Brokers are neighborhood party operatives that gather political support for their bosses in poor areas, and networks of brokers are a key element for political machines to compete in the political arena. The Daley machine in Chicago, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Mexico, and the Nationalist Party (KMT) in Taiwan, for example, have all developed extensive networks of brokers to permeate poor areas.
El 11 febrero de 2014, en medio de la polémica generada por las llamadas “reformas estructurales” que el presidente Enrique Peña Nieto estaba impulsando, el senado mexicano aprobó la Ley Antiterrorista en una votación apresurada, de esas que suelen denominar fast track.
Last week reporter Carmen Aristegui of the Mexican news station MVS was released from her position with the company. Aristegui is known for her reports on governmental corruption and is regard as one of the top reporters in Mexico. The firing comes several months after the reporter aired a report accusing President Nieto and his wife of corruption. Aristegui believes her firing was backed by the president and has announced that she will appeal her removal from MVS.
As a political and social disease, public corruption costs governments and businesses around the world trillions of dollars every year. Government Anti-Corruption Strategies: A Cross-Cultural Perspective provides a better understanding of public corruption and governments’ anti-corruption practices. It outlines a general framework of anti-corruption strategies that governments undertake to effectively curb corrupt practices.
This past April the UN International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) released a report that exposed a network of Guatemalan officials and individuals involved in a $15 million USD embezzlement scheme. The announcement immediately generated widespread public outrage, which led tens of thousands of Guatemalans to peacefully protest an end to government corruption.
Police performance is vital in consolidated democracies, but even more so in post-transition countries where public support for the regime is not yet firmly established. In many Latin American countries, as Mark Ungar and others have pointed out, law enforcement institutions had to be reformed not only to improve the capacity of the emerging democratic states but, more importantly, to prevent a return to the oppressive practices of the authoritarian past (Ungar 2011).
Academic and policy discussion have generally tended to underestimate the role that citizens play in sustaining and reproducing the phenomenon of corruption, traditionally favoring approaches focused on official actors such as bureaucrats and politicians. The impact that citizens have in the overall level of corruption in a given society, however, can only be ignored at a great risk.
Corruption and scandal are not new to Brazil. In fact, the current corruption scandal involving Petrobras, businessmen, and politicians is just the most recent in a country with a long history of corruption. In Brazil, corruption has become normalized. Some of the largest corruption scandals are explored here, namely scandals during the Lula and Collor presidencies.
In the midst of what may be called the biggest corruption scandal in Brazil of all time, how are Brazilian government agencies poised to deal with the outcomes of the Petrobras case and investigate other wrongdoings? Pretty well, as long as they are able to work together and share information.
Under what conditions do voters in Latin America’s democracies punish corrupt politicians? As many of the region’s countries approach or pass their third decade of continuous democratic government, attention has turned from questions of democratic longevity in the region to the quality of democracy that citizens experience. And in Latin America, as in many parts of the world, citizens and policy makers are increasingly preoccupied with political corruption.
