I know of a U.S. District Judge who was appointed to the Federal Bench, by President Reagan, and unanimously confirmed by the Senate, in about 1985. He sometimes tells the story that shortly after he became a Federal Judge he visited Mexico as part of some sort of international judicial systems exchange program. While speaking informally to a group of leading Mexican jurists he was asked how he, a relatively young man of Mexican heritage, had been risen to be a Federal Judge, with lifetime tenure. With what he intended to be self-depracating humor, he said that his mother had worked as a maid in Los Angeles, and that he was the illegitimate son of Ronald Reagan.
None of the Mexican dignitaries present laughed, or even batted an eye, they just nodded sagely. That Ronald Reagan would make an important appointment based not on what was best for th ecountry, but to provide for a bastard son by giving him a prestigious lifetime job on the Federal payroll, and that the United States Senate would go along with it without protest, or even comment, made perfect sense to them -- it was how things worked in Mexico.
It is indeed how things work in Mexico, I come in contact with a few of Mexico’s elite regularly at work and they do not comprehend our way of doing things at all. Why let the “little people” get ahead, or help them out in any way- it simply makes no sense to them.