The Politics of Anti-Corruption Agencies in Latin America

Joseph Pozsgai-Alvarez, Joseph Pozsgai-Alvarez

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000487862
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Categoría: Politica globale

This book investigates the history, development, and current state of anti-corruption agencies in Latin America.

In recent decades, specialized anti-corruption agencies have sprung up as countries seek to respond to corruption and to counter administrative and political challenges. However, the characteristics, resources, power, and performance of these agencies reflect the political and economic environment in which they operate. This book draws on a range of case studies from across Latin America, considering both national anti-corruption bodies and agencies created and administered by, or in close coordination with, international organizations. Together, these stories demonstrate the importance of the political will of reformers, the private interests of key actors, the organizational space of other agencies, the position of advocacy groups, and the level of support from the public at large.

This book will be a key resource for researchers across political science, corruption studies, development, and Latin American Studies. It will also be a valuable guide for policy makers and professionals in NGOs and international organizations working on anti-corruption advocacy and policy advice.

Part I

National commissions, agencies, and systems

1 Introduction

Locating anti-corruption agencies within the politics of anti-corruption in Latin America

Joseph Pozsgai-Alvarez

DOI: 10.4324/9781003147886-2

Despite the strong negative emotions aroused by corruption, the academic and political interest in addressing this scourge in any systematic way only sprung out in the past three decades. Before that, corruption was considered a matter entirely of domestic political affairs and, consequently, taboo among professionals from international organizations. Corruption produced political scandals, recurrent calls for prosecution and reform, and sporadic academic interest; but its discussion remained (for the most part) confined to national borders, and its study largely anecdotal. However, beginning around the first half of the 1990s as a result of new conditions created by the end of the Cold War, the global spread of neoliberal ideas, and the work of international NGO Transparency International and the World Bank, anti-corruption action began a hectic period of growth that saw it develop into a full-fledged international movement within the short span of ten years. Popularly spelled out in a speech delivered by World Bank’s President James D. Wolfensohn in 1996—Corruption is a problem that all countries have to confront” (Wolfensohn, 1996, 11)—by 2020 this movement is composed of an ever-growing variety of organizations and individuals in the public and private sectors, at the local, national, and international levels, to understand, prevent, and control corruption in all its forms.

Corruption is the abuse of entrusted power for private gain (Pozsgai-Alvarez, 2020; Eigen, 2002), and its consequences are, by now, publicly and scientifically recognized. Among many other effects, corruption threatens political stability, hinders economic growth, lowers popular trust in elected officials, deprives citizens of equal access to public resources, inhibits their exercise of legal rights—in short, its presence, be it occasional or pervasive, is felt throughout the political, economic, and social spheres, even when not immediately perceived. Despite it being most commonly used in practice to refer to acts of bribery taking place in connection to the public sector, its forms are just as numerous as their consequences, and the relative predominance of a given form will depend on the setting (Ang, 2020; Johnston, 2005). In general, we find that corruption can take the forms of clientelism, electoral fraud, embezzlement, influence peddling, nepotism, etc., and they can take on specific social accents based on local culture. That is how we also speak of wasta (“connection”) in the Middle East, baksheesh (“charitable giving”) in Central Asia, guanxi (“connections”) in China, blat in Russia, and protekzia and combina in Israel, to name but a few. In particular, we will find that the impropriety of relational forms of corruption (such as patronage or nepotism) is more easily contested in local context than, say, purely transactional forms (most significantly, bribery).

1 Corruption in Latin America

In Latin America, corruption appears most gently in the Mexican palanca, the Chilean pituto, and the Brazilian jeitinho, all of which describe the exchange of favors and connections nurtured (Arellano-Gault, 2019); however, the combined impact of corruption is nothing short of devastating for the overall state of the region and for most of the countries therein. According to Transparency International’s (2019) latest Global Corruption Barometer survey, one in five citizens in Latin America reports having paid a bribe over the previous 12 months, with occurrence reaching as high as one in two in Venezuela and one in three in Mexico. Unsurprisingly, only 21% express confidence in their government. The misallocation of resources caused by corruption forces (or allows) firms and workers to remain in the informal market, with levels reaching over 60% in Guatemala, Mexico, and Paraguay (OECD, 2020); this, in turn, has done nothing to help improve the disappointing levels of economic growth seeing over the past few years (which has prompted observers to call the 2010s Latin America’s “second lost decade”). Ironically, the easiest way to estimate the extent and impact of corruption is by considering the most compelling examples of anti-corruption efforts: the numerous high-level cases prosecuted and the mass mobilizations seen.

First, the Operation Car Wash—and its multiple offshoots—represents one of the largest cases of corruption in the world. Launched in Brazil in 2014, it quickly unraveled from a national scandal to an international event, sweeping through ten other countries in the region and leaving political (and economic) devastation in its wake. The network of bribes paid to win public contracts involved nine Brazilian construction firms, prominently Odebrecht, Camargo Correa, and Constructora OAS, and billions of dollars in bribes. According to the plea agreement of Odebrecht alone, 35 million were paid in Argentina; 11 million in Colombia; 91 million in the Dominican Republic; 33 million in Ecuador; 18 million in Guatemala; 10 million in Mexico; 59 million in Panama; 29 million in Peru; and 98 million in Venezuela (Pinotti, 2020). The scandal saw several former Latin American presidents arrested, including Brazil’s Lula da Silva and Michel Temer, and Peru’s Ollanta Humala and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski. The wave of scandals, added to the effects of lower exports, had a chilling effect on public investments, which in 2017 represented only 1.6% of GDP in Latin American and Caribbean countries (OECD, 2020, 27), an amount lower than in other regions and with a significant negative impact on the prospects for economic growth (Cavallo and Powell, 2019).

Second, scandals have also sparked massive protests across the region over the past decade. In 2015, Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina was forced to resign from office (and was later arrested) after months of increasing national unrest over allegations of corruption. In Bolivia, allegations of electoral fraud ended too in the ousting of President Evo Morales—who then flee the country and was granted asylum in Mexico—in 2019, after three weeks of civil protests. Likewise, the involvement of Peru’s Pedro Pablo Kuczynski in the Odebrecht scandal, as well as the irregular pardon of former President Alberto Fujimori, sparked mass demonstrations in the capital and further exacerbated a political conflict with Parliament, ultimately causing his resignation amidst a second impeachment in early 2018. While these three cases are emblematic of the effects of popular unrest over a country’s political stability, plenty of anti-corruption mobilizations have taken place across the region, with various degrees of effectiveness. To illustrate the frequency of such events, it suffices to consider the major protests that took place in the Dominican Republic in January of 2017 (“March for the End of Impunity”), August of 2018 (“March of the Million”), July of 2019, and February–March of 2020 (“Trabucazo 2020”). It is also important to highlight the potential for a broader impact on anti-corruption that popular discontent and demonstrations can have, perhaps nowhere better exemplified than in the “Torch-lit Marches” that took place in Honduras throughout the second half of 2015, and which resulted in the creation of the Organization of American States (OAS) Mission to Support the Fight against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras (MACCIH).

2 The political nature of (anti-)corruption

The strong emotional reactions generated by the fight against corruption over the past decade contrast sharply with the reported persistence of corruption tolerance among citizens. This tolerance is evidenced through their direct participation in petty corruption (mostly in the form of bribery or nepotism), and their electoral support of politicians involved in corruption scandals (Pozsgai-Alvarez, 2015). Having already mentioned the frequency of petty bribery in the region, let’s review the second, high-level form of corruption tolerance. All things being equal, we would normally expect people to choose the non-corrupt option; however, seldom do elections in Latin America allow for such a straightforward evaluation, and too often voters are forced to weight the honesty of candidates to public office against more mundane records. After all, this is the land of the infamous “rouba mas faz” (“he steals but gets things done”), first used by Brazilian scholars to describe former Sao Paulo Governor Ademar de Barros in the 1950s (Pereira and Melo, 2015), and since then adopted across Latin America. Tolerance is not only expressed through support despite scandal, but it also takes the form of permissiveness, meaning the lack of active electoral opposition. Administering a vignette experiment in Colombia, Carreras and Vera (2018) report that voters are less likely to cast a vote when candidates are marred by accusations of corruption. Similar results of voter apathy in Mexico are described by Chong et al. (2015) as “quashing the hope” instead of “inspiring the fight,” and explain this by suggesting that “incumbent corruption information taints all candidates” (2015, 70). However, tolerance does not appear to be ubiquitous across events and locations, and while other characteristics of the candidate—importantly, their work performance—mitigate the effect of negative information, corruption does appear to reduce support for the offending candidate (Vera, 2020). Tolerance of corruption is expressed in the rationalization of unethical behavior: minimizing the consequences of their acts and/or displacing responsibility. Such rationalization is common, as stated by De Sousa and Moriconi (2013, 495): “there is widespread perception by the public that, in order to be successful in politics, one has to be corrupt.” Putting it into everyday terms, the idea that “they all steal” (Hummel, 2018, 224) is all too frequently used to explain away their disengagement from moral action.

However, we should not make the mistake of interpreting this tolerance or permissiveness to be a popular endorsement of corruption. While the precise moral weight of different acts of ...