Abstract
The nations of Latin America are afflicted with corruption, public and private. Reverberations from Brazil’s ongoing Lava Jato scandal have implicated at least a third of the countries of the region in its pay-for-play results. At the center of this vast web of conspiracy and illicit dealings are construction companies, giant petroleum exploiters, and presidents, vice-presidents, cabinet ministers, and regional political leaders across the continent. This chapter and the ones that follow explain what happened and why it happened (over decades in some instances) across a range of troubled Latin American countries from Argentina in the south to Mexico in the north. A section in this chapter explains why Uruguay, Chile, and Costa Rica are less corrupt than their neighbors. A final chapter suggests how Latin America can reduce the onslaught of corruption.
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Notes
- 1.
The Odebrecht construction firm of Brazil paid $782,000 to a financial firm owned by President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski of Peru from 2004 to 2007, when he was Peru’s economy minister and prime minister. In 2017, his opponents called him “morally handicapped.” But he survived an impeachment motion in Peru’s Congress. See Andrea Zarate and Nicholas Casey, “Peru Leader Faces Ouster Over Links to Builder,” New York Times, 16 December 2017. For his resignation, Marcelo Rochabrun, “Peru’s President Offers his Resignation,” ibid, 22 March 2018.
- 2.
See Gregory Paw and Sandra Oriheula, “The Long Shadow of Odebrecht’s Corruption,” FCPA blog, 27 March 2018, www.fcpablog.com/2018/3/27. Brazil’s ruling party under Lula mediated these handouts to Venezuela.
- 3.
See Robert I. Rotberg, “The Judge Who Could Remake Brazil: How Sergio Moro Has Tackled Corruption,” Foreign Affairs blog, 21 Dec. 2016, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2016-12-21.
- 4.
Chad Bray and Stanley Reed, “Brazil Oil Giant to Pay $2.95 Billion Over Bribery Scandal,” New York Times, 4 Jan. 2018. See also Matthew Taylor, “The Anticorruption Imperative for Latin America,” 6 Nov. 2017, https://aulablog.net/2017/11/06/the-anticorruption-imperative-for-latin-america.
- 5.
Ernesto Londono and Daniel Politi, “Corruption Arrests in Argentina Spur Hope and Wariness,” New York Times, 9 Jan. 2018; Azam Ahmed and Paulina Villegas, “In Mexico, Inquiry Said to be Killed by Leaders,” ibid, 9 Jan. 2018.
- 6.
Azam Ahmed, “Mexican Governing Party’s Ex-Chief Maneuvers to Avoid Graft Arrest,” New York Times, 23 Feb. 2018.
- 7.
See “A Central American Spring?” Economist, 15 Aug. 2015.
- 8.
Robert I. Rotberg, The Corruption Cure: How Citizens and Leaders Can Combat Graft (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2017), 280.
- 9.
Elisabeth Malkin, “Guatemala Arrests ex-President and his Finance Minister in Corruption Case,” New York Times, 13 Feb. 2018.
- 10.
Christine Lagarde, quoted in Szu Ping Chan, “Global Corruption Risks Tipping More Countries into Crisis,” Telegraph, 11 May 2016.
- 11.
For some of these data, especially on illicit outflows of cash from Latin American nations, see Global Financial Integrity’s reports, www.gfintegrity.org. Those reports contain individual country data, only some of which are up-to-date.
- 12.
For a detailed examination of the methodology of indexing corruption as utilized by Transparency International, the World Bank, and the Index of Public Integrity, see Rotberg, Corruption Cure, 54–61. The most useful of the governance indexes mentioned in a preceding paragraph are discussed in the same book, 61–73. A fuller discussion is contained in Robert I. Rotberg and Aniket Bhushan, “The Indexes of Governance,” in Rotberg (ed.), On Governance: What It Is, How It Is Measured, and Its Policy Uses (Waterloo, ON, CIGI, 2015), 55–90.
- 13.
Transparency International, Corruption Perceptions Index, 2017, www.transparency.org.
- 14.
- 15.
World Bank Control of Corruption Indicator, 2016, info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi.
- 16.
- 17.
See Daniel Buquet Corleto and Rafael Piñeiro, “The Uruguayan Path from Particularism to Universalism,” in Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and Michael Johnston (eds.), Transitions to Good Governance: Creating Virtuous Circles ofAnti-corruption (Cheltenham, Elgar, 2018), 57–79.
- 18.
GAN Business Anti-Corruption Portal, “Uruguay Corruption Report,” May 2016, www.business-anti-corruption.com/country-profiles/uruguay, accessed 24 Feb. 2018. See also Maira Martini, Transparency International Anti-Corruption Help Desk, “Uruguay: Overview of Corruption and Anti-Corruption,” March 2016, www.transparency.org/files/content/corruptionqas/country_profile_uruguay_2016.pdf.
- 19.
For details on the origins of the Nordic and Antipodean exception model, see Rotberg, Corruption Cure, 197–222.
- 20.
Patricio Navia, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, and Maira Martini, “Chile: Human Agency Against the Odds,” in Mungiu-Pippidi and Johnston, Virtuous Circles, 213–233.
- 21.
See the extensive analysis in ibid and Arturo Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Chile (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
- 22.
Evelyn Villarreal and Bruce M. Wilson, “Costa Rica: Tipping Points and an Incomplete Journey,” in Mungiu-Pippidi and Johnston, Virtuous Circles, 184–185.
- 23.
Ibid, 190–191.
- 24.
“Costa Rica: Stability at a Price,” in James Dunkerley, Power in the Isthmus: A Political History of Central America (London, Verso, 1988), 598–599.
- 25.
“The Better Alvarado,” Economist, 7 April 2018.
- 26.
Villarreal and Wilson, “Costa Rica,” 210–211.
- 27.
See Juan de Onis, “Chile in Crisis: South America’s Model Nation Grapples with Graft,” Foreign Affairs, April 12, 2015, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/chile.
- 28.
For a full discussion of these issues, see Rotberg, Corruption Cure, 18–27.
- 29.
Juan E. Pardinas, quoted in Kirk Semple, “Grass Roots Anticorruption Drive Puts Heat on Mexican Lawmakers,” New York Times, 28 May 2016.
- 30.
See Rotberg, Corruption Cure, 197–222.
- 31.
For the overall argument, see Rotberg, Transformative PoliticalLeadership (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2012). For “ethical universalism” see Rotberg, Corruption Cure, 36–38, and the references in the notes to those pages citing the work of Alina Mungiu-Pippidi.
- 32.
Rotberg, Corruption Cure, 37.
- 33.
This process is discussed at length in a chapter of Rotberg, Corruption Cure, 223–256.
- 34.
As Braem Velasco indicates in his chapter, the systematic analysis of procurement data by auditors provides a strong deterrent against corruption because it increases the probability of detecting illicit acts by persons responsible for the granting of contracts.
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Rotberg, R.I. (2019). The Corruption of Latin America. In: Rotberg, R.I. (eds) Corruption in Latin America. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94057-1_1
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