A national survey in Mexico reports that corruption by police and other public servants is sky high in the country.
About 47% of people in Mexico who had an interaction with police from July to December of last year said they experienced some form of corruption, according to a national survey by Mexico’s statistics agency, INEGI.
Most commonly, that corruption takes the form of bribes.
More than 2.9 million people paid some 3.4 million bribes to police and other public servants during the second half of last year, according to the survey. That works out to an average of nearly 18,600 bribes paid each day, or about 13 every minute across the country.
Bribes are most frequently sought by police during traffic stops and other interactions with the public, according to the data. Others are taken by employees in government offices.
Experts say while bribes are often small, collectively they represent huge sums of money. But because they are so ubiquitous, bribes frequently go unreported, uninvestigated and unpunished.
