Corruption 101

Now that we have been living here for a while, things here have started to become very "normal". You get used to way things look and operate and they start to feel normal and make sense to you. We were commenting today how blessed we are to live in the neighborhood we live in as it is full of trees and beautiful. Funny enough, the first time I drove into the neighborhood I was not fully impressed, but now that I have been here it is beautiful by my new set of standards.

Every once in a while still something new happens that reminds you that things work differently here. Last week, someone came to our house from the electric company about our meter. We got our next door neighbor who is bilingual to help us with the conversation. Apparently, the meter on our house has a wire on it that slows the meter down. This of course makes it so you pay less every month. Since we didn't own the house, it did not effect us, but definitely the owner.

After the conversation, our next door neighbor explained the situation. He says this happens every once in a while to people in the area and it happened to his sister not to long ago. Workers from the electrical company will come out and put on a new meter and a cable that slows down the meter. They will then return a couple of days later to tell the owner about the problem. The fine from the electric company for this tampering is 50,000 pesos (about 4,500USD). These workers don't want to collect this money. The electric workers want a kickback. They were dissapointed we were not the owners. They told our neighbor to call the owner (which we did) and tell him they would be in the neighborhood for the next couple of hours. They wanted to talk to him and get a small little payoff to fix the meter.

Our neighbor afterwards also showed us some of the signs of corruption. The meter for our house was brand new when all of the other meters were very old. There was no reason for us to have a brand new meter on our house. While I thought the neighbor would express frustration. He really did not. This happens in Mexico and they learn to deal with it.

Things like this make you thankful for the rule of the law in the states as you realize that it is missing in many places here in Mexico. You also frequently here of cops asking for payoffs at traffic signals or trying to buy vehicles from people for 50USD when they stop them. We have yet to experience this, but we got our first lesson this week.