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Corruption

by Michelle Lescure

In the past five years, governments in the region have blamed "external factors" for the deterioration of services and uncontrolled price increases in all aspects of food, housing and education. The health services are bankrupt or in decay. Along with this, unemployment and underemployment have increased in almost all Latin American countries.

However, when we see the money that has come in, the numbers don't add up. If we add the amounts for loans received, we can see that really, there has been sufficient money.

The excuses won't do anymore, and we have to look inside each country for the cause of so much dispossession. The main internal problem is without any doubt corruption. The money pours as if through a sieve, to public officials who openly steal - like ants, the government hacks simply consume the taxpayers' money, adding their own Pharaonic expenditures to the cost of running the state.

The high government official ends up charging the public trust for the cost of his cell phone, his wife's makeup, his children's braces, his mistress's vacations, his secretary's wardrobe and the eccentricities of his new 'lifestyle.' Even the most discrete can't justify their expenses and have to resort to financial juggling acts.

Soon, even domestic servants end up on the state payroll, farms and houses are put in the names of friends and relatives, accounts are managed by fronts. To maintain their luxuries, officials are obliged to steal more every day, as the calendar counts down to the next elections.

This is the so-called 'good life.' To go out and work, to honorably earn a salary with one's own sweat, is, on the other hand,'the bad life.'

Nobody is saying that ALL high-ranking public officials steal. It's not like that. But there are so many curious examples of miraculous changes of fortune among them that by a simple process of extrapolation, as a class they'd have to be among the luckiest one percent on the planet, the people who win the lottery twice a year. The worst of it is that people know that to reach the top of the pyramid, they have to leave all morals behind as if fleeing a graveyard. It's a life of excesses, embezzlement and sharp-edged deals, and whoever tries to set things right has first to enter the realm of politics and make a sacrifice to the gods of corruption: avarice and arrogance.

'All governments steal,' a Panamanian politician once publicly said, without dying of shame.

The unadorned truth is that to be a politician is almost synonymous with being shameless and dishonest in public life. The efforts that are made to present a new image crumble into dust with every scandal that comes to public attention, when the media owners allow this to happen.

In light of this, the voices of journalists who denounce corruption are almost the only things that create consciousness, that promote investigations, demand explanations and disseminate information from which the public can draw its own conclusions.

However, these reporters tend to be timid, as they remain under the watch of the powerful whom they would denounce, people who have the power, the money and the influence to shut them up.

More than anything else, the media live from advertising, and the government is one of the principal advertisers. Nobody wants to slay the goose that lays the golden egg of ad sales, and much less if that bird is the government.

Thus, as fewer journalists are left to confront corruption, the corrupt elements continue to increase their power and influence with the media.

The right of people to have both honest government and freedom of expression many times depends on the journalist, on his or her character, integrity and disposition to defend these principles. In this struggle, journalists continue to fall, some from the bullets of powerful opponents, many others from the sordid manipulations of those who seek to keep things that they're trying to hide out of the light of public scrutiny.

It can be utopian, even illusory, to believe that corruption can be ended by its denunciation. But the first thing that has to be done to resolve the problem is to recognize that it exists - to know it is the prerequisite. Thus corruption has to be denounced.

When the public's eyes are open, it can make healthier and more effective decisions. To know the facts makes it possible to see the way to avoid repeating errors. By seeing the transgressions, the public will demand stricter and more just laws. At election time, they will be able to choose the most competent officials, rather than the most superficially popular.

But this process will take time, and more courageous journalists to take on corruption.

Also, readers who understand that without such reporters, they will be lost.