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 |  Subject: Mexico: Contest to identify the most useless red tape  Fri Jan 09, 2009 5:57 am | |
| MEXICO CITY: To get life-saving medicine for her young son, Cecilia Velázquez embarks each month on a bureaucratic odyssey. First, two government doctors have to sign off on the prescription. Next, four bureaucrats must stamp it. Last, she has to present it (in quadruplicate) to a hospital dispensary.
The process takes at least four days and sometimes as many as 15. Since her son suffers from a hereditary immune system deficiency that could make an infection fatal, she said she asked God to keep him well on the months when he had to go without his medicine for several days.
She once complained to the government agency that runs the hospital where her 7-year-old son, Diego Emilio, is treated for his illness, agammaglobulinemia. But the comptroller's office there told her that the procedure "just is that way."
"I felt angry, sad, impotent," she said in an interview. "But I had to stay quiet and be respectful."
On Thursday, Velázquez finally got the vindication she had been seeking — from the president of the country.
Velázquez had won a government contest to identify Mexico's most useless red tape, and President Felipe Calderón was on hand to present her prize.
Calderón, like presidents before him, has vowed to battle government inefficiency, which he sees as a serious drag on an economy already suffering from the global downturn.
"How many layers of resistance toward citizens, how many layers of insensitivity have built up?" Calderón asked during a speech he presented to the many bureaucrats who attended the awards ceremony. "How many walls do we have to break down to really reach citizens?"
The contest, which was organized by the government office that oversees attempts to stop corruption and inefficiency, attracted 20,000 applications.
Mexico is by no means the only country that forces citizens to jump through endless hoops to register a birth, open a business or apply for government aid. But people here swear that their bureaucrats have, over generations, developed a particular brilliance for inventing new ways to drive them to distraction.
Mexicans have learned to arm themselves for any government encounter. They turn up for even the simplest transactions with folders filled with years' worth of documents, pretty much any piece of paper they have ever had stamped or notarized. Official birth certificates have become so essential that some families order scores of them — what they hope will be a lifetime supply — as soon as their children are born.
But even intricate preparations are no guarantee against endless delays. Bureaucrats have been known to change the rules as they like, or to duck out for two-hour lunches despite long lines of people waiting to see them.
Some Mexicans respond by offering bribes, said María del Carmen Pardo, a professor of public administration at the Colegio de México who was on the contest jury. But most people, she said, learn to seek out sympathetic officials to help speed them through the requirements.
The other finalists in the competition included a woman who complained about the paperwork required to clear up a problem involving a birth certificate in Mexico City, and a woman with dual citizenship who was forced to prove her Mexican nationality to a judge despite having all the right paperwork.
The jury gave a special mention to state governments' requirements for all drivers to get new license plates every few years — the subject of hundreds of entries.
Velázquez won not only because of the seriousness of her problem, but also because of her common-sense approach to solving it. She suggested that the government keep a database, so it can check that patients are legitimate and not abusing prescriptions.
She won about $22,000, which she said would help pay for her son's treatment. She works part time and says she doubts that she could find a full-time employer willing to let her go for days each month to navigate the bureaucracy.
She also won a government promise to fix the red tape. "We'll see," she said.
Pardo, the contest jury member, said she thought the competition would not by itself guarantee change. But she said it helped not only to highlight the problem, but also encouraged Mexicans to speak out to try to force change, rather than just accepting the status quo.
"Chileans don't let this happen to them," she said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/09/america/09mexico.php
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