opinion

Corruption, punishment and prevention
by Raúl Leis R. --- raulleisr@hotmail.com

The matter of corruption in the Educational Quality and Equity Fund (FECE) compels the government to insist upon an objective investigation and the exemplary punishment of those who diverted public education funds into their own pockets.

If punishment is necessary and indispensable it is, however, insufficient because under this focus policies, programs and projects end up being as a practical matter reduced to the legal field and to repressive actions or auditing and control. The final result of that is that the general population thus assumes that it's dealing with a big problem, but it stops being a subject of interest and an object of our personal efforts and concerns.

The subject of corruption thus becomes the exclusive sphere of "specialists" --- politicians, police and legal and judicial functionaries. Without denying the great importance of the punitive focus, it's necessary to complement and enrich this with a preventive vision that educates the entire citizenry and commits it to the struggle against corruption, clearly establishing the ethical, moral, social, cultural, economic and political nature of the phenomenon. Such a focus implies the analytical and critical understanding of corruption by everyone living in this society. Only in this way will it be possible to establish the shared responsibility in the face of the problem, and the necessary participation in the construction of a true democracy, that is, a profound, substantive and participatory democracy. From this perspective there are two essential senses of democracy, which are comparable to a hot air balloon that glows when it ascends and dims when it descends.

The descending discourse is top down from the government to the people, authoritarian or manipulative, limiting citizens' expression and freedom, cutting of the roads to participation or playing pseudo-participatory games. This discourse corrupts democracy from within, exhausts it and puts it on the road to a crisis that breaks the social contract.

The ascending proposal, on the contrary, exercises democratic control from the bottom up, not only at the moment of voting but in daily civic life. The essence of the ascending democratic system is to exercise the right to demand, to social auditing, to accountability, from bottom to top as habitual practice, favored and not just tolerated by those in power, guaranteed by the institutions, exercised openly, clearly and continuously by the citizens.

Any system that's not sustainably founded on a participatory and transparent model gets turned into an authoritarian scheme or a society of domination that perverts all of its beautifully expressed stated objectives.

Only to the extent that the citizen is considered part of the cycles of public policy can she or he take the initiative to be an actor and fact finder.