“Every dollar that is lost due to corruption is a dollar that is no longer used for services for the benefit of the citizenry”

Every December 9, the UN remembers the International Day Against Corruption, to “highlight the rights and responsibilities of all – including States, public officials, law enforcement officials, representatives of the media, the private sector, civil society, the academic sector, the public and young people – in the fight against corruption ”.

For Mauricio Alarcón, from Citizenship and Development, a foundation that represents Transparency International in Ecuador, it is not correct to quantify in numbers the losses caused by corruption and impunity, although it is done.

“The important thing is the fact that the public must understand that every dollar that is lost due to corruption is a dollar that is no longer used for services for the benefit of the citizenry such as public works or as a matter of the current situation, medicines to regulate and satisfy public health problems, ”says Alarcón, who adds that in general the region has problems in this regard.

An example of this is that Transparencia por Colombia indicated that 92.7 billion pesos (about 23.8 billion dollars) had been lost due to acts of corruption in the last five years in that country. What you would pay 24.2 times for the vaccines you bought against the coronavirus between April 2020 and October 2021, according to calculations by The viewer.

According to data from the Development Bank of Latin America (CAF), it is estimated that corruption costs the region $ 220 billion annually. A considerable value, since it indicates that it is equivalent to the GDP of Peru or the international reserves of Germany.

In addition to that, according to CAF, corruption would cost the world 2.6 trillion dollars a year. More or less 5% of world GDP. What would serve to provide a basic emergency income to those living in poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean. This, without forgetting that around a trillion is paid annually in bribes, according to the World Bank.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, approximately 10% to 25% of all funds spent globally on procurement are lost due to corruption.

Something more than important in a time of crisis in which resources are needed to manage and overcome what is caused by the coronavirus pandemic, which has affected the world since the first quarter of 2020 and has exposed corruption more. This has also led to a search for more transparency in public procurement processes due to the problems that have been arising, as there were people who took advantage of the emergency, including in Ecuador, which last September acknowledged that corruption had cost them 70,000 million dollars over the past fourteen years.

In the region, Uruguay, Chile and Costa Rica have the best scores on Transparency International’s corruption perception index. Ecuador is ranked 92 out of 180 countries. In addition, on the issue of impunity for reported crimes, Ecuador is also badly located, in position 15.

The three countries with the best results differ in that there are clear rules (laws) that are applied in the institutions, there is greater respect and guarantee for the rule of law, where the decisions of the public power depend on laws and not on people, and justice prosecutes and punishes corruption crimes.

“Additionally, I believe that these three countries have lower levels of permissiveness or justification of corruption on the part of the citizens,” says Alarcón.

In 2018, several countries in the region signed the so-called Lima Commitment, at the VIII Summit of the Americas, which aims to establish policies for the prevention and fight against corruption with concrete actions on issues such as strengthening democratic governance, transparency , access to information, protection of whistleblowers and human rights, prevention of corruption in public works, public contracts and purchases, international legal cooperation, combating bribery, international bribery, organized crime and money laundering, as well as the strengthening of inter-American anti-corruption mechanisms. But more work still needs to be done on these points.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank recall that corruption is one of the main elements that cause the deterioration of trust between governments and citizens, and causes a deficient development of infrastructure and a insufficient service provision to taxpayers.

Control Risks and Americas Society / Council of the Americas (Ascoa) presented its Capacity to Combat Corruption Index in 2021, in which it is said that efforts to combat corruption are more necessary than ever in the region, due to the fact that Governments are under increasing financial pressure due to the pandemic, while the quality of judicial institutions greatly affects business confidence at a time when foreign investment is at its lowest levels in recent years.

According to this index, Uruguay, Chile and Costa Rica are the countries with the best results in the fight against corruption. Ecuador is in the middle of the table. While the two main economies of the region, Brazil and Mexico, had a significant decrease in this matter, taking into account factors such as legal capacity, democracy and political institutions, civil society and the media.

According to the Chilean organization Latinobarómetro, between 2016 and 2020 the perception of an increase in corruption decreased in the region from 62% to 57%.

Interview from the academy

Faced with the great challenge that corruption represents in Latin America, different academics have spoken of the difficulties in combating this problem. One of them is Jaime Costales Peñaherrera, a political psychologist and professor of Social Psychology at the San Francisco de Quito University.

Why is it so difficult to establish effective measures against corruption in the countries of the region?

Because it is a monumental business. It is present in all types of political systems, especially in authoritarian populisms, which turn their societies into pro-delinquent systems and establish institutions and teams of officials that favor the theft of public resources and impunity. The XXI century socialisms are the most current and huge case of theft of public money. Their regimes have not been – and are not – governments, but high-flying mafias anchored to power. The cases of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Argentina and Ecuador demonstrate this.

How or more important does the fight against corruption become in a scenario in which countries are looking for options to respond to and recover from the crisis caused or intensified by the pandemic?

That fight is crucial, and you have to recover the money stolen from society. Lasso affirms that 70,000 million dollars were stolen during correísmo –and morenismo–, a shocking figure that would allow to comfortably meet the serious needs of the population, strengthen an efficient and massive health system, consolidate the IESS, create new ventures to reduce unemployment and poverty, etc. It is urgent to speed up the trials and final sentences against the big white-collar criminals and above all to recover what was stolen. We have to bravely and frontally oppose corruption and increase a massive citizen reaction that rejects it. It is time for the rebellion of the honest, not violent but frontal.

Are there differences in the consequences between corruption that occurs in the public and private sectors or are they two sides of the same problem?

They are two sides of the same criminal issue, they are interdependent aspects of a huge crime against the whole of society. But usually the Governments handle huge budgetary figures, with which the theft of public money is more serious on the part of State officials. With good reason it could be said: never before has so much been stolen from so many! The most serious consequences are pro-delinquent states and public officials, and citizen accustoming to believe that nothing can be done, that is, a self-destructive conformism. (I)