I was in a small border town in the Baha sitting at an outdoor café. I watched a Mexican cop stopping American licensed cars and demanding fifty bucks or, “I arrest you.” He was scaring the snot out of them. When I related this to the family I was staying with, one of them told me, approximately, “Americans that bring nice cars here are idiots. Any cop who likes your car can stop you and take it.” (Incidentally, at the time if you wanted to rent a car on the American side, you had to promise that you wouldn’t take it into Mexico. When I asked why the clerk said, “’Cause they can just take it.”)
The family I was staying with told me how some of them had gotten good jobs. They paid bribes. The best jobs were with the Electric company, the telephone company and the oil industry. The bribes cost accordingly.
“The bribes cost accordingly.”
Every former Spanish colony is corrupt to this day. That’s how I got my driver’s license in the Philippines.
Last time I drove to Mexico I had to bribe two different sets of Mexican cops to get back into the U.S. That was the early 1980s.