Progresa, the main anti-poverty programme, is more forward-looking: for instance, families who get benefits must agree to send their children to school, and the money is handed to the women instead of the men, who tend to drink or gamble it away.
Ms. LITHWICK: There's so many and each of them is sort of heartbreaking, but you know, there's the guy in Atlantic City who kept scamming women he met online and would send them love letters and tell them to spend money so he could move to be near them and then he would gamble it away at the casinos.
"It's a bit of a gamble to walk away from such an iconic event that has been such a big and critical part of their marketing program, " says Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, Ill.