Word: corruption
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Says Political Scientist Jorge Bustamante: "We know we own the oil, and we are ready to defend it with our lives. But it has not touched our lives as yet." Just how much oil wealth will affect the average Mexican is uncertain. One worry is to what extent endemic corruption will siphon off some of those billions. Another is whether López Portillo's ambitious dreams of industrialization will really benefit the impoverished millions desperate for work, social services, or both. The 600,000 jobs promised by López Portillo, to cite one example, are 200,000 fewer than...
This system has resulted in a political stability rare for Latin America; Mexico has not faced an attempted coup in more than 60 years. But the P.R.I.'s dominance has also provided ample documentation of Lord Acton's dictum that power tends to corrupt. Says an experienced Mexican attorney: "When a Mexican official gets an important post, he steals from it instead of serving in it. It's unfortunate, but that's the way it is." From policemen to Cabinet officers, officials routinely ask for and get bribes, ranging from the $2 that will persuade a traffic cop to tear...
Last May the López Portillo government began a well-publicized series of crackdowns on corrupt officials. The federal attorney general, Oscar Florez Sanchez, declared that he would investigate "everybody from the governor of Coahuila on down" after $6.6 million worth of denim dyes were smuggled into Mexico aboard a plane owned by the state government; the digging finally focused on the pilot and an associate. The Mexican information agency announced last spring that 900 investigations into public corruption had begun. So far none of those investigations has produced even an indictment, much less a conviction. Charges Hero Rodriguez Toro...
...tempting. It seems the one word that will do to point toward something moribund in a culture, the metastasis of despair that occurs when a society loses faith in its own future, when its energy wanes and dies. It would probably be more narrowly accurate to use words like corrupt or depraved to describe, say, punk rock, or murder in a gas line, but decadent is more popular because it contains a prophecy. To be decadent is to be not just corrupt, but terminally corrupt. "Decadence" speaks with the iron will of history and the punishment of the Lord...
Shocks of a more surreal nature follow. When Willard meets up with a bump-and-grind U.S.O. show in the proverbial middle of nowhere, Coppola creates a haunting spectacle of corrupt American values loose in an alien world. Later, Willard encounters a platoon of spaced-out black G.I.s who are shooting aimlessly into the night without benefit of a commanding officer. "It's the asshole of the world," says one fleeing soldier. Coppola's eerie visions, sculpted out of smoke, fire and darkness, make the words real...