Latin American democracy is crumbling under corruption, by Edward Lynch,
3/28/18, The Hill
Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski recently
resigned on the eve of an
impeachment vote over his administration’s corruption.
In Brazil, there are seemingly endless scandals involving
purchased government favoritism for Petrobras and Odebrecht.
Eight former Mexican governors face charges for corruption.
Transparency International rates the region as one of the worst in the world
for dealing with government officials.
Even more than Latin America’s swing to the left 10 years
ago, corruption threatens to bring misery and insecurity to the region. Corrupt
nations do not attract the foreign investment the region desperately needs.
At the end of the 1980s, the prospects for democracy in Latin
America looked better than they had in over a century. Every nation in the
region, except for Fidel Castro’s Cuba, was either democratic or undeniably
moving in that direction.
Even in Nicaragua under the Sandinista and in Augusto Pinochet’s
Chile, dictators would be decisively defeated.
Under President Reagan, the U.S. government abandoned
its longstanding policy of supporting right-wing dictators. With
the demise of the Soviet Union, the threat (and the attraction) of communism
all but disappeared. The region entered the 21st century confident in the
resiliency and permanence of its democratic institutions.
But now, 18 years into our once-highly anticipated century,
Venezuela and Bolivia are led by men who make little effort to hide their
“president for life” aspirations.
Presidents of Brazil, Argentina and Ecuador left office only
with extreme reluctance. All face post-administration legal charges. Increasing
crime rates in large cities are prompting citizens to tolerate heavy-handed
government responses.
Political parties that helped to usher in democracy are being
swamped by populist, personalist parties whose leaders promise wealth for all,
in return, of course, for more government power.
Democracy’s beleaguered status in Latin America cannot be
attributed to a single cause, but its biggest enemy, by far, is corruption. It
does more than erode confidence in government. Corruption erodes confidence in
human nature itself, and thus undercuts democracy at its deepest metaphysical
core. With a problem of this magnitude, there are no quick or easy solutions,
but understanding the causes is a vital first step.
Corruption comes from the combination of excessive government
power and insufficient intra-government competition. The first puts government
officials in charge of too many people’s lives and livelihoods. The second
insures that bribery and lucrative conflicts of interest take place without
accountability.
Overlaying the entire system is a political culture, resulting
from decades of dictatorship that permits officials to steal without a pang of
conscience, and convinces private citizens that redress is impossible.
Every element of the corruption epidemic can be addressed
through federalism on the North American model, an example that Latin American
nations would do well to imitate. This is not because state and local
governments in the United States are immune from corruption. Rather, Latin
America should imitate the United States because checks and balances, for the
most part, have kept corruption manageable.
The American Founders never promised silver bullet solutions.
They only promised structures with built-in disincentives to malicious
behavior.
Devolving power would attack corruption from a number of
different angles. First, since local governments deal in smaller amounts of
money than national governments, less illicit profit is available to start with,
making a cost-benefit analysis of illegal activity more likely to result in
caution.
Second, barriers to the movement of people and investments among
localities within a nation are low, often nonexistent. Thus, if corruption
becomes a problem in one locality, people (and their money) can move.
Abandoning an entire nation because of corrupt national officials is more
difficult and time consuming.
Third, with real power and real resources, local officials could
no longer blame the “people upstairs” for failures of public policy. Minimally,
corruption would have to be tamed to the point that it did not interfere with
the most basic, and visible, government functions.
Finally, devolution attacks the root cause of endemic
corruption, which is the culture of separation between rulers and ruled. That
separation is harder to maintain on the local level, since the people who are
being mistreated are psychologically (and physically) closer to the officials
who govern them.
Again, federalism is no guarantee of virtue. But properly
understood and implemented, devolving power raises the cost of corruption while
providing built-in incentives to effective government.
The father of corruption is greed, but the father of endemic
corruption is cynicism, which prompts citizens to cede government to the venal,
until the people get fed up, and power is wrested from the profiteers and given
to the predators.
Government corruption is as old as government itself, but it
need not be an existential threat to democracy. To protect their democracy from
corruption, Latin American citizens should turn to the solution of federalism.
Edward Lynch,
Ph.D., is chair of political science at Hollins University, where he teaches courses on foreign policy and
international affairs. He served in the White House under President
Reagan and is the author of “The Cold War’s Last Battlefield: Reagan, the Soviets and Central America.”
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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