He thought about writing screenplays, and now, perhaps unintentionally, he’s helping to write a new chapter in the history of Nicaragua.
Roberto Courtney, a 37-year-old lawyer and economist, is the executive director of Ética y Transparencia (Ethics and Transparency), an organization that works on electoral issues, citizen participation and anticorruption efforts in his country.
Courtney left Nicaragua in 1983 to begin a long academic and professional pilgrimage to the United States. After completing high school there, he earned a degree in economics at Loyola University and studied law at Georgetown University. He worked successively in the legal department of a psychiatric hospital in Manhattan, a Wall Street law firm, and a law firm in Los Angeles. In 1993 he opened his own practice in the latter city. Three short years later, after winning a couple of important cases, he closed his office in Los Angeles and returned to Nicaragua, intending to take some time off to write.
“I wanted to write scripts for films and some were already well underway,” Courtney recalls. But a conversation in an airport waiting room with one of the officers of Ethics and Transparency changed the direction of Courtney’s life. “I decided to stay for a while. Nicaragua is a country that is still taking shape, and I felt the need to take part in this. There have been major advances and these compelled me to stay,” he says.
Ethics and Transparency has played a key role in the consolidation of democracy in Nicaragua. Toward the end of the 1990s, the organization directed a national dialogue convened by the government as a result of the governance crisis that occurred following the breakdown of talks between the governing Liberal Alliance Party and the Sandinista National Liberation Front. Some 57 organizations participated in the dialogue and more than 200 accords on economic and governance matters were signed.
Ethics and Transparency also served as an observer of the national elections of 1996 and 2001, the Atlantic Coast elections in 1998 and 2002, and the departmental elections of 2000. Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, who was in Nicaragua on the eve of the 2001 elections, said one of the guarantees that could be relied on was “the quality and integrity that Ethics and Transparency would provide in the quick vote count.” “In my opinion,” said Carter, “they are one of the best civic organizations in the world for guaranteeing independent results.”
During the past year, Ethics and Transparency has stepped up its fight against corruption. “We want all of this to result in an improvement of justice, of the process of public contracts, bids, government procurement, privatizations. We are working for a revolution of ethics,” he assures. “People trust Ethics and Transparency. To a certain extent, we are synonymous with assurance and that is very important,” he says.
Courtney feels satisfied with the work done so far, but he knows that there is still much left to do. If all his goals are eventually achieved, Courtney can always go back to writing or playing the saxophone, despite the fact that he does the latter “with more enthusiasm than skill.”