prosecutors’ offices, those of Sonora and Michoacán, which managed to prosecute more than 10% of their investigations initiated. The rest not even that. There are four states: Guanajuato, Guerrero, Nayarit and San Luis Potosi that failed to submit a single case to a local judge.
Worse, of the 24 anti-corruption prosecutors’ offices that provided information, there are 12 of them (or half) that did not obtain a single sentence related to corruption crimes in 2019 and 2020.
The specialists detected that there are cases such as that of the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office of the state of Mexico which reports that it decided to “solve” three thousand 404 investigation folders (practically half of those it opened) by sending them to the temporary file. Although it is a legal option in case there is not enough data, in fact it means more impunity.
“In the case of possible acts of corruption, this form of termination of the investigation is not the most suitable since it does not solve the cases or ensure complete effectiveness on the part of the Prosecutor’s Offices,” the analysis concludes.
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