The social life of corruption in Latin America

Abstract

This essay serves as the introduction to the special issue titled, 'The social life of corruption in Latin America'. The six authors featured in this special issue of Culture, Theory and Critique exhibit a range of scholarship around questions of corruption and anti-corruption in the region. All have been involved in long-term ethnographically based research projects in particular locations in Latin America, including Brazil (three contributions), Peru (one contribution), Colombia (one contribution) and Ecuador (one contribution). In this special issue, these engaged regional scholars turn their attention to the theme of corruption in 'parts known', that is, within sites where they have already established deep connections. The social life of corruption One could say that the timing is 'fortuitous' for a collaboration among Latin Americanists focused on this theme. We join fellow scholars in anthropology who are engaged in 'rethinking' the anthropology of corruption (e.g., Muir and Gupta 2018), while also seeking to provide ethnographic depth in our analyses. The authors in this special issue attend to historical continuities and discontinuities in the ways that corruption is both understood and practiced; they also attune to the different scales and hierarchies within which corruption allegations appear. These essays together provide a sophisticated and differentiated set of portraits of contemporary corruption in the region. As this issue made its way to press, the authors were forced to make repeated adjustments to both the content and the analysis in their papers, in order to account for emerging developments within the many corruption scandals currently unfolding in the region. The ability of these scholars to interpret current political events through the lenses of their embedded understandings of local dynamics allows this collection, as a whole, to create new openings for critiques of the rationalities, moralities and politics underlying contemporary practices of corruption and anti-corruption in the region, and beyond. We begin by noting that these are extraordinary times for engaging with the theme of corruption. In 2016, the Panama Papers 1 emerged in the form of approximately 11.5

Problemática de la corrupción en el Perú

“…La corrupción es un fenómeno bastante complejo o un proceso sistémico, organizado y colectivo, cuyas piezas clave para su consolidación son la esfera pública, la dinámica organizacional, las prácticas administrativas, y los actores políticos de gran poder (Meza y Pérez-Chiqués, 2021;Moreno-López, Porporato y Maharaj, 2022 En este sentido, las redes de corrupción abarcan varios países como es el caso de la famosa constructora brasileña Odebrecht que, a cambio de ganar los concursos públicos para la realización de grandes proyectos, ofrecía cuantiosos aportes de campaña (Paffarini, 2020;López-Cazar, Papyrakis y Pellegrini, 2021), o el caso de los Panama Papers, el cual era visto como un paraíso fiscal; percibido como una "zona difícil" para el cumplimiento de las leyes (Mazuera-Arias et al, 2019); al respecto, las olas y los destapes de corrupción, han provocado la renuncia, así como la acusación de múltiples presidentes y expresidente de la región, independientemente de su ideología política o sentimientos democráticos, la mayoría se vio envuelto en estas redes de la corrupción (Goldstein y Drybread, 2018).…”

“…En Perú, desde hace más de un siglo la corrupción continúa desarrollándose y evolucionando, es más ocupa un nivel destacado dentro de la realidad política del país (Goldstein y Drybread, 2018). En sociedades donde hay mucha desigualdad social, la sociedad no espera un trato justo, ven a la corrupción no como algo aceptable, sino como inevitable y fuera de su propio control, esto a su vez desmoraliza a las personas; por otra parte, en sociedades con distribuciones de recursos más equitativos, las personas reconocen los tratos injustos como una violación a la integridad del sistema gubernamental.…”

The Anti/Corruption Continuum: Generation, Politics and Grassroots Anti‐Corruption Mobilization in Guatemala

“…In Guatemala, as in most of Latin America, the corruption/anticorruption complex is tightly knit, contributing to what we call an anti/corruption continuum: the same mechanisms used to fight corruption may also sustain the corrupt system (Dotson 2014; Hetherington 2011, 2018; Thomas 2016). This flexibility, as Donna Goldstein and Kristen Drybread (2018, 300) assert, makes it difficult to predict how and why publics become aware of practices of corruption and motivated to act. The context of an upcoming municipal election at a time during which the CICIG‐effect was ascendant (including a toppled government) contributed to a moment in which many Guatemalans felt that real change might be possible.…”

Operating at the Edge of Il/legality: Systemic Corruption in Mexican Health Care

“…We join anthropologists currently engaged in “rethinking” corruption (see Goldstein and Drybread 2018; Muir and Gupta 2018). Anthropologists are aware of how the “Global South” has become shorthand for nations fraught with corruption (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012), and many question whether the concept of “corruption” is, in itself, ethnocentric and misleading (Smith 2018).…”