Through a series of ethnographic vignettes, this article examines how providers contribute to corruption in Mexican health care, how providers are themselves subjected to logics of corruption, and the relationship between patients’ and providers’ vulnerability within contexts of resource scarcity. Doctors, faced with insecure salaries due to nonpayment of wages by the government, collude with hospital staff to sell state drugs on the black market. Meanwhile, vulnerable patients are used as teaching opportunities for private school students—with horrifying, and fatal, effects. Palancas (“favors” granted by colleagues and higher-ups to individuals with less authority) and exclusive treatment of recomendados (patients given preferential treatment based on the “recommendation” of personnel with greater authority) signal the importance of hierarchical power in determining how corrupt acts are interpreted. What counts as corruption varies from one context to another; therefore, our method seeks to understand how the actors themselves evaluate the “corrupt” social practices in question. Through transnational collaboration (between two coauthors positioned in the United States and Mexico), we aim to contribute to decolonization of anthropology as a discipline by situating Mexico not only as a repository of ethnographic data but also a site for emerging theoretical intervention.

中文翻译：

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在非法/合法的边缘运作：墨西哥医疗保健中的系统性腐败

通过一系列民族志小插曲，本文探讨了提供者如何助长墨西哥医疗保健的腐败，提供者本身如何受到腐败逻辑的影响，以及在资源稀缺的背景下患者和提供者的脆弱性之间的关系。由于政府不支付工资，医生面临着不稳定的工资，他们勾结医院工作人员在黑市上出售国家药品。与此同时，弱势患者被用作私立学校学生的教学机会——带来可怕的、致命的影响。Palancas（同事和上级授予权力较小的个人的“恩惠”）和对推荐人的独家待遇（根据具有更大权力的人员的“推荐”给予患者优惠待遇）表明等级权力在决定如何解释腐败行为方面的重要性。腐败的定义因环境而异；因此，我们的方法试图了解行为者自己如何评估所讨论的“腐败”社会实践。通过跨国合作（位于美国和墨西哥的两位合著者之间），我们的目标是通过将墨西哥不仅定位为人种学数据的存储库，而且还是新兴理论干预的场所，为人类学作为一门学科的非殖民化做出贡献。