Reforma: Fernando Núñez de la Garza Evia*
Translated by Sally Seward
Mexico is a country where meritocracy hardly exists, another symptom of our lingering condition as an underdeveloped country. Personal connections still carry significantly greater weight than the studies, preparation or talent (in other words, merits) of the people. The issues this causes for the country are enormous, and the proof is in a disorganized, incompetent and corrupt bureaucracy that is responsible for administering and directing the public affairs of the country, nothing more and nothing less.
In 2003, the Vicente Fox government created a new law for professionalizing the bureaucracy of the country, called "Law of Career Professional Service in Federal Public Administration," one of the few comprehensive reforms carried out by his administration and inspired by the professionalization of private business teams. As we know, saying and doing are two very different things, and although during his administration there was momentum, the governments of Felipe Calderón Hinojosa and Enrique Peña Nieto have cared very little.
Since the nineteenth century, the European countries saw the need to professionalize their bureaucracies, which would go hand in hand with their preeminence in the world. China, which has grown rapidly in recent times, has also put special emphasis on the competence of its civil servants. And Mexico? We are still making the same mistakes: public positions are politicized (every time there are changes in the government there are changes in the positions, as if they were trophies) and there is still nepotism and cronyism. Far from this, income should be based on merit, subject to continuous evaluations and rewarded for good performance. There is a deep chasm between how it is and how it should be.
Even so, in Mexico there are "islands of decency," such as in the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs and the Bank of Mexico (among others), which have been able to implement professional bureaucracies: the high level of the Mexican foreign service is recognized throughout the world and the Bank of Mexico has played an excellent role since it achieved autonomy in the decade of the nineties. But those institutions only handle some areas of the giant that represents the national bureaucratic apparatus, making it clearly insufficient. For example, in an institution as important as the Congress of the Union there is a very small group of apolitical advisors whose role is to professionalize the legislative work. In comparison, the United States has a large group of professionals who work for the Congress as a whole and therefore provide their services to all the political parties.
Two recent studies confirm how important it is for countries to have professional bureaucracies. The first, carried out by the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, indicated that the countries that base their public positions on merit pay considerably less for public works, an area that stands out in Mexico precisely because of its high levels of corruption. The second study, carried out by the University of California-Berkeley, showed that countries that have career public employees grow more quickly economically, something that has clearly not happened in Mexico. It seems as though both research projects were dedicated to Mexico.
In a recent statement, the Inter-American Development Bank found that Mexico is one of the countries in the Americas that has become the most stagnant in the professionalization of its civil services. The professionalization of the teaching career is an important step forward, but the same should be done throughout the entire Mexican bureaucratic apparatus: moving from one little island to the next is clearly not enough. It is in the best interest of the political class, since they will be the ones who decide where we should be heading, but those who are steering the ship are the bureaucrats: the first pass reforms, but the second make them reality...or not. Therefore, to transform Mexico into a country of meritocracy and put us on the right path, our bureaucracy would be an excellent place to start.
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*Fernando Núñez de la Garza Evia is a lawyer.