Culture, Theory and Critique

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The social life of corruption in Latin America

Donna M. Goldstein & K. Drybread

To cite this article: Donna M. Goldstein & K. Drybread (2018) The social life of
corruption in Latin America, Culture, Theory and Critique, 59:4, 299-311, DOI:
10.1080/14735784.2018.1531816

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2018.1531816

Published online: 13 Nov 2018.

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CULTURE, THEORY AND CRITIQUE
2018, VOL. 59, NO. 4, 299–311
https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2018.1531816

The social life of corruption in Latin America

a b
Donna M. Goldstein and K. Drybread
a
Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA; bDepartment of
Anthropology and Program for Writing and Rhetoric, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

ABSTRACT
This essay serves as the introduction to the special issue titled, ‘The
social life of corruption in Latin America’. The six authors featured in
this special issue of Culture, Theory and Critique exhibit a range of
scholarship around questions of corruption and anti-corruption in
the region. All have been involved in long-term ethnographically
based research projects in particular locations in Latin America,
including Brazil (three contributions), Peru (one contribution),
Colombia (one contribution) and Ecuador (one contribution). In
this special issue, these engaged regional scholars turn their
attention to the theme of corruption in ‘parts known’, that is,
within sites where they have already established deep connections.

The social life of corruption

One could say that the timing is ‘fortuitous’ for a collaboration among Latin Americanists
focused on this theme. We join fellow scholars in anthropology who are engaged in
‘rethinking’ the anthropology of corruption (e.g., Muir and Gupta 2018), while also
seeking to provide ethnographic depth in our analyses. The authors in this special issue
attend to historical continuities and discontinuities in the ways that corruption is both
understood and practiced; they also attune to the different scales and hierarchies within
which corruption allegations appear. These essays together provide a sophisticated and
differentiated set of portraits of contemporary corruption in the region. As this issue
made its way to press, the authors were forced to make repeated adjustments to both
the content and the analysis in their papers, in order to account for emerging develop-
ments within the many corruption scandals currently unfolding in the region. The
ability of these scholars to interpret current political events through the lenses of their
embedded understandings of local dynamics allows this collection, as a whole, to create
new openings for critiques of the rationalities, moralities and politics underlying contem-
porary practices of corruption and anti-corruption in the region, and beyond.
We begin by noting that these are extraordinary times for engaging with the theme of
corruption. In 2016, the Panama Papers1 emerged in the form of approximately 11.5

CONTACT Donna M. Goldstein donna.goldstein@colorado.edu

1
The Panama Papers were a leak of documents in 2015 from an anonymous source at the Panamanian law firm Mossack
Fonseca. These documents contain personal information on prominent wealthy individuals who used the services of the
firm to commit fraud, tax evasion, and international sanctions. Not all of the transactions were illegal, however
(Wikipedia).
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
300 D. M. GOLDSTEIN AND K. DRYBREAD

million leaked documents detailing personal financial information about public officials
from around the world – some of whom are quite wealthy individuals. Taken together,
the documents outline the mechanisms through which the wealthy and well-connected
commit fraud and tax evasion, and skirt international sanctions, or simply take advantage
of a weak regulatory environment. But the leak of information contained within the
Panama Papers also began the process of revealing the as yet not fully known ‘social
life’ of corruption in Latin America. Worldwide, corruption often generates both personal
financial wealth and political power; in the Latin American region the particular charac-
teristics of corruption, and the number of patterns which it takes, are still being made
known and are difficult to fully comprehend. For example, in some of the cases discussed
in this special issue, individuals who are part of corruption schemes are deeply connected –
either as politicians or experts – to key parts of the state. These cases clearly reveal that a
broad range of individuals and institutions with radically different ideologies are using
opaque financial mechanisms to secure and hide money, and to protect that money
from taxes and other regulatory mechanisms. As made up of practices that almost
always fall within the category of ‘white-collar crime’, their schemes are oftentimes
complex, both in financial and legal terms.
But corruption does not always involve large-scale financial schemes. Nor does it hew
to a particular political ideology. Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of corruption is its
flexible character, which makes it difficult to predict how and when the public might
become aware of its practice, and motivated to address it. However, as we will see in
the diverse cases discussed here, the ability for the public’s perspective to be perverted
and manipulated with regard to corruption is somewhat high. The ever-increasing
forms of local and global mediatisation, together with the classed and raced ways
through which corruption interacts with traditional notions of criminality, have created
patterns to the manner in which corruption is understood in the public sphere. Powerful
middle-class and elite publics are seemingly primed to see white-collar criminals as both
‘white’ and ‘innocent’, while seeing lower-class and racially non-white subjects as con-
nected to (hard-core) criminality and corruption. Indeed, the classed and raced aspects
of corruption in Latin America shine through the papers in this special issue, explaining
a social life that has, as of yet, not been fully explored or reported.
The Latin American participants who appear prominently in the Panama Papers may
share similar race and class backgrounds, but their ideological sympathies traverse the pol-
itical spectrum, ranging from the far right to the far left – and everything in between. For
example, in Argentina, both Macri (the current Argentine president, who is ideologically
positioned to the right of centre) and the Kirchners (past Argentine presidents, who are
ideologically positioned to the left of centre) are well represented in the papers. Next
door, Brazilian billionaires appear prominently in the Panama Papers leaks, as do political
figures from a number of parties that are differently positioned on the ideological spec-
trum: the centre-right Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB), the
centre-left Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB) and the leftist Democratic Labour
Party (PDT). Executives from the state-run oil company, Petrobras, also appear in the
leaked materials, as does the politician Eduardo Cunha: the former leader of the lower
house of the Brazilian Congress who drove the impeachment proceedings against Presi-
dent Dilma Rousseff of the left-of-centre Workers Party (PT). Entities with a range of pol-
itical sympathies and financial interests belonging to Costa Rica, Ecuador, Uruguay, Chile,
 CULTURE, THEORY AND CRITIQUE 301

Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and Mexico all appear prominently in the Panama Papers as
well.
At the time the papers were released (2016), President Barack Obama addressed the
complex financial systems and the inadequate regulatory environment that enabled the
wealthy to gain further advantage by making complex financial moves. ‘It’s not that
they’re breaking the laws’, he said, ‘it’s that the laws are so poorly designed that they
allow people, if they’ve got enough lawyers and enough accountants, to wiggle out of
responsibilities that ordinary citizens are having to abide by’ (Boland-Rudder et al.
2016). The Panama Papers should be considered one of many ongoing large-scale
global corruption scandals that illuminate patterned and complex financial schemes
that create additional advantages for the extremely wealthy. These advantages are
enabled not only by political and financial systems that thrive on inequality, but also by
the cultural capital inherent within such systems.
In some places outside the Latin American region, where stark economic inequality has
not been normalised, information leaked from the Panama Papers seems to have pene-
trated public consciousness; in some cases it has led to political action. One example
that stands out is the case of the Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíõ Gunnlaugsson of
Iceland, who resigned when it became known that he had taken advantage of some of
the legal loopholes offered by offshore tax shelters. A good deal of the public outrage
that inspired the successful call for Gunnlaugsson’s resignation was motivated by what
was understood to be his exceedingly hypocritical stance toward financial corruption;
he had campaigned against the very same quasi-legal financial activities he had used to
enrich himself (Henley 2016).
Public awareness of corruption in the US seems to be taking a much different trajectory,
leading toward increasing impunity rather than accountability – but there are signs this
could swiftly change if political winds shift direction. Only time will tell if any of the cor-
ruption cases that are currently moving forward in US courts will ultimately produce
lasting effects in the political system. Of the many corruption scandals currently unfolding
in the US as we finalise our work on this special issue, the case of Paul Manafort, the one-
time former campaign manager of President Donald J. Trump, might prove to be the most
significant. Manafort’s first trial came to a close as this issue made its way to press; he was
found guilty of eight counts of corruption, including five counts of tax fraud, two counts of
bank fraud and one count of failure to disclose a foreign bank account (LaFraniere 2018).
In spite of Trump’s efforts to distance himself from his former campaign manager, Man-
afort and his trial may later prove to sit somewhere at the centre of the ‘Russia investi-
gation’. But as of yet, it seems that the legal recognition of President Trump’s former
campaign manager’s participation in corruption is not enough to produce broader politi-
cal effects.
Manafort’s past economic success as a political consultant for a number of questionable
political actors, including pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine, rested, in part, on his politi-
cal ties within the US. We don’t yet know if and whether this equation worked in the other
direction (e.g., whether his political ties with Russian oligarchs were important in his role
as Trump’s campaign manager). We do, however, know that when Manafort volunteered
to work as director for the Trump presidential campaign, he agreed to work without
drawing a salary – despite his cash-flow problems at the time (Foer 2018).
302 D. M. GOLDSTEIN AND K. DRYBREAD

During Manafort’s trial, Rick Gates – a former friend and employee of Manafort who
served as a witness for the prosecution and was once a high ranking member of the Trump
Presidential transition team – provided the court with hours of testimony explaining how
the super wealthy shift money across international borders, evading tax collectors and law
enforcement, and ultimately decreasing public tax bases and increasing the wealth of oli-
garchs and their enablers (Cassidy 2018). As of this writing, we do not yet know of all the
connections between Manafort’s corrupt practices, his ties with Russian oligarchs and
politicians, and his involvement with the Trump White House. But the trial did clarify
how financial schemes involving off shore tax havens work, and how they can both
hide and generate large sums of money, as well as political power.
Arguably, the Manafort trial and the Panama Papers leak have together drawn our
attention to the fact that we still do not fully comprehend the ways in which the money
generated by tax evasion and money laundering is used politically. But if contemporary
scholars ‘of the North’ have avoided writing about corruption in ‘the South’ because
they did not want to be perceived as engaging in an orientalising practice (Nuijten and
Anders 2007, Goldstein 2012), there is now plenty of material to keep these scholars occu-
pied just about anywhere on the globe, with the US included prominently. Reading these
essays about corruption in Latin America certainly inspires the will to think
comparatively.
In this special issue focused on the social life of corruption in Latin America, our aim is
to examine the context, social meanings, discourses and workings of corruption in the
social order. The questions we raise for the Latin American context can be asked in
relation to corruption anywhere:

. How do accusations of corruption reveal tensions between the democratic promise of

equality and the realities of pervasive social and economic hierarchy in particular Latin
American contexts?
. In what ways do millennial and post-millennial forms of capitalism and the culture of
neoliberalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001) intersect with old and new, left and right,
individual and party forms of corruption in the Latin American region?
. How do racial categories and stereotypes configure the multiple facets of ‘crime’ and
‘corruption’, and the ways in which they are framed in particular local and national
contexts?
. In what ways are practices of corruption and its exposure gendered?
. How are anthropologists and other scholars of diverse identities and positions working
in Latin America constrained in their representations of corruption at local, national
and global levels?
. How is white-collar corruption framed in this newest iteration? Does it share charac-
teristics with white-collar crime and corruption elsewhere?

We address these questions in the essays that follow. While remaining attentive to the
enduring and pronounced forms of corruption in the region, we thus seek to explore how
recent political, financial and media events signal the emergence of novel forms of white-
collar crime and corruption, forms which ultimately require us to rethink the operation of
state (or state-like) power in Latin America (Aretxaga 2003). Together, the essays in this
volume suggest that we think of corruption as something both ‘old’ and ‘new’, that is,
 CULTURE, THEORY AND CRITIQUE 303

something that is very well known but that also takes on new shapes and purposes in this
contemporary moment.

Corruption’s force in the Latin American region

For more than a century, large-scale corruption has flourished throughout the Latin
American region in a variety of forms including patronage, cronyism, nepotism and cor-
onelismo. In his now famous travel journal from the 1830s, Charles Darwin commented on
the omnipresence of corruption in South America, speaking to its debilitating effects on
democratic principles: ‘Nearly every public officer can be bribed. The head man in the
post-office sold forged government franks. The governor and prime minister openly com-
bined to plunder the state’ (Darwin 1990 [original 1839]: 170). Darwin’s travel writings
implied that these forms of corruption were particular to the region and were an epidemic
of sorts. Indeed, representations of corruption on the continent have quite regularly been
produced in the literature of the region, which portrays corruption as a fact of social life.
Corruption features prominently in the Latin American literary canon, appearing, for
example, in the work of José Hernandéz, Euclides da Cunha, Mario Vargas Llosa,
Carmen Naranjo and Carlos Fuentes (this is not by any means an exhaustive list).
While recognising the continued validity of corruption’s enduring role in social life in
the region, here we suggest that in recent years a new narrative of corruption has begun to
emerge: that is, of the strategic deployment of ‘anti-corruption’ as a political move. This
move has been utilised by ‘the right wing’ most effectively. Yet the corruption practices
critiqued most vocally by the far right are present across a broad political spectrum, as
is evident in the Odebrecht scandal, which involves multiple Latin American countries,
a wide array of political actors, and billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains.
In 2014, authorities began an investigation of the Brazilian construction firm Odeb-
recht; this investigation, in turn, brought to light evidence implicating high-level govern-
ment officials from ten Latin American countries (and two African countries) in a complex
scheme of bribery and kickbacks that helped the Brazilian firm secure lucrative building
contracts across the continent (and on the other side of the globe). Multiple political
parties across a broad ideological expanse were implicated. Thus far, the investigation
has led to the arrest of high-level officials in Colombia, Peru, the Dominican Republic
and Brazil; indictments elsewhere are likely to follow.
Between the Odebrecht scandal, the Panama Papers leaks, and the multiple local
exposures of smaller-scale corruption schemes in the region, it would appear as though
a wave of anti-corruption activity is finally helping to clean up Latin American politics.
Since 2015, charges of corruption have spurred the resignation of Guatemalan President
Otto Perez Molina (former military, conservative), the indictment of former Argentine
President and current Senator Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (centre-left), and the
impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff (centre-left). In each of these cases,
democratic sentiments, maturing legal institutions and a new media landscape have com-
bined to expose powerful politicians to a level of scrutiny and accountability that would
have been unthinkable a decade ago. But even as some have praised the growing vibrancy
of civil society in Latin American democracies for creating the conditions of possibility for
these high-level crackdowns on corruption, the impulse behind some of the recent anti-
corruption activity in the region has been far from democratic.
304 D. M. GOLDSTEIN AND K. DRYBREAD

Take the case of Kirchner: In December of 2016, she was indicted on charges of corrup-
tion in a case involving funds earmarked for public works. The scandal surrounding
Kirchner deepened in August 2018, when a judge authorised police raids of her residences
in search of information regarding her potential involvement in a wide-ranging kickback
scheme during her presidency. The Argentine Senate enabled the searches by partially
lifting the parliamentary immunity Kirchner enjoys as a senator; they did so after the pre-
siding judge in the case made them aware of a series of detailed notebooks kept by a driver
of a senior minister in the Kirchner government (2007–2015). The notebooks revealed a
treasure trove of details regarding the cash payments from construction bosses to govern-
ment officials that the driver claims to have helped facilitate. Kirchner claims she is being
targeted by Argentina’s current president, her political rival and right-wing businessman
and politician, Mauricio Macri. While Kirchner may or may not eventually be found
guilty, the political timing of the raids – a recent devaluation has pushed Argentina
into a recession and stagflation has diminished Macri’s approval ratings – suggests that
they are possibly motivated by causes other than transparency.
President Dilma Rousseff’s 2016 impeachment trial in Brazil arguably provides an even
more obvious example of a politically motivated crusade against alleged corruption. Many
have agreed that Dilma’s removal from office was a parliamentary coup. Some who under-
stand her removal as a coup also recognise that the entire Brazilian political system is
mired in corruption. The dual picture emerging of Rousseff’s downfall is that a highly
managed and mediatised anti-corruption campaign removed her from office, and that
the politicians currently in control of the government helped depose her in order to
protect themselves from facing their own corruption charges.
In a very broad sense, and related to the maturation of judicial systems throughout the
Latin American region, it is a well-known fact that white-collar crime is endemic in the
region; yet until recently it has been both untreated in the criminal justice systems and
understudied on the whole. Within the judicial system, it had seemingly been impossible
to adequately address white-collar crime and corruption prior to the present. The same
might be said of the academic study of these phenomena. In contrast, academic literatures
focused on urban violence, drug trafficking and prisons are abundant. For example, the
current Brazilian criminal justice and prison system are filled with black, brown and
poor bodies (see, for example, Drybread 2016) prosecuted and imprisoned for minor
infractions, including drug possession and petty theft, at the same time that wealthy
white elites have arguably been able to plunder the country with impunity. In this
context, recent investigations of high-profile politicians and business leaders, even with
all of their regressive political implications and flaws, do indeed provide a collective
moment to reflect on white-collar instances of ‘breaking the law’.
To some, the sudden emergence of so many high-profile corruption scandals in Latin
America not only indicates the intractability of the dishonesty, thievery and graft that
remain integral to the continent’s processes and politics, but also gives credence to the
idea that in order to get things done, corruption is necessary; ‘greasing the wheels’ of
an unforgiving bureaucracy is part of a politician’s (and bureaucrat’s) job. To others,
this proliferation of corruption scandals heralds significant shifts in the ways that
white-collar crime is perceived, exposed, tolerated and punished.
Prior academic writings about corruption, crime and violence have recognised cor-
ruption’s white-collar phenotype, including its confluence among middle- and upper-
 CULTURE, THEORY AND CRITIQUE 305

class perpetrators (Nuijten and Anders 2007; Goldstein 2012). However, more research
must be done in this regard. White-collar crime has too long been understood as static
and unchanging. While its history might be summed up in the popular maxim stated
many times in newspaper reports and in everyday speech in Brazil – that white-
collar crime usually ‘ends in pizza’, with nothing being accomplished aside from impu-
nity (see, Goldstein 2018) – this is not necessarily a Brazilian problem nor is it exclu-
sively a Brazilian outcome. White-collar crime everywhere too often ends in reduced
sentencing and plea deals for perpetrators, with short and specialised prison sentences
– even when the amounts of money involved are beyond comprehension. In the US
context, our own motto for corporate corruption has an equivalent in the ‘too big to
fail’, mantra of 2008. Collectively, we tend to worry more about the potential short-
term consequences of prosecuting corporate and political crimes than about the long-
term effects of allowing powerful actors to enrich themselves at the expense of us all.
This special issue shows that, of course, both emergent and embedded forms of corrup-
tion produce real effects on local communities and on larger political systems. In Latin
America, effects have included local variations of drug, military and gang violence that,
in turn, are entangled with state power. This special issue sheds light on these critical inter-
sections, and asks: Do emergent forms of corruption highlight the fragility of democratic
citizenship in the young, and tenuously stable, democracies of Latin America (Drybread
2009)? Has neoliberalism – or the threat of neoliberal collapse – produced new intersec-
tions of race, class and corruption (Goldstein 2012)?

Critical intersections of corruption in Latin America

Part one: the Brazil papers: Rousseff, Collor and Othon
Brazil is often argued to be the ‘exceptional’ case among Latin American countries. Its large
size and powerful economy, distinct history and language, and its immense diversity, in
some ways, set it apart from the other countries in the region. The essays introduced in
this subsection are indeed Brazil-based stories but they have far-reaching, perhaps even
prescient, implications for the region as a whole. The recent corruption themes encased
within Brazil’s Lava Jato or ‘Car Wash’ corruption scandal are already being spoken of as
precursors to Argentina’s ‘notebook’ scandal (Politi 2018). Aaron Ansell’s essay titled
‘Impeaching Dilma Rousseff: the double life of corruption allegations on Brazil’s political
right’ takes the reader into the very heart of Brazil’s recent ‘anti-corruption’ turn, providing
the context and a novel explanation for how Dilma Rousseff, the carefully hand-picked
Workers Party presidential candidate who later became Brazil’s first female President,
was eclipsed from her powerful position through congressional impeachment. The case
was not successful because of the clarity of Rousseff’s wrongdoing or even because of
strong factual evidence against her. Instead, argues Ansell, economic and political con-
ditions extant at the time allowed for Dilma’s detractors to stage a ‘conflation of two
models of corruption’, one legal-behavioural and the other religious-ontological. Each
model influenced the other, eventually creating the conditions that emboldened opposition
(right-wing) politicians to force Dilma from elected office. Ansell argues that the ‘legal char-
acter of the proceedings provided the cover for Brazil’s legislators to pronounce on
Rousseff’s ontological, rather than her statutory, corruption’ (314). Ansell’s essay
306 D. M. GOLDSTEIN AND K. DRYBREAD

proposes that the broad coalition of right-wing actors – neoliberals, authoritarians, reli-
gious conservatives and race-class elitists – who determined Rousseff’s culpability in con-
gressional deliberations on her impeachment did not look to what she did, but instead to
what she was in determining her culpability. In so doing, they also created a public
equivalence among Rousseff, Lula and the PT, rendering the latter as a party constructed
of (already) corrupted individuals. Ansell argues that Dilma’s impeachment can be par-
tially explained through what he terms the ‘evidentiary logic of cross-domain homology’:
linking disparate characterological traits – alleged Marxism, lesbian proclivities and
‘criminal’ behaviour during the dictatorship – through contaminated representations.
In these representations, elements of Dilma’s history that were well known by the
public were combined to create an aberrant and perverted, morally corrupt figure.
Over time, the accumulation of such representations was successfully deployed by
Dilma’s detractors to create a figure of ontological corruption who, in this logic,
‘deserved’ impeachment. Ansell writes that this strategy of conflating perceived moral
corruption with the practice of actual political and financial corruption is not necessarily
one that will work only for the ideological ‘right’. However, when we compare the racial,
religious and gender logics that emerged in the Dilma case to the ways in which corrup-
tion and crime are already configured as contaminated representations in Brazilian
history, we are left to wonder whether this ‘anti-corruption’ logic could ever be success-
fully deployed from a different perspective.
Kristen Drybread’s paper titled, ‘When corruption is not a crime: “innocent” white poli-
ticians and the racialisation of criminality in Brazil’ helps to explain the very conundrum
raised by Ansell. In her essay, she reminds readers of the historical antecedents of the cor-
ruption equation, especially how corruption is thoroughly already racialised – and therefore
classed – in Brazil, and how these characteristics are particularly inflected in the politics of
corrupt northeastern politicians, who are the descendants of a white landed elite. Drybread’s
essay shows how the patterns of white-collar crime in Brazil follow the powerful rules that
classic sociology laid out about the ‘power elite’ (Mills 2000 [1956]) in the early twentieth
century. Indeed, even the earliest literatures on white-collar crime noted the inextricable
link between such crimes and their individual perpetrators, setting out the definition of
white-collar criminality as ‘committed by a person of respectability and high social status
in the course of his occupation’ (Sutherland 1949). Drybread’s essay goes far in explaining
the social relations of race embedded in today’s construction of corruption, which despite its
seemingly new forms, remains built upon a racialised historical bedrock. This bedrock per-
sists through time, leaving the vast seigniorial estates of the landed elites in Brazil intact, and
providing a foundation for the well-known levels of inequality that characterise labour
relations in contemporary northeast Brazil today. Drybread re-introduces us to a Brazil
that many in the central cities (e.g., São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro) might claim is gone,
but that is still quite visible in the impoverished northeast. There, mixed-race and darker
skinned Brazilians are understood as lower-class citizens and their association with crimi-
nality is naturalised over time. Conversely, the white elite and politically powerful of Alagoas
that Drybread describes do not see white-collar corruption as a politically or morally rel-
evant issue. Instead, for these elite white northeastern politicians, the practice of ‘vote-
buying’ – where impoverished citizens trade their votes for material gain – is reconfigured
for public consumption as the central problem of corruption. Drybread describes how
these elites transform vote buying from a tactic of subsistence into a problem of racial
 CULTURE, THEORY AND CRITIQUE 307

and moral corruption. Doing so enables them to detach themselves from white-collar
crime and corruption, and to thereby avoid taking responsibility for its practice. Thus,
these white-collar actors position themselves as the entrepreneurs, business leaders
and political saviours of the region, at the same time that they reposition materially
impoverished citizens who must sell their vote for sustenance as criminals. Drybread
argues that these characterisations function well because they are built on longstanding
historical representations of race and class that have never been erased in the context of
Brazil’s ‘cordial’ forms of racism. The end result is that the very same elite political
figures who have committed fraud and various other forms of white-collar crime and
corruption, such as ex-President Fernando Collor de Mello, exempt themselves from
being seen as morally corrupt. Meanwhile, ex-President Luis Ignácio Lula da Silva
(Lula), who was born into an impoverished family in the northeast (and is often con-
sidered to be phenotypically white), is rendered characterologically ‘black’ in this
equation. We could say that Lula, the PT and Dilma are potentially always ‘ontologically’
corrupt – to use Ansell’s phrasing – because of this constellation.
Donna Goldstein’s essay titled, ‘Already innocent: radioactive bribes, white collar cor-
ruption and nuclear expertise in Brazil’ takes on the claim of an ‘already’ conditioned (and
racialised and classed) perception of innocence by examining the ‘whiteness’ that is con-
centrated and ‘taken-for-granted’ in a Brazilian nuclear expert’s defence against corrup-
tion allegations. The case focuses on a central figure in Brazil’s nuclear history, Othon
Luiz Pinheiro da Silva (Admiral Othon), a man known as the ‘Prometheus of Brazil’,
whose expertise in all nuclear matters extends back to the 1970s. Admiral Othon was
recently found guilty of engaging in a number of corrupt practices related to the construc-
tion of Brazil’s third nuclear plant, Angra 3. These corrupt practices became known
through the Car Wash investigations that extended from the oil industry into the con-
struction and nuclear industries. Although Admiral Othon was initially given a harsh sen-
tence of 43 years for his corruption related crimes, he was recently released from prison; in
that moment, during a widely referenced interview, he echoed points made by his lawyers
during his legal defence: that ‘anti-corruption zeal’ was working in coordination with
foreign interests and against nationalist desires to unfairly punish him, a national treasure.
In framing his expertise and the importance of his work to the nation in terms of national
security, energy and technical prowess, Admiral Othon and his lawyers constructed his
moral ontology as ‘already innocent’ and as transcending partisan politics. Indeed, prior
to his release, a number of politicians from across the political spectrum came to
support Othon publicly. His corruption case potentially provides evidence that anti-cor-
ruption forces do not only achieve success in litigating against avowedly left-wing charac-
ters, as some have argued. While it is not entirely clear how Othon himself should be
ideologically positioned – his work was supported by left-, centre- and right-wing govern-
ments – it is clear that his education, status, expertise, technical skills and national security
credentials created a kind of ‘super-whiteness’; that is, a set of characteristics that
expressed white-collar expertise as a preconfigured category of innocence.

Part two: representations of indigeneity and ‘moral’ corruption in the Amazon

The second section of this special issue consists of two papers that consider the ‘moral
economies’ of corruption in the Amazonian region. Each essay reveals an important
308 D. M. GOLDSTEIN AND K. DRYBREAD

case for understanding how representations of indigeneity in local corruption narratives

fuel these regionally specific moral economies of corruption. We begin with Angus
Lyall’s essay titled, ‘A moral economy of oil: corruption narratives and oil elites in
Ecuador’, which speaks to the manner in which the historic elite denounced attempts
by indigenous groups in the northern Amazon to form an indigenous-owned oil
company called Alian Petrol. As in the case regarding the nuclear expert Admiral
Othon, here nationalist (technocratic and mestizo) interests took control. They
dashed the plan of indigenous groups to obtain control of precious oil reserves in
the Amazon. In this case, the alignment of elite interests against indigenous interests
meant that the former had to publicly declare Alain Petrol to be ‘immoral’ in much
the same way that Dilma had to be cast as an immoral character in order to be
deposed from the Presidency of Brazil. Lyall notes that there is a historical pattern to
this condemnation of indigenous efforts to achieve greater autonomy in Ecuador;
such condemnatory narratives, he writes, ‘have been effectively used in moments of dis-
content with rent redistribution’ (383). In the case of Alain Petrol, narratives of moral
corruption were applied to indigenous actors who desired to control the resources
present in their own territories. In this context, corruption has been reconceptualised
as a strategic weapon; it does not simply reference illicit transactions, but speaks at
once to the depletion of national wealth and to the persistent legacies of colonialism
in the region. While the nationalist narratives that have been successfully deployed
against foreign investors in this neoliberalising and privatising context may have once
had a left-oriented flavour, in the ethnically motivated moral narratives Lyall draws
our attention to, articulations of whiteness and expertise are utilised to delegitimise
indigenous resource claims.
The so-called ‘moral corruption’ of indigenous peoples is similarly addressed in the
next essay, titled ‘Traversing the margins of corruption amidst informal economies in
Amazonia’, by Daniela Peluso. The essay illustrates the ‘clash’ between bureaucratic
notions of corruption and indigenous moral cosmoeconomics by detailing how indi-
genous groups in Peru’s Amazon are perceived as corrupt by non-indigenous actors.
While in the Ecuadorian Amazon indigenous attempts to take part in oil production
and technology are represented by the elite bureaucrats of the oil industry as
morally corrupt, in the context of the indigenous Peruvian Amazon addressed by
Peluso, it is the ‘informal economies’ related to resource extraction that are tagged
as corrupt. In this setting, both logging and the bureaucratic necessities associated
with this extractive industry thrive on everyday extra-legal practices, such as coimas
(bribes), aumentos (extras) or the parillada (barbecue) that describe bribery dressed
as false generosity, among others. To non-indigenous actors, these everyday practices
mark indigenous people as both ‘anti-nationalist’ and ‘corrupt’ (403). Peluso’s paper
is an exploration of how state bureaucratic regulations function in indigenous areas,
and particularly on how Amazonian peoples work to relax these regulations by recast-
ing them as illegitimate.

Part three: law, states and corruption

The final section of this special issue explicitly addresses how local practices and national-
level laws and law enforcement practices can encourage particular forms of corruption.
 CULTURE, THEORY AND CRITIQUE 309

Winifred Tate’s paper titled ‘Paramilitary politics and corruption talk in Colombia’ reveals
the ways corruption talk in the Monteria region of Colombia’s Atlantic Coast helps to
explain how paramilitary leaders obtained comparatively high moral standing during
the nation’s Dirty War. Tate explains that in order to comprehend this interpretation –
given the violent human rights violations perpetrated by these same paramilitary
groups – one has to look at the regional characteristics of inequality and corruption
that preceded the rise of the paramilitaries. In Colombia’s historically constituted hierar-
chies of class and race, political life in the region had long been dominated by rural family
clans who ‘took all the money in Córdoba’ and used their regional power to create fortunes
not only through legal forms, but also through crime and corruption (Tate 2018). Since the
1970s, this has included drug trafficking. Paramilitary leaders who emerged in the 1980s
staked the claim that they were ‘anti-corruption’, even though they too engaged in siphon-
ing off public resources for private gain. In some instances, the corruption of these para-
military leaders was publicly acknowledged, but they were seen as ‘doing corruption right’
because they carried out the projects they had promised while stealing ‘less’ than tra-
ditional elites regularly stole from the public. Paramilitary leaders also used rhetorical
strategies of the leftist opposition, including adopting leftist testimonios (in the form of
paramilitary life histories) to highlight their position as ‘innocents’ at the beginning of
their political trajectories, thereby casting themselves not only as saviours of regional
security against drug traffickers and leftist forces, but also as representatives of weak
and beleaguered regional elites. While much of this paramilitary perspective is a
fantasy, it is nonetheless replicated and made to seem real in powerful mediated forms,
including popular Colombian telenovelas.

Concluding thoughts
From the cases presented in this special issue, it is clear that ‘corruption’ is at once a con-
ceptual category, a set of historically embedded practices that creates wealth, and also a
political strategy (‘anti-corruption’). Corruption thus takes shape in a ‘creative’ manner
at local, national and global scales here explored in this special issue of Culture, Theory
and Critique in the context of Latin America. The essays to follow reveal some of the
ways that emergent forms of corruption in Latin America might require new ways of
understanding relationships between authority, morality, transparency and (il)legality in
putatively democratic regimes. While one could argue that a general consensus holds
that corruption runs counter to the principles of democracy, within Latin America’s
young democratic states, charges of corruption have, of late, been strategically levelled
to promote – and likewise to thwart – ideological and social projects that further equality.
This phenomenon bolsters a primary contention of this special issue as a whole: that cor-
ruption traverses social and political hierarchies, even as it generally works to keep them in
place. Given that even the most marginalised can, in certain situations, benefit from prac-
tices that can be construed as corruption, it is important to note that such benefits tend to
offer only short-term solutions to entrenched social and political problems. It is the pol-
itical economic elite who, in using corruption to preserve the various forms of inequality
that set them apart from the masses, truly benefit from practices of corruption, or from
accusations thereof.
310 D. M. GOLDSTEIN AND K. DRYBREAD

The papers presented here suggest that we must acknowledge how accusations of cor-
ruption – whether founded or not – can reveal tensions between the democratic promise
of equality and the realities of pervasive social and economic hierarchy that still exist in
Latin America, and throughout other parts of the world. By ethnographically examining
particular practices of corruption and anti-corruption that implicate a range of social
actors, the essays suggest that we must no longer assume corruption can only benefit
the wealthy and well-connected, while anti-corruption necessarily furthers the cause of
those who have traditionally been excluded from political and financial power. Both cor-
ruption and anti-corruption are multivalent discourses and practices that can be mobilised
for the benefit of some, or too, for the good of none.

Acknowledgements
The authors want to thank the contributors to the special issue and, in particular, Christopher
Charles Barnes, editorial assistant extraordinaire, for his patience and editorial skills.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors
Donna M. Goldstein is a professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder
and author of Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown (Uni-
versity of California Press, 2003 [2013]), winner of the 2005 Margaret Mead award. She writes
within the fields of medical anthropology, anthropology of the environment, and Science and Tech-
nology Studies (STS) and is currently working on a project that examines the history of Cold War
science and nuclear energy in Brazil.
K. Drybread is a cultural anthropologist based at the University of Colorado Bolder. She has written
on prison rapes and murders, political corruption, and the meanings of mundane mass graves. Her
current project examines relationships between citizenship and violence in Brazil.

ORCID
Donna M. Goldstein http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5771-3752
K. Drybread http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6573-4898

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