Watchdog Autonomy: Masked Corruption Reform in Latin America
Streets in Sololá, Guatemala. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Twenty years of foreign policy has treated corruption in Latin America as an affliction remedied through repetitive, selectively advantageous reform. Beginning with Cold War-era policy measures, the prevailing thought process remains that by reducing national control over assets and pushing neoliberalism, the opportunity for state leaders to taint domestic affairs diminishes. It follows that through the new loss in autonomy, private—often foreign—multinational corporations could step in to control such assets for the sake of “progress.” In June of this year, the Council on Foreign Relations released an article encouraging further corruption reform: “the U.S. should help create much needed watchdogs,” it quotes, “[in order] to dismantle the corrupt systems themselves.” Political intervention in Latin America exists under the assumption that there is an inherent, universal fault in the region’s political character. The criminalization of the Latin American people seldom fails to be used to a third party’s benefit; while there is a longstanding tradition of undermining Latin America’s autonomy for the “greater good” (an important footnote: “greater good” more often than not translates into English as “The United Fruit Company'', and into Russian as “The World Peace Council”), this article will address a more immediate concern by examining the future of Latin America in its existing exploitability. What we can gain from the knowledge of the past intervention into the region, especially in reference to Cold War-era foreign policy, is that the cycle of corruption in Latin America will never end through foreign means. By exploring foreign and corporate gains in anti-corruption policy, we can begin to move forward from the criminal v. watchdog narrative. Foreign corruption reform is a policy approach to further the presence of multinational corporations and states through reducing the autonomy of the local government systems, obscured through the lens of free trade and deregulation. By extension, corruption will only begin to lessen when local economies regain autonomy, allowing the people to dictate their terms of governance.
In the hierarchy of grievances regarding existing foreign corruption policy, the base would be in the fact that corruption is quantified in others’ benefit. Growth, and the deterioration of such, is largely expressed through export fluctuations. Although economic development is taken into consideration, exports remain the main measure of well-being. The favor of trade growth as a development indicator has been further developed in recent literature, where the fastest growing economies of Latin America have been differentiated by their export sector. Even dismissing such, it is logical that increased trade would be viewed as a key indicator of growth, especially when our benchmark for modernism is an open market. If corruption prevents growth, then this association between increasing global trade and corruption becomes negatively correlated.
Through the association, interventionist policy can serve to support globalization through the guise of corruption reform policy, without the imputation of the prior. An early example can be found in the World Bank’s 1998 statement regarding anti-corruption policies, which lists ‘privatization, decentralization, financial management, [and] tax administration’ as “direct” efforts to be carried out in order to stem corruption. It's no surprise that the listed ‘reform’ efforts directly correlate with the policies enacted post-1980s financial crisis, nor is it surprising that the policies would be camouflaged ten years later in pursuit of a more “noble” end goal. The assumption that export wealth will trickle down is an aloof excuse for the intervention of banks and government agencies who directly benefit from global trade. Those left behind fall into the hands of a welfare state that was stewardly designed in the interest of alleviating debt that was perpetrated by the same institutions offering solutions.
When autonomy is challenged, autonomy is sought. The conflicts of the past century emerged almost entirely when citizens realized they have no control over their economy. The rise of the disdained neopopulist governments across Latin America were once led with the promise of land redistribution, from foreign corporations to the hands of the people. The Guatemalan Civil War, the Salvadoran Civil War, the Chilean coup d'etat, to name a few, reflect similar narratives of promised autonomy diminished by foreign states. Limiting government entities dismantles legitimacy. The incentive for national accountability diminishes, especially regarding topics as relatively trivial as the mismanagement of foreign funds, when it is known that the final say is historically determined by an other. Corruption, by extension, flourishes when citizens are required to supplement the duties governments are meant to fill.
It is easy to draw the comparison to disaster capitalism in this analysis, defined as the governmental/foreign practice of taking advantage of a major disaster to adopt neoliberal economic policies (such as deregulation, privatization, and austerity measures). In the event of post-Hurricane Maria torn Puerto Rico, when citizens acted as a communal group in order to objectively survive, corruption scandals among FEMA and state officials skyrocketed. The U.S. federal oversight board used the case in justifying the recent privatization of Puerto Rico’s power grid by a Texas-owned company. It is not recognized, however, that Puerto Rico had been (and still remains) under strict austerity measures from a U.S. oversight board, up until the point where Maria hit and a massive influx of foreign funds arose from the depths of the U.S. federal government. It is that dynamic, of limitations met with openness, challenged autonomy met with the opportunity for the independent use of funds, that pushes corruption. The dynamic is compounded by the inherent lack of accountability upheld by despairing citizens, exacerbating the existing foreign v. local conflict. The cause of corruption was never that the people of Puerto Rico had the right to run their electrical grid, their government, but that the people recognized the puppet state since the island's colonization. When autonomy is challenged, autonomy is sought.
Conversely, in an analysis of Latin American anti-corruption reform scandals, Chile’s success is highlighted in response to the immense scandal regarding President Michelle Bachelet’s son in 2015, after a period of economic stability. An independent group of professionals, specifically excluding politicians and private sector leaders, formed the Engel Commission to report on government corruption and provide recommendations for future government action. The commission pushed to re-establish government legitimacy by encouraging transparency. The reform cycle was highly successful, and the emphasis on strengthening the role of municipal governments restored significant public confidence in the Chilean government. Parallel narratives can be found following Enrique Peña Nieto’s term as president of Mexico, and in Ricardo Rosello’s forced resignation as the governor of Puerto Rico in 2019. Outrage as the catalyst for collective accountability continuously outperforms formal foreign policy efforts. Though, accountability is, again, only an option when citizens are equipped with the resources to act in the first place. Chile’s success reflects how confidence, in this case, instilled through a known, collective feeling, can legitimize a people and by extension their governments. Chile differentiates itself as it continues to remain one of the least corrupt nations, tieing with the United States in the corruption perception index. This is only after the massive shift away from the Pinochet dictatorship, which saw Chile politically untouched after the initial coup of 1973 for almost 20 years. The transition to democracy suggests, against the existing policy, beliefs that perhaps genuine democratization, recognized autonomy, has the ability to create growth and reduce corruption more than neoliberalism ever could.
Puppet states can’t grow past their strings. Growth needs to be sourced domestically. If general foreign policy should continue to seek involvement in Latin American corruption reform, then the actors must accept and reconcile their role as perpetrators. The United States has a unique role in reversing its past grievances; through leveraging established means of diplomacy on a local level, local, micro growth can begin to flourish. Chile’s fight for autonomy was birthed from the mass historical violence of dictatorship, and is continually challenged. Violence is never required for change, but discomfort certainly is. It is naive to assume multinational corporations, and even state leaders themselves, will leave an arrangement that has continually served their benefit. However, through discomfort, through leveraging the stereotypes generations of policy have inflicted over the region, Latin America can begin to bark back.
Evelyne Williams is a staff writer at CPR and a second-year student at Barnard College. She is from San Juan, PR, and can be found anywhere grumbling about the cold.