Prosecutors in Mexico Seeking Arrest Warrants For More Than 30 Scientists (theguardian.com) 57
Mexico's scientific community has reacted with outrage after the country's chief prosecutor requested arrest warrants for 31 scientists, researchers and academics on accusations of organised crime, money laundering and embezzlement -- charges that could land them alongside drug cartel kingpins in one of the country's most notorious lockups. From a report: A judge at the maximum security Altiplano prison -- from which Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman escaped in 2015 -- denied granting the arrest warrants on Wednesday. But the federal prosecutor immediately announced plans to pursue arrest warrants for the third time. The university professors have been accused of violating a law that prevents members of an advisory board from receiving money from a government science fund. But that law was passed in 2019, and the scientists got the $2.5m years earlier when it was apparently legal. Those involved have denied the funds were illegal or misused. The National Council on Science and Technology (Conacyt) has described the reaction to the arrest warrant applications as "a concerted wave of disinformation," which was spreading "terror" in the scientific community.
Ex Post Facto laws ... (Score:2)
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Re: Ex Post Facto laws ... (Score:3)
Re: Ex Post Facto laws ... (Score:3)
amazing.
mexico and science in the same sentence
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Believe it or not... straight to jail...
No Scientists on Advisory Boards? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No Scientists on Advisory Boards? (Score:5, Interesting)
The reporting on this is horrible as usual.
The regulation is designed to prevent someone from serving on an advisory board that doles out funds *while also* serving as a scientist in an organization receiving said funds. It makes perfect sense and is a good common sense policy to prevent conflict of interest.
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The regulation is designed to prevent someone from serving on an advisory board that doles out funds *while also* serving as a scientist in an organization receiving said funds. It makes perfect sense and is a good common sense policy to prevent conflict of interest.
In sensible places you simply are required to recuse yourself from the panel when your grant or any from your institution or with any current or recent collaborators is being assessed and ranked. So you get to sit on the board while having essen
Re: No Scientists on Advisory Boards? (Score:5, Interesting)
Board member A will recuse himself
Or herself.
from the other board members in exchange for votes when they need them. That happens all the time. Boards are incestuous.
That's not how it works. I know a few people who on funding council boards.
This is literally the main problem with government and advisory boards where no one has a vote on who is on the boards.
So your solution to lower corruption is to replace scientists with politicians.
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So the solution is to keep scientists off of advisory boards for grant funding? Who exactly would you put in there? Non-scientists? Do you think an accountant or a lawyer is going to make a better decision? You've removed the possibility of bias (or at least, of informed bias) in favor of uninformed bias? Sounds replacing a kind of funding board with some potential ethical issues with a board with a lack of any ability to assess research in a meaningful way at all. And let's be honest, depending on the kind
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Oh so we need to have a bunch of uninformed random assholes deciding which high energy particle physics research project gets funded? Like a jury of your peers which is completely filled with retirees and people with nothing better to do, or people that couldn't figure a way out of it and would rather be literally anywhere else?
Sounds like we can do away with the advisory boards altogether in favor of a random lottery, because that decision would probably result in better utilization of research funds than
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Again - THE REGULATION **IS NOT** PROHIBITING âoeSCIENTISTSâ FROM SERVING ON BOARDS.
It is simply prohibiting someone from serving on a board who also doles out funds TO THEIR INSTITUTION.
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Again - THE REGULATION **IS NOT** PROHIBITING ÃoeSCIENTISTSÃ FROM SERVING ON BOARDS.
It is simply prohibiting someone from serving on a board who also doles out funds TO THEIR INSTITUTION.
Right, so serving on the board in their area of expertise prevents them from getting funding. Great idea!
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If there's evidence of corruption or malfeasance, then go after the members of the board in question. I have no issue with that. But as both you and I say, some of these are highly technical disciplines. Unless you're going to use an outside group, like say, researchers from outside of Mexico, to review proposals, you might as well call in the janitors and the mail room to review these grants.
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It's difficult, and often very expensive in legal fees and lost work It's aggravated when your lab has lost funding due to malfeasance.
Re: No Scientists on Advisory Boards? (Score:2)
So the punishment is to lock them up with men who have headless corpses hung off of bridges for the whole public to see.
Eh, not too far from how the US INjustice system works actually.
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Throw a bunch of scientists in jail with a bunch of drug cartel members... You'll end up with a real life breaking bad as the scientists trade their knowledge and skills to the cartel in exchange for protection in jail.
Re: No Scientists on Advisory Boards? (Score:2)
I expect that the Mexican authorities are aware of this potential outcome, and I expect them to not give a rats ass.
Public show justice good feels for the public, and as long as a top official is not one of those headless corpses hung off of a bridge all is good.
Re: No Scientists on Advisory Boards? (Score:2)
"Public show justice"
"Justice theater for the public" sounds better.
Re: No Scientists on Advisory Boards? (Score:2)
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The guy who forgot to sign out of their obvious troll account makes a good point:
That is not how the world works. Board member A will recuse himself but ask for votes from the other board members in exchange for votes when they need them. That happens all the time.
This is exactly right.
Anyone who has ever served on a board knows that most decisions are made long before the meeting. This is true for ordinary things, not just this kind of corruption.
We're too quick to accept corruption with cynical quips "just they way business is done" or "that's how things work in the real world" as if acting honestly was hopelessly naive. It certainly doesn't help when people get a real thrill out o
Re: No Scientists on Advisory Boards? (Score:2)
"People used to value their integrity. We need to get back to that."
Yeah I miss the days when it took years to find out about the massive corruption and rot from our publicly esteemed leaders who put on a good feels show for the public.
They don't really try hard with the good feels charade anymore. Quality's slippin' everywhere man!
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> Anyone who has ever served on a board knows that most decisions are made long before the meeting.
It's why some bureaucrats hate when I show up. I'm often not pre-briefed on the internal politicking, which leads to me asking about pain points in the project and has destroyed a few contracts. It's also saved some people, including my own company, from massive losses when an overlooked requirement is brought up by me.
Re:No Scientists on Advisory Boards? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ideally you would have experts on the advisory board apportioning funding to the experts doing the research. Trouble is, in the real world, the only experts you can find for the board are going to be the same people doing the research that needs the funding. Creating that ethical divide is good in principal, but it may run into severe practical problems. If it's a choice between sitting on a board and getting no funding for research and not sitting on the board and having a chance to get funding, the board is going to be empty, or at least filled only with administrators who don't do research.
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No researcher would sit on such a board if they knew they could be prosecuted. So you're going to end up with non-experts with no fucking clue agreeing to proposals, and if corruption is so bad at Mexican universities, what's to stop an evil unethical scientist from trying to influence the uninformed board members? At least when they're on the board, their discussions are on record, and it's a helluva lot easier to determine if bias or self-serving motives are at play.
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People want simple solutions to complex problems, so you end up with the most simple and obvious solution which then not only doesn't really solve the original problem but also causes lots of new ones.
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Right. The good old: "For every problem there is a solution that is simple, neat—and wrong."
Re: No Scientists on Advisory Boards? (Score:2)
"If it profits me, and I don't get any shit blow back, then ethics be damned!"
Seems to be the standard way of thinking these days.
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Re: Easily neuter your political enemies (Score:1, Interesting)
The simple fact an actual judge, who apparently studied law, doesn't understand this, tells us what kind of junk can become a judge in Mexico (and most likely elsewhere too).
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The judge apparently understands it. It's the prosecutor who is confused.
Anti-establishment crusade (Score:5, Interesting)
The context of AMLO's crusade is really important - he uses the government to punish and persecute those he has resented during his lifetime. The CONCACYT (board of science and technology) represents in large part a technocratic effort to develop Mexico's universities and academics in STEM+, rather than in humanities, and was highly resented by AMLO's group. Mostly because the CONACYT has been fairly progressive in its ideals to open up Mexico's university and research apparatus and globalize by sending talent abroad for development, and spending money in STEM research. AMLO hates this organism - in large part because he is inept at mathematics and failed out of the university system. He wants to shape academia to reflect his system of values, and simplistic view of the world.
Re: Anti-establishment crusade (Score:1)
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Or, as he is lauded in all right-thinking institutions the world over, the Defender of Bleach Science.
Re: Anti-establishment crusade (Score:2)
Now if the True Believers(TM) just followed their fuhrer's advice...
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That's ok, neither do most of the people that uses the term as an insult or pejorative.
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We should be understanding of scientists and other bourgeois thinkers, just like Chairman Mao was. [/sarcasm]
Re: Anti-establishment crusade (Score:4, Insightful)
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Strange considering the GOP is the most anti-science and anti-education group in the US today. I think you're projecting a bit about the "left". Liberals are extremely pro-science. I'm not sure how you could be this confused about which side is pro-science and which side is pro conspiracy theories and pro religion masquerading as ideology.
The far left tends to be as anti-science, conspiracy theorist and generally as batshit crazy as the far right... Its just that in most western countries, the English speaking world in particular, we don't really have a far left to speak of and way too much of a far right.
Science tends to be quite moderate (although is easily o-opted for extremist purposes as history has demonstrated) so it does not lend itself to either cause.
The far right (and left) are always trying to frame the argument as an "us v
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Yeah, because there's never any right-wingers pushing narratives and not science. Nice try, troll.
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But scientists and academics describe the prosecutions as an attempt at silencing them as the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador imposes punishing austerity policies and pays short shrift to science in his response to the pandemic.
“The message from Conacyt and the prosecutor to the national academic community is strong and clear: if you think differently than us, it’s best you find something else to do,” wrote political economist Javier Aparicio in the newspaper Excélsior.
It would be incredibly refreshing to refer to this incident as a rare one-off departure from established scientific belief... but, I suppose, if you're waiting for that ship, events in not that ancient history might lead you to be particularly unsurprised it has set sail.
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If you're referring to my post, let me fact check with a Mexican scientist.
Oh wait! That's me, I am a Mexican scientist!
It's all true.
Let add more clarity: Over the years I have worked and met truly outstanding scientists that received training in high end fields because of Conacyt. Across many disciplines - engineering, biology, medicine, genetics, maths. The top of the top in many STEM fields were able to receive instruction and training that
The only good news (Score:4, Insightful)
If they pursue the scientists as effectively as they do the cartels, the scientists have nothing at all to worry about.
Unless the scientists don't have enough money to pay off the prosecutors...
Re:The only good news (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the scientists should be very worried. The cartels can offer corrupt officials a lot of money, or alternatively can hang them headless from bridges. I doubt there are a lot of scientists in Mexico with hundreds of millions of US dollars stashed in foreign accounts, or have the desire or the stomach to torture and behead university officials that threaten to deny grant requests. In other words, prosecutors, to give the appearances that they're tough on corruption, will go after easy targets like scientists, rather than tough and even outright dangerous targets like drug cartels. It's what "get tough on crime" always devolves into; throwing jaywalkers into jail forever because they can't afford their bail, while Wall Street tycoons rob the economy blind. It's hard and expensive to go after big criminals, a lot easier to go after some poor African-American who got caught passing a phony $20 bill.
Remember when Italy went after some geologists because they committed the grievous crime of not being clairvoyants?
Just some clarification (Score:3, Interesting)
Científicos Jefe! (Score:1)