In November 2024, Marilyn Cote, a woman in Puebla who presented herself as a psychiatrist, became national news. The Ministry of Public Education found that she had no professional license in the health fields. On November 14, El Financiero reported that she “fue denunciada por la Secretaría de Educación Pública por usurpación de profesión” (was denounced by the Ministry of Public Education for usurping a profession). (Video in Spanish.)
The Prosecutor’s License
In January 2024, critics questioned whether Ulises Lara met the requirements to lead the prosecutor’s office of Mexico City on an interim basis.
A license as a law graduate is “requisito indispensable para que cualquier persona ocupe un cargo de fiscal” (an indispensable requirement for anyone to hold the office of prosecutor), El Universal wrote. The records of the Ministry of Public Education had shown only a license in sociology for him.
On January 9, 2024, the ministry issued him “una cédula profesional de licenciado en derecho” (a professional license as a law graduate).
Doubts About 305,333 Titles
In September 2021, El Financiero reported on a review by the Auditoría Superior de la Federación, the federal audit office.
It had found “dudas en la autenticidad de 305 mil 333 títulos y 29 mil 588 cédulas profesionales” (doubts about the authenticity of 305,333 titles and 29,588 professional licenses) registered by the Ministry of Public Education. The ministry replied that the universities issue the degrees, and that the audit did not affect the authenticity of the licenses.
Constituted Before a Notary
Article 5 of Mexico’s General Law of Commercial Companies states: “Las sociedades se constituirán ante fedatario público” (Companies shall be constituted before a public attester). The public attester is a notary or a commercial broker. Every later change to the company is recorded in the same way. The attester may not authorize the deed if the bylaws contravene the law. The simplified joint-stock company follows its own procedure.
A Sale by Public Deed
Under Article 2320 of Mexico’s Federal Civil Code, a property appraised at more than 365 times the daily minimum wage must be sold by escritura pública, a public deed. A private sale still binds the buyer and the seller. As the legal publication IDC Online explained in 2021, it has no effect against third parties. If the same property is sold twice, the sale registered first prevails.
Three Hundred Forty-One Days
In its Doing Business 2020 report, the World Bank measured how long it takes to enforce a commercial contract through the courts in Mexico. It took 341 days. The cost came to 33 percent of the value of the claim. On this measure, Mexico ranked 43rd of 190 economies.
Every Page Signed
In Mexico, the parties to a contract usually sign every page of it. In 2020, the legal publication IDC Online explained that the law does not require this, and that a contract without signatures on every page is still valid. The practice “se ha convertido en una costumbre” (has become a custom), it wrote, to make sure that all the pages are the ones originally agreed.
The Promissory Note
In July 2026, the president of the commercial chamber of the High Court of Justice of Yucatán said that about 95 percent of the cases it hears involve pagarés, promissory notes. He added that this does not mean they all involve fraud. The note is one of the most common ways to formalize a debt between private persons and companies.
A pagaré can be enforced simply because it exists. In 2024, an opinion piece in Vanguardia noted that in more than 40 percent of the pagaré cases heard in the commercial courts of Coahuila, the debtor claims that the document was altered.
The Pace of Life
In 1999, the psychologists Robert Levine and Ara Norenzayan published a study of the pace of life in 31 countries in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology.
They measured walking speed in city centers, the time a post office took to sell one stamp and the accuracy of 15 bank clocks in each country. Mexico came last of the 31 on the overall index. The authors called it “the archetypical land of a mañana.”
Twenty-Five Percent More Time
In October 2018, Senator Ricardo Monreal presented an initiative to reform Article 59 of Mexico’s Law on Public Works. At the time, the article allowed changes to public works contracts as long as they did not exceed “el veinticinco por ciento del monto o del plazo pactados en el contrato” (twenty-five percent of the amount or the term agreed in the contract).
The initiative said that such changes were frequent. It cited the intercity train from Mexico City to Toluca, whose cost had grown by more than 50 percent over the original budget.