But Americans are painfully stupid when it comes to Mexico and our own government is partly to blame along with the news media. For the most part, news media don't have a clue about any of this nor the imagination to explore it. Part of the problem is an impoverished vocabulary to deal with the Mexican reality. Americans think of corruption as an opportunistic crime a police officer, a judge or a bureaucrat who takes a bribe. Corruption in a democratic system involves an abuse of public trust.
Someone profits illegally from a position of trust.
Because of this narrow use of the word, Americans don't understand Mexico. They buy into the image of democratic legitimacy that Mexico strives very hard to project. They think that the problem of corruption in Mexico is opportunistic, that it is like the kind of corruption you can find in the United States, that you've got bad apples in the police, the military and the government. They fail to understand that the Mexican system the criminality starts at the top. A president doesn't get bought off after becoming president, paid to look the other way.