Perception Indexes of Corruption in Mercosur

Julio E.S. Virgollini writing on the symmetry of European and Latin American corruption processes says:

"In words that deal with the Italian reality, but that can very clearly be referred to Argentina or to many other countries, especially in the Latin American area, where extended and prolonged processes of corruption and crime are deployed, FERRAJOLI describes the situation in this way:

"In fact, in view of the dimensions reached by corruption and the collusion of political power with the Mafia, the Camorra and with the other invisible powers (Masonic lodges, Gladio, P2 and deviant secret services), our State is really a double State, behind whose legal and representative façade had grown a clandestine infra-State, endowed with its own codes and attributes, organized in hidden centers of power, destined for the private appropriation of public property and secretly covered with recurrent subversive temptations. Thus, a double hidden and parallel State that contradicted all the principles of political democracy and the Rule of Law, from the principle of legality to that of publicity, visibility, controllability and responsibility of the public powers ".

The same author (2004: 254-256), making an analysis of the functionality, damages and victimization produced by corruption, says:

"In times of transition, it has been said, corruption favors the processes of economic and institutional development because it represents the opening of integration channels for those groups that, otherwise, by expressing their own demands would resort to violence; in this way, corruption can be functional to the maintenance of political order. In a vaguely similar way, corruption has frequently been linked to situations of economic backwardness or institutional disorder, whose overcoming should naturally entail a reduction in social tolerance regarding this phenomenon; in this perspective, the costs of corruption could be lower than the benefits it produces, because it provides the only instrument available to overcome the obstacles that impede economic development.

That the problem of corruption can be put in terms of functionality or dysfunction comes, at least in part, from the apparent absence of the victim, as the protagonists of corrupt practices are consensual actors: they buy and sell, they exchange benefits voluntarily. In the context of these relationships, the victim is invisible, because in reality the damage occurs in another area and in another time than in those in which the exchange occurs, and also in relation to other people. These types of circumstances are remarkably similar to those that occur in the area of white collar crime, especially when attention is drawn to the frequency with which the victims of these events do not become aware of the damage they have suffered.

5. The damages of corruption

"One of them is constituted by what RUGGIERO calls the metrification of rights, that is, the conversion to private goods, which can be negotiated in the market, of (...) The rights to work, to housing, to health, to education, to the expression of ideas, etc., belong to the sphere of citizenship, but corruption transforms them into negotiable goods, which distorts social justice, whose characteristics should be predictability and equality, to turn it into the result of a private negotiation or an arbitrary or funny concession. (...)

The corrupt exchange is by nature opaque, obscure, it is constituted in the negation of the visibility, what comes from the necessity, inherent to the systems of the representative democracy, to resort to mediators that cover the function of linking with the government the necessities and the interests of citizens. But these politicians have financing costs that must be covered in some way, which is the first incentive for corruption (...)

In addition, what is obscured is the ability of the citizen to verify the fulfillment of the mandate given to his representatives or the content of the decisions taken by them during their function, since in reality they become dependent on the hidden forces. that act within the political parties: political representation unfolds in the most absolute darkness, leading to the moral and political disqualification of the citizen.

This form of victimization is not the only one. According to RUGGIERO, an additional problem is the spread of corrupt practices at all levels of society, partly encouraged by general impunity, and partly by the growing and more widespread social habit of obtaining some benefit of small and daily corrupt exchanges. The accustomed to corruption that occurs at lower levels reduces the sensitivity to this type of episodes, which in fact end up parity the small individual corruption with the large negotiated. (...) To paraphrase SYKES and MATZA, one of whose neutralization techniques used to "condemn those who condemn", RUGGIERO suggests that the technique appropriate to corruption is, instead, "to forgive those who forgive".

Manuel Villoria Mendieta (2000: 97) drawing a parallel between the states in which the population relies on the government and those in which corruption establishes itself generating distrust, cites Paraguay as one of the most corrupt in the world in 1998. It says:

"On the contrary, they are countries with great development of participatory culture and trust in the State where less corruption occurs -for example, in the Nordic European countries-. According to the "corruption perception index", developed by Transparency International, for 1998, the five least corrupt countries in the world are in this order: Denmark, Finland, Sweden, New Zealand and Iceland. And the ten most corrupt, also by order: Cameroon, Paraguay, Honduras, Nigeria, Indonesia, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Russia and Bolivia. However, each country has its peculiarities and trying to define common rules is quite difficult. In any case, corruption is the extreme form of the absence of ethics and, due to its seriousness, generates a crisis of legitimacy in the State that demands immediate responses at the highest institutional level before its expansion destroys the system of coexistence (López Caldera, 1997)."

Jorge Luiz Raimondi (2005: 273) in dealing with the illicit enrichment of public officials in Argentina says:

"Unfortunately, the existence of public officials that ostensibly increase their personal assets during the exercise of the position seems to be a constant in Argentine history. At least, this follows from the mere compulsa of the annals of local legislation, in which, throughout the different epochs, the regulations related to the subject are repeated. Thus, for example, on December 5, 1622, King Philip TV dictated Law VII, which established: "(...) governors, corregidores, and alcaldes mayores are not admitted to the use and exercise of their offices, if do not present the inventory of all their goods, and having them, and those who are in the Indies do and present to the royal hearings of the district (...)", supplementing with the law LXVIII as soon as he urged not to admit in the hearings of the continent to any minister, even before the presentation of the appointment signed by the king himself, if it was not accompanied by the testimony of having presented in the Council of the Indies the inventory of his property, and the law IX - of the Compilation de Indias- which provided for the creation of bonds to answer for subsequent residency trials."

In the context of Mercosur, the variation in the perception of corruption between the years 2000 and 2017 indicates little improvement for better only in the part of Uruguay, as evidenced by the data of Transparency International, which, in particular, does not investigate isolated cases of corruption, but offers considerable subsidies in the scope of researches about world corruption. Here are some data that deserve consideration:

Indexes on perception of corruption in Mercosur between 2000 and 2018 (Among 90 countries in 2000 and 180 Countries in 2017)

Country Year 2000 Year 2017

Argentina 52 85

Brazil 49 96

Paraguay No data 135

Uruguay No data 23

Venezuela 71 169

The Corruption Perceptions Index released by Transparency Internacional (TI) from 2012 to 2017 shows that Argentina and Paraguay the perception of corruption decreased a little, in Uruguay the perception of corruption increased a little, while in Brazil and Venezuela the perception of corruption increased considerably.

Venezuela, recently admitted as a member of Mercosul, is shamefully adding itself to the most corrupt countries in the world. Here is the ranking of 2012 and 2017:

Rank of Transparency International from 2012 to 2017

Country Year 2012 Year 2017

Argentina 102 85

Brazil 69 96

Paraguay 150 135

Uruguay 20 23

Venezuela 165 169

Juan Bautista Cincunegui and Juan de Dios Cincunegui addressing corruption and the factors of power affirm:

"Administrative corruption is not a recent phenomenon but we all have the intuition that it has become widespread in recent years in an alarming manner. The problem is not limited only to the enrichment of some officials and the consequent damage suffered by the State. Corruption has much more devastating effects. It affects the legitimacy of political institutions, undermines morality and justice, generates pernicious consequences in economic matters and deepens the crisis of values due to the absence of models of personal virtue and honesty in those who occupy public positions of responsibility. At the same time, it generates blankets of suspicion on honest officials, which de-incentivates probas people to accede to public positions."

Jorge Luis Rimondi (2005: 31-32), addressing the need for transparency in procedures to combat corruption in Argentina, says:

"... It is true that the sentence to the official responsible for an act of corruption in the management of public affairs is based on the strictest justice, but it is no less true that for a State it is more profitable to establish procedures that prevent the acts of this type. It is known that the best medicine is preventive; In the same way, it is more beneficial for the social body to establish mechanisms to prevent conflicts within them than to solve them".

As for Brazil, we have already said elsewhere that corruption has an estimated annual cost of US $ 3.5 billion, according to the Getulio Vargas Foundation, more than 30 billion, according to the Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo (study conducted in 2010) and more than 100 billion, according to a study released by the UNDP.

It should be noted that the difference between the disclosed values is extremely large. In my feeling they are beyond what the UN divulges.

The question that matters is: How much could the provision of public services be improved if the sums of diverted public money were invested in social welfare?

Why The International Combat of Corruption Has Been Necessary

David Baigun and Nicolás Garcia (2006: 161) say that the economicization of society, the increase in trade and communications, and widespread globalization have increased the scope of corruption and the need to combat it:

"One can ask why corruption now emerges as an international priority. A first argument is that the phenomenon has been aggravated by the economization of society: the rapid increase in trade and international communications. Another possibility is that certain reforms are spreading from one side of the world to the other creating new opportunities for corruption by modifying the traditional rules of the game, and in some cases, as in the case of Eastern European countries, political change is not always are accompanied by a similar development of the institutions and the incentives of the public sector."

2.1 - Combating corruption in the European Union

Baigun and Rivas (2006: 162-163, 171-172) assert that the fight against corruption must have public policy status:

"V. The anti-corruption policy of the European Union

We have already indicated in previous pages that at first the interest for the repression of corruption is due to the purpose of punishing those actions that violate the community law or harm the financial interests of the Community. The punishment of officials responsible for the collection, management, disbursement or control of Community funds provided they have incurred passive bribery, the abusive exercise of the office, the misappropriation of funds from the Community budget, disclosure of official secrets as well as money-laundering and reception are shown as instruments of a preventive nature in the face of behaviors that harm or jeopardize the financial interests of the European Economic Community.

(...)

We have first of all the Convention on the protection of the financial interests of the European Communities of 29 September 1995, which establishes important principles for the criminal prosecution of fraud in an efficient and homogeneous way in all the Member States."

From the political forum entitled "The World Fight Against Corruption" (1996: 76-81) by the University of Social Museum of Argentina, March 1996, a precious account of the world fight against corruption is extracted. Here is an excerpt:

"The global fight against corruption

Paris - Call it return, commission, pot de vin or simply bribe: the payments of businessmen to officials add billions of dollars per year to the cost of doing business around the world.

Bribes inflate the price of contracts, discourage investment, and have increased the debt of poor countries by a third.

All countries proscribe the corruption of their own officials, but only the United States and Sweden prohibit their national companies from corrupting foreign officials. In many countries, business bribes to get overseas markets are tax deductible. (...)

Corruption has taken a particularly heavy toll on Africa, and many of its business leaders worry that the continent's bad reputation will exclude them from the benefits of world trade. Last August, South African President Nelson Mandela called for international action to "make corruption a more dangerous and less profitable issue."

A recent Swiss study found 20 billion dollars in accounts in the name of current and past governors of Africa only in Swiss banks.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, based in London, which encourages investment in the former communist bloc, called bribes in Eastern Europe a "major deterrent" to foreign investment. And experts say that corruption in China and other developing countries such as Indonesia, Pakistan, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, India and the Philippines is widespread. (...)

International bankers and aid organizations worry that corruption undermines the development of the world's poorest nations. "Investors and agents need to have a clean environment if we are to achieve the benefits of global trade and investment," says Kim Jaycox, vice president of the World Bank in charge of Africa.

In Asia, national campaigns to limit corruption also gain ground. In South Korea, two former presidents and several business magnates face charges of corruption linked to bribes that would have amounted to 1 billion dollars. The two-year campaign against corruption in China led to the execution of some low-ranking municipal officials and last year displaced the Communist Party secretary in Beijing. And in 1993 popular distaste for corruption scandals helped end 38 years of the Liberal Democratic Party's government in Japan.

The crusade of the judges

In Europe, a handful of judges began investigating corruption cases that came to power. Italy's clean mamis campaign set the course for a new group of independent magistrates in France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and Greece. Thousands of Italian politicians and businessmen were questioned and more than 700 were tried for bribery since Milan's magistrates launched their investigations in 1992.

On October 20, 1995, the Secretary General of NATO, Willy Claes, resigned when the Parliament decided by voting to lift the immunity that protected him from the investigations. The resolution was due to accusations that, as an official of the Flemish Socialist Party, he had known illegal payments of 1.6 million dollars from an Italian defense company to the party's coffers to influence the contract for the purchase of helicopters.

In France, more than 100 business leaders and politicians investigated for illegal practices. In 1993, for the first time, a French prime minister promised that the government will not block such investigations. Last year, judicial investigations led to the resignation of government ministers and the arrest of a third party.

"Culture in France is slowly changing," says Thierry Jean Pierre, one of the original investigating magistrates and now a member of the European Parliament. "Ten years ago the bribery and corruption investigation was totally taboo here."

Pierre attributes to the example of the Italian magistrates that he inspired the French judges to pursue sensitive investigations in political terms that had previously been silently abandoned. The judges were also outraged by the 1990 law that granted amnesty for crimes linked to the legal financing of political parties.

(...)

However, the task of exhorting governments to go from limiting the corruption of their own officials to monitoring the activities of their multinationals abroad has crashed into a concrete wall.

For industrialized countries, overseas contracts are a matter of national security, and bribes are a legitimate way of obtaining them. A recent US intelligence work that analyzed illegal payments in 100 major contracts in 1994, concluded that foreign companies that offered bribes won in 80% of the cases.

Provided with this information, the United States has pressured international organizations to match the playing field in the competition for international contracts. Washington wants its rivals to compete with the same rules applied to American executives by the External Corruption Practices Act of 1977.