No stamp of approval for Mexico bureaucrats

But after six months, he was still in pursuit of his prize: a permit to paint his house.

"Tedious," Sandria declared of his paper chase. "They ask for a lot of things that aren't really necessary."

On a recent day, Sandria, a 50-year-old electronics technician, waited in (yet another) line at (one more) overcrowded government agency. He clutched a dogeared manila folder stuffed with documents outside a hulking downtown branch of Mexico City's government, his 13th such visit.

"There could be three or four more," said Sandria, a stocky man in a red Miami Heat jacket. "I could get up there and they could say, 'You're missing a check mark or a period.' "

Sandria's ordeal in red tape is excruciatingly familiar to many Mexicans, who long ago learned to weather a day-to-day obstacle course of bureaucratic requirements, or tramites (TRAH-mee-tehs), that would probably send most Americans into fits of hair-pulling.

As in the United States, there are tramites for opening a business, registering a car, building a porch. But what puts Mexican red tape in a league of its own are the reams of required paperwork -- identification, proof of residence, birth certificates, deeds and titles -- and a bureaucracy that can be as picky as it is ponderous.

Too often, many Mexicans complain, only bribes seem to get the creaky wheels of government turning.

So it stirred a sense of sweet vengeance when the government of President Felipe Calderon recently offered cash prizes in a contest to identify the country's "most useless tramite." An ad campaign depicted a haggard resident, laden with files, standing before a glowering bureaucrat.

Venting years of frustration, 20,000 Mexicans poured forth with nominations by Internet, telephone and even the postal system, which enjoys its own place in the nation's pantheon of inefficient agencies. The winners, who will take home a total of nearly $50,000, are to be announced this month.

"The idea here is to have an assessment of tramites seen from the point of view of citizens," said Salvador Vega Casillas, who heads the federal comptroller's office, the Public Function Secretariat. "It is the first time the government is paying money to be criticized."