Mexico's high-stakes presidential vote: 4 questions answered

The next Mexican president will inherit a country torn by drug violence. Tackling deep-seated democratic and economic challenges is key to progress.

Can corruption be cleaned up?

Corruption is deeply entrenched in Mexico and affects everything from its efficacy in battling violence to improving education and ultimately its growth. Examples are endless: Policemen were recently caught on tape kidnapping men in western Mexico who ended up dead the next day; a 2011 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report on Mexico shows the average household spends almost one-third of its budget on products that hail from “monopolistic or highly oligopolistic markets.”

“There needs to be a national crusade to clean up government at the federal and local levels,” says John Ackerman, a law expert at Mexico’s National Autonomous University. “This has been the real failure with Mexico’s transition to democracy.”

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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