La multa or la mordida

Ah, yes – to pay the fine or the infamous “bite”, or mordida. Paying off officials and politicians, be it at the local, state, or federal levels, is as old as any custom in Mexico. Certainly, corruption exists in all political arenas in all countries, but here it is part of everyday life.

One type of mordida is the reactive one – when you get caught violating a law. A friend told me about the time a traffic cop motioned for him to pull over for not wearing a seatbelt. The officer presented two options:

A) He would confiscate my friend’s driver’s license, which he could pick up at the police station after paying the $700 peso fine. Or,

B) The officer could take care of everything for him right then for a lower fine. My friend would return to his car, get $400 pesos, hide it under his license, and bring it back to the officer.

Naturally, my friend chose the more economical and pain-free option.

Another type of mordida is the preventative one. I have another friend who owns a retail store that sells contraband goods, essentially material that was smuggled across the border to avoid paying import taxes. She pays $500 pesos to a local official every month to make sure that they don’t raid the store. It is a cost of doing business.

Everyone sees it as a win-win-win situation: the underpaid lower-level government workers get an extra boost, the violator gets off with a lesser “fine”, and neither of them care about the lost revenue to the government because the collected fines would have eventually gone into the politicians’ pockets anyway. So why not spread the wealth around?

To judge Mexican society on this ethical rationalization would be futile and impractical.
While the buck may get passed around physically, it certainly doesn’t stop at the top. Mexicans see government as an entity that, although it has plenty of money, doesn’t provide the services it promises because of corruption at the higher levels. Even if those at the top were able to kick their corruption habits, convincing the rest of Mexican society to do the same would be a generational effort.