Is corruption Latin America’s biggest problem?
Perhaps not. But according to one of the region’s most respected religious leaders, corruption is the largest obstacle to the region’s development and the principal source of its infamous social inequality.
Speaking to IDB officials at the Bank’s Washington, D.C. headquarters last February, Honduran Cardinal Oscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga described corruption as a “great scourge” that is undermining the foundations of Latin American societies.
“Corruption is a cancer that has spread throughout the world,” Rodríguez said, “but it has done so in a particular way on our continent, to the point where we have a culture of corruption. The abuse of public office, political kickbacks, omissions, illegal gifts, bribes, tax evasion, fraud—these are our daily bread.”
Rodríguez is widely known for his advocacy of the poor and his uncompromising leadership in the areas of social justice and ethics. Indeed, it might seem predictable for a clergyman to inveigh against the obvious evils of corruption. But in his recent talk Rodríguez went far beyond the vague lamentations and expressions of outrage that have been common on the editorial pages of newspapers throughout the region. Instead, the cardinal offered specific examples of areas where corruption occurs, an analysis of the institutional weaknesses that encourage it, and an outline of reforms that could help stamp it out.
Rodríguez began by praising the IDB’s efforts to combat corruption through programs to reform public institutions in areas such as justice, government procurement, customs, and financial management. Corruption is an appropriate concern for multilateral development institutions, he argued, because it frequently undermines the effectiveness of the projects they finance. “We have development programs where perhaps 20 percent of the money is actually used for development, while the rest is lost to bureaucracy, to politicking, to paybacks for favors,” Rodríguez said.
The business of politics. Rodríguez offered a sobering overview of the ways in which corruption has infiltrated institutions that are crucial to encouraging development and protecting democracy—starting with electoral politics.
Political corruption, according to Rodríguez, is at the root of Latin America’s institutional crisis. Politics has become “an industry that enriches a tiny group at the expense of the entire population,” he said. “Politicians do not represent the people,” he added. “They represent interest groups, certain sectors within a particular party, and sometimes not even the party as a whole.” People are so disillusioned with the behavior of elected officials that they abstain from voting, Rodríguez said, thereby contributing to the absence of public control over government.
Rodríguez argued that electoral systems often perpetuate these problems by undermining politicians’ accountability to voters. “In many countries politicians are not elected by districts, as they should be,” Rodríguez said. Instead, politicians “buy their way” onto a political party’s list of candidates, and the public is subsequently forced to vote for an entire party list instead of selecting individual candidates. Under this kind of arrangement elected officials have more incentives to defend interests of the party than those of voters, according to Rodríguez.
He also cited immunity from prosecution—a privilege granted to members of congress in order to protect them from political attacks in the courts—as another threat to accountability. Immunity has been perverted into an “umbrella for impunity,” Rodríguez said, and many candidates seek public office specifically because it allows them to evade justice for a few years.
For all these reasons, Rodríguez believes civil society and the international donor community need to tackle the difficult subject of electoral system reform. “We need to get involved in the world of politics, which has been left to do what it wants,” he said. “The dialogue between the world of ethics and the world of economics has advanced considerably… but we have made very little progress in the dialogue between ethics and politics.”
Follow the money. Rodríguez sees another source of corruption in the secrecy that often surrounds government handling of public funds. He joked that votes for congressional approval of the federal budget tend to be scheduled for the middle of the night, “so that legislators will be as sleepy as possible” and will not engage in a serious debate about spending priorities. He cited the example of a former Honduran minister of finance who publicly suggested that the full text of the federal budget should be published in advance of legislative votes, so the public would have a chance to examine it. “No one paid attention to her,” Rodríguez lamented.
So long as citizens are ignorant of how their tax money is spent, unscrupulous officials and private government contractors will find opportunities for waste, fraud and abuse, according to Rodríguez. Conversely, “when civil society is familiar with the budget, when it can determine the allocation of funds within each category, and when it can control the way those funds are spent, then we will be entering a period of greater sustainable development,” he said.
Society cannot be properly informed about government spending without the help of the media, however, and Rodríguez pointed out that too often journalists are themselves corrupt. “In my country and in others, we have developed a culture in which the media and reporters can be bought,” he said. Some reporters offer to produce biased coverage for a fee, according to Rodríguez, and many businesses and organizations have “publicity” budgets that are used specifically to pay for favorable media coverage. “It would be a good thing if these ‘publicity’ budgets could be examined by the public, because then a lot of things would come to light,” Rodríguez said.
A new kind of civil service. Rodríguez said any effort to stamp out corruption will also require a profound reform of the civil service. He cited the story of a former internal revenue commissioner in Honduras who was approached by a job applicant who told him he wanted to run a customs office—any customs office. “He wanted it in order to get rich by defrauding the state,” said Rodríguez. “We have reached that extreme, the aberration of considering honest people to be stupid: how can you have a government job and not take advantage to enrich yourself?”
The practice of looting public coffers is particularly frequent in the area of government contracts and procurement, according to Rodríguez. In theory, such abuses are supposed to be prevented by financial audit and control agencies within the government, but in too many cases these agencies “cover up crimes instead of preventing them,” he said.
Rodríguez said it is imperative to strengthen public audit and control institutions, and he praised IDB initiatives in this area. He also called for measures to upgrade the professional and ethical requirements of government service and to increase civil service continuity between succeeding governments. “We should not change all the civil servants each time a government changes.” he said. “Experience, honesty and capacity cannot be sacrificed for the sake of a party flag.” Continuity and political independence are especially important in the judiciary, Rodríguez added, because too many Latin American judges are appointed on the basis of “political influences” intended to suit the party in power.
The private sector also needs better financial oversight, according to Rodríguez. “Corruption is not only a problem in the public sector,” he said, “especially when we see monopolistic practices by private companies, the concentration of economic power, and a lack of respect for the rights of minority shareholders.”
Unequal battle, but worth fighting. Rodríguez has more than an academic concern with the subject of corruption. As president of Honduras Transparente, a nongovernmental group formed in 1997, he has been at the forefront of anticorruption efforts in his own country. The group raises public awareness of both the costs of corruption and the success that other countries have had in combating it. “We have encountered many difficulties,” Rodríguez said. “The battle is sometimes very unequal.”
Nevertheless, Rodríguez remains optimistic about the prospects to change the culture of corruption. “Good is stronger than evil, and truth is stronger than lies,” he said. By pushing for a unified fight against corruption across all sectors of society, Rodríguez believes it will be possible to “raise people of integrity, so that we can have societies of integrity in which we can all commit ourselves to human development.”