IN A new year message Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, promised to work to “liberate” his country from crime, corruption and impunity. His cabinet has duly set these as its priorities. The message is the right one. But unfortunately for Mr Peña, Mexicans are increasingly cynical about the messenger.

Mexico is still seething over the government’s leaden response to the kidnap in September of 43 students by municipal police in the south-western state of Guerrero and their apparent murder by drug traffickers. The investigation of the case seems to have stalled. Mr Peña’s main policy response to the massacre is a proposed constitutional amendment to abolish municipal police forces. But Congress may not approve it, not least because some are less rotten than the state forces, which would take their place.

In the government’s defence, the rule of law cannot be created in Mexico overnight. It will take years, perhaps decades, to clean up and strengthen the country’s police. But his critics believe Mr Peña is dodging the most important task: to punish corrupt political bosses who are complicit in organised crime. And the government itself is now stained by scandal.

The latest embarrassment, reported this week in the Wall Street Journal, is that in 2005 Mr Peña bought a house from a small builder who has won a slew of contracts from his administration. This follows the revelation that Luis Videgaray, his finance minister, bought a $500,000 house at a fashionable golf club with a mortgage from the vendor, a company owned by Juan Armando Hinojosa. The businessman has received much work from the federal government and previously from the state of Mexico when Mr Peña was its governor and Mr Videgaray was finance secretary.

This confirmed the close links between the administration and Grupo Higa, Mr Hinojosa’s business empire. In November the government abruptly cancelled a $3.7 billion contract for a high-speed train awarded to a consortium including Grupo Higa. Days later it emerged that the president’s palatial private home had been bought with a large mortgage granted to the First Lady by the group.

Both Mr Peña and Mr Videgaray insist that they have done nothing illegal. They are missing the point. In modern democracies, whose ranks Mexico aspires to join, the kind of mutual back-scratching they appear to have engaged in with Grupo Higa is seen as unacceptable behaviour.

If they are serious about tackling corruption and conflicts of interest, Mexico’s political leaders could look to Brazil. Petrobras, Brazil’s state-controlled oil company, is embroiled in a much bigger scandal involving kickbacks of perhaps $4 billion over the past decade. Prosecutors believe much of the money went to the ruling Workers’ Party and its governing allies. The president, Dilma Rousseff, chaired the Petrobras board for much of this period.

Thanks to fiercely independent prosecutors and courts, and a tough new anti-bribery law, Brazilians can be confident that the wrongdoing at Petrobras will be investigated and punished—even were the trail to lead to Ms Rousseff herself. In 1992 a Brazilian president was impeached for corruption; more recently, several ministers have been forced to resign over dodgy contracts or unethical links to private businesses. Dozens of managers of construction firms under contract to Petrobras face criminal charges.

For such things to become thinkable in Mexico, several changes are needed. Proposals for an independent prosecutor’s office and anti-corruption agency should be fast-tracked (depressingly, Mr Peña’s supporters want the latter under government control). The second missing element is political accountability. Nobody has taken responsibility and resigned over the security failings, the dodgy train contract or the conflicts of interest. Nobody has barred Grupo Higa from government contracts while it is independently investigated, if only to establish that it is blameless.

“They don’t get that they don’t get it,” says a former senior official. But Mexicans do get it. Mr Peña’s approval rating has fallen to 40%, close to the lowest-ever for a Mexican president.

His bold economic reforms may yet bring political reward. The opposition’s splits may help him win a congressional election in June. But the past few months have undermined the authority he used to secure the reforms. And with polls suggesting that turnout in the election will be dismal, the main beneficiary of the cynicism the president is engendering may be Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a messianic populist who has twice almost won the presidency. Mexico deserves better.