Teaching Comparative Government

Americans seem to assume that the adversarial system of enforcing laws (used in the USA, Canada, and the UK) is "normal." It's not, but more countries are trying it out. Mexico is slowly making changes. Judging Latin America’s judges ONE morning this year, in a windowless modern courtroom, Jorge Alberto Rodríguez faced justice. He was accused of driving a stolen car with changed number plates. The judge began by explaining his rights to him. His lawyer then tried to trip up the policemen whom the prosecution had produced as witnesses. To no avail: after an adjournment to allow a missing defence witness to appear via video link, the judge found Mr Rodríguez guilty. That seemed to square with the evidence. Having been on bail for the nine months since his arrest, he was given a suspended jail sentence of five years and fined 15,000 pesos ($800). Such a trial could have taken place in a British magistrate’s court. In fact, it was in Mexico City. The case was conducted under ...

How are the demands on government and the state in Mexico similar to and different from those in Nigeria? Mexico’s murder rate heads for a new record IN APASEO EL GRANDE, a town in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, the bodies are stacking up… In the first three months of this year the municipality of 85,000 people had 43 murders, up from 20 in all of 2016. That is about the same as London, a city 100 times larger and currently panicking about its high murder rate… The town and the state it belongs to are suffering from a double blow. One is a national crime wave, during which the murder rate broke through its previous record of 2011. That peak came after the then president, Felipe Calderón, deployed the army to fight drug gangs. His tactic of capturing or killing kingpins caused the gangs to split into warring factions and to enter new lines of business. The current president, Enrique Peña Nieto, who took office in 2012, promised to halve the murder rate. Instead, after an ini...