Nightmare bureaucracy in Mexico? Share your story.

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The Mexican government launched a competition Thursday to find the worst examples of inefficiency within the bureaucratic machine. The initiative is asking people to submit the most outrageous examples of inefficiency and corruption they have experienced when dealing with officials and government agencies in Mexico.

The effort is being overseen by la Secretaría de la Función Pública, and the ‘winners’ will be announced in December. According to the daily newspaper La Jornada, foreigners as well as Mexicans can submit their tales of exasperation and dissatisfaction with red tape in the country.

Promotional material for the competition (above) features two men in a cluttered office. One man -- a bureaucrat -- is behind a desk and holding up his hands as if to say, ‘What do you want me to do about it?’ The other man, laden with a stack of bound paperwork, looks on in frustration.

The message accompanying the image: ‘Denounce the worst procedure -- the most useless bureaucratic procedure.’

Mexico is listed as the 72nd-most-corrupt country in the world, according to Transparency International’s 2008 index.

The amount that Mexicans paid in bribes last year rose in comparison to previous years, the nonprofit reports. Mexicans paid the equivalent of about $2.6 billion in bribes in 2007 -- that’s 42% more than they paid than two years earlier and an average of more than $24 for each of Mexico’s 105 million people.

Much of the money went to fix parking tickets, get garbage collected or secure parking spots from the legions of informal attendants who block off spaces and charge for them.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

http://www.funcionpublica.gob.mx/.