It is certainly no exaggeration to state that corruption has become one of the most serious and urgent problems Latin America is facing today. In recent years, the region has seen a true epidemy of corruption scandals involving presidents, ministers, legislators, judges, high-ranking bureaucrats, and influential businesspeople. So far, all signs indicate that the problem is still on the rise, as most measures adopted to deal with this blight have proved ineffective. The impeachment of Dilma Rousseff and the imprisonment of Lula da Silva in Brazil, together with the political earthquake produced by the huge Odebrecht scandal in many Latin American countries, constitute dramatic evidence of the seriousness of the situation.
Corruption in Latin America, edited by Robert I. Rotberg, is an academic attempt to unveil the major causes of corruption in a select number of Latin American countries. The volume contains 12 chapters, including the introduction and the conclusions, written by the editor. The book is divided in 3 parts. Part 1 includes 4 chapters on the Brazilian case. Part 2 contains 3 chapters on Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru, while part 3 comprises 3 chapters on the cases of Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. Rotberg justifies this overrepresentation of the Brazilian case by referring to the country’s size and population and the prominent role played by the Lava Jato scandal. The most plausible reason for this choice, though, is that the idea to organize this volume originated during the editor’s stay at the University of São Paulo as a visiting professor in 2016–17, as he recalls in the preface. Despite its subtitle (referring only to politicians and corporations), the study also pays attention to the judiciary, the police, drug traffickers, journalists, international organizations, and civil society.
The introduction bears the all-embracing title “The Corruption in Latin America.” Here, Rotberg explores several aspects of the corruption phenomenon that have affected Latin America in recent years. He does this in a rather eclectic way, as the introduction includes both sections on specific countries (Honduras and Guatemala, but not on the rest of the studied nations) and sections on specific topics (with two sections on practically the same topic: “abusing public trust” and “abuses of trust”). As a result, no clear red line emerges from the analysis to demarcate the major commonalities and differences of the cases included in the book. Moreover, the introduction does not provide a brief theoretical review about aspects of the current corruption debate connected to the role played by the political class and corporations.
Surprisingly, Rotberg dedicates the largest section of the introduction to the cases of Uruguay, Chile, and Costa Rica, nations that are not included in the case studies in the book. He seems to be intrigued by one important question that, until now, has been systematically ignored in most studies exploring corruption in Latin America: why these three countries show relatively high levels of public probity and low levels of corruption. He dedicates seven pages to exploring a series of factors that could provide an explanation for these exceptional cases. For instance, he refers to the particularities of their colonial experience, the lack of precious minerals, the special features of the social and political elite, the high literacy rates, and particularly, the strength of their legal and political institutions. Rotberg is genuinely concerned with the extremely destructive effects of corruption on Latin American societies. By referring to those three countries, it seems that he wanted to send a message of hope and optimism. This becomes clear in the last sentence of the book, where Rotberg expresses his hope that a new generation of governing elites will be able to deeply transform their countries to become more like Uruguay and Chile than they are now.
In part 1, the four chapters dedicated to the Brazilian case focus on corruption from different thematic and analytical perspectives. In chapter 2, Marislei Nishijima, Flavia Mori Sarti, and Regina Célia Cati analyze Brazilian cultural traits, such as patronage and clientelism, that, according to the authors, have facilitated the spread and maintenance of corruptive practices since colonial times. Their premise is that Brazilian cultural traits are important elements for understanding the country’s institutions and how they work. They refer, among other aspects, to practices related to traditional society, in which the elite of big landowners defended their own particular welfare instead of the country’s interests. They also mention the broad acceptance among the Brazilian population of the practice of jeitinho, by which people try to take advantage of others by making use of personal connections, family ties, and the like to obtain favors and rewards, which is often prohibited by law. The chapter concludes with a general analysis of the ways these cultural practices have penetrated the entire Brazilian bureaucracy, political parties, and public policies, and how this has reduced the state’s ability to foster economic growth.
Rafael Braem Velasco, in chapter 3, presents the results of a quite technical study on the use of data analysis to detect potentially corrupt behavior at Brazilian public institutions at the local level. The study shows a series of new methods to audit tender procedures at the municipal level. For this purpose, Velasco makes use of a huge set of data provided by the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the State of Paraíba. This contains detailed information about public contracts awarded by the state’s 223 municipalities over the period 2010–16. The author warns, however, that not all the irregularities and inconsistences that can be observed in the tender procedures and acquisitions at the municipal level are necessarily the result of corruption. Factors such as insufficient bureaucratic capacity and project complexity can also have a negative impact on the quality of procurement governance at the municipal level.
In chapter 4, Nara Pavão make use of public opinion data in an attempt to establish the dominant attitudes of the Brazilian population toward corruption. For this purpose, she used data from the 2016 Latinobarómetro survey including all the Latin American countries. According to Pavão, the survey shows that Brazilians are very much involved in the fight against corruption and that they have one of the largest levels of trust in their judicial institutions. This can strongly be connected to the very active role played by the judiciary system against corruption during the Rousseff administration.
The final chapter on Brazil deals with the internationalization of Brazilian corruption. Mathias Alencastro analyzes the mechanisms of corruption used by Odebrecht to obtain major public contracts in Angola. Similar to the modus operandi used in Brazil, Odebrecht deployed in Angola a complex system of bribes to high-ranking political leaders and illicit donations to finance political campaigns of the ruling elite. This study makes clear that the activities Odebrecht conducted in Africa counted on the full support of the Brazilian government. Odebrecht was considered to be a strategic actor in Brazil’s foreign policy and its goal to increase its influence in the Portuguese-speaking African countries.
Natalia Volosin begins part 2 in chapter 6, in which she adopts an institutional approach to analyze the endemic corruption machine that controls the state institutions and the political life in Argentina. She beliefs that corruption is a symptom of disease, not the disease itself. The country’s extreme vulnerability to corruption is instead the result of problems such as political instability, lack of appropriate checks and balances, corporatism, and authoritarianism. To illustrate the working of the corruption machine, Volosin analyzes the kleptocratic character of the Kirchner administrations.
In chapter 7, Ronald MacLean-Abaroa analyzes corruption under the Evo Morales administration in Bolivia. This former mayor of La Paz describes how he dealt with the widespread corruption he found in the municipality. While he built up career incentives to increase the levels of probity among the municipal employees, he also deployed mechanisms of deterrence to prevent acts of corruption. Most of the measures he adopted were revoked following the installation of Evo Morales’ government. The author argues that the huge incomes obtained by the Bolivian state as a result of the commodity boom of the period 2006–14, and the nationalization of the oil and gas industry, generated all kinds of incentives among public officials to enrich themselves. He accuses Morales of making structural use of the existing anticorruption legislation to incarcerate and force into exile most leaders of the political opposition.
In the final chapter of part 2, Lucia Dammert and Katherine Sarmiento describe how decentralization policies applied in Peru since 2002 have provided fertile ground for corruption and impunity in several regions of the country. To focus on corruption from a regional perspective is a very welcome approach. Most studies of Latin America so far have explored the phenomenon at the central level. Indeed, the emphasis has been on the role played by the government, the bureaucracy, the parliament, and key state institutions located in the capital cities. Dammert and Sarmiento provide a lucid account of how regional elites make use of the traditional weakness of the central state to build up local networks of corruption. They show that decentralization does not necessarily reduce corruption at the regional level by bringing closer the decisionmaking process and the delivery of goods to the voters. In the Peruvian case, decentralization has often led to the capture of local governments and their resources by local elites by means of clientelism and patronage.
Part 3 of the book opens with a chapter by Stephen Morris exploring the relationship linking corruption and crime in Mexico. This certainly a very promising approach, since studies of corruption rarely incorporate crime into the analysis. Morris provides a very useful analysis of the theoretical literature existing on corruption and crime, problems that have rarely been explicitly connected to each other. In his examination of the Mexican case, he argues that crime and corruption not only often go together but that under certain conditions, crime facilitates corruption, and vice versa. However, Morris avoids falling into a reductionist position; he makes clear that corruption is one among a series of factors that stimulate crime and that crime is just one of the many factors facilitating corruption. The Mexican case shows not only that focused efforts to combat crime cannot be effective as a result of high levels of corruption, but they may make corruption worse.
In Chapter 10, Claudia Escobar analyzes how organized crime exerts control on the judiciary system in Guatemala. She was a judge on the Guatemalan Court of Appeals in the period 2005–14 and has received several international awards for her fight against impunity in her country. After a series of threats, she was forced to leave for the United States in 2015. She describes, for instance, the rampant corruption existing in the process of election of magistrates in her country. The nomination commissions have become politicized and co-opted by organized crime. At the same time, influential groups with connections to organized crime have managed to control the bar association. Escobar also assesses the positive impact the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) has had in the combat against big corruption in Guatemala. This UN body, led by Commissioner Iván Velasquez, has been able to expose acts of corruption by leading members of the political and economic elite, including presidents, senior judges, powerful businesspeople, and military officers. Nevertheless, so far, the local elite has succeeded in hindering the needed judicial reforms that the CICIG has suggested.
In Chapter 11, Kai Enno Lehmann explores the social conditions behind the culture of corruption in Honduras. Like Guatemala, Honduras possesses a corrupt political and economic elite, which experiences initiatives financed by international organizations to strengthen public probity as totally detrimental to their own interests. But elite resistance is not the only obstacle to successfully combating corruption in the country. Lehmann stresses the extreme degree of social distance between rich and poor that characterizes Honduran society, leading to a lack of communality between the different social sectors. Moreover, the poor masses are totally dependent on those above them to get what they need (such as food, jobs, and security). According to Lehmann, most Hondurans live on the basis of three simple rules, “attend to the here and now,” “submit to power,” and “remember who you are,” in order to survive in an extremely unequal society. These rules constitute, according to Lehmann, a major obstacle for mobilizing the population against the elite’s corruption and introducing the required reforms.
Rotberg does not provide a general conclusion about the main lessons emerging from the several contributions. Instead, in the final chapter, he enumerates a series of possible actions that can be included in an anticorruption strategy for Latin America. He particularly stresses the importance of leadership to make possible the required social, political, and institutional transformations to effectively combat corruption. But in order to be effective, these changes have to occur at the apex of society. National leaders have to have a strong political will to introduce changes, even at the cost of creating powerful enemies in several sectors. Moreover, the probity and independence of the judicial system are essential requirements for any chance to be effective in the battle against corruption.
However, the capture of the state by organized crime in many Latin American countries makes it practically impossible to combat corruption, since key local actors and institutions are themselves part of the problem. An interesting proposal formulated by Rotberg is the creation of a Latin American anticorruption court, with a comprehensive mandate to deal with gross cases of abuse of public office in the region. The UN CICIG initiative in Guatemala has already proved that international commissions can be quite effective in denouncing cases of corruption involving the highest circles of power. The idea to establish a Latin American anticorruption court will certainly generate multiple objections. Nevertheless, the fact remains that most Latin American countries have, until now, completely failed to combat big corruption through their own political and judicial institutions.
