We on the left side of the political spectrum have lots of reasons why we don’t like Wal-Mart: its antipathy toward unions, its practice of denying its employees enough hours to afford them health care premiums paid by the company, its destruction of Mom n’ Pop retail stores by its low-price strategy, and its discrimination against female managers.

Add the practice of bribery to the list. In a well-reported article in the NYT David Barstow and Alejandra Xanic von Bertrab go into great detail explaining how the company has paid bribes to suborn officials in Mexico, getting them to skip or get around zoning requirements before stores the size of Wal-Mart’s can be built. They tell the story of a town named San Juan Teohihuacán, which has ancient pyramids which draw tourists from all over the world. The town zoned the area near the pyramids to prohibit commercial development. Wal-Mart wanted to build a store there. Did the zoning stop them?

But 30 miles away in Mexico City, at the headquarters of Wal-Mart de Mexico, executives were not about to be thwarted by an unfavorable zoning decision. Instead, records and interviews show, they decided to undo the damage with one well-placed $52,000 bribe.

The plan was simple. The zoning map would not become law until it was published in a government newspaper. So Wal-Mart de Mexico arranged to bribe an official to change the map before it was sent to the newspaper, records and interviews show. Sure enough, when the map was published, the zoning for Mrs. Pineda’s field was redrawn to allow Wal-Mart’s store.

Problem solved.

There are several stories like that in the article. So not only is Wal-Mart a lousy employer in the United States, it’s a criminal employer in Mexico. Good to know.

If you don’t click through to the NYT article, you’ll miss this paragraph, which is the key to the whole article:

The Times’s examination reveals that Wal-Mart de Mexico was not the reluctant victim of a corrupt culture that insisted on bribes as the cost of doing business. Nor did it pay bribes merely to speed up routine approvals. Rather, Wal-Mart de Mexico was an aggressive and creative corrupter, offering large payoffs to get what the law otherwise prohibited. It used bribes to subvert democratic governance — public votes, open debates, transparent procedures. It used bribes to circumvent regulatory safeguards that protect Mexican citizens from unsafe construction. It used bribes to outflank rivals.