Corruption in Bolivia
[1] Under Gonzalo “Goni” Sanchez de Lozada, president from 1993 to 1997 and from 2002 to 2003, however, witness the selling off state industries in a process that was widely viewed as corrupt, with many of the purchasers being firms with whom he had close ties.
[4] Evo Morales, elected Bolivia's president in December 2005, convinced poor and middle-class voters that his promised social revolution would overcome establishment corruption.
[1] Nonetheless, Bolivia remains the poorest nation in South America, with real GDP lower than it was a generation ago and most of the population still living below the poverty line.
[7] Similarly, the World Bank gave Bolivia a score of 38.9 for corruption on the Worldwide Governance Indicators scale from 0 (worst) to 100 (best), a decline from 2007 (43.7) but an improvement over 2009 (29.2).
Indeed, a belief in the importance of group identify, and consequently a tendency to embrace the attitudes of the collective, often trumps individual ethics in Bolivian society.
A former employee who reported him to the police, Claudia Silvana Salas, was later arrested and imprisoned on extortion charges and was receiving “anonymous threats.”[4] Over 200 individuals, including government officials and friends and members of Morales's MAS party, ended up being accused of corruption in connection with the fund's disbursements.
It was noted that the first person to draw attention to corruption at the fund, back in 2012, was Jacobo Soruco Cholima, head of a Rural Workers’ Union, who was murdered in June of that year, apparently in retaliation for his whistleblowing.
[10] In February 2016, Morales was accused of influence-peddling involving a Chinese construction firm, CAMC, for which his ex-girlfriend, Gabriela Zapata, worked and which received lucrative government contracts.
In 2009 elections, EU observers reported widespread abuse of the public budget by incumbents, with campaigns being partly financed by civil servants' salaries.
A 2010 report found Bolivia the weakest of all Latin American countries in this regard and noted the lack of limits on political donations and the absence of any law requiring disclosure thereof.
[1] Many police officers have ties to organized crime, mainly drug traffickers, and many are appointed to senior positions, a power that is exclusively exercised by the president, because of their political connections.
In 1988, Bolivia's foreign minister charged that narcotics traffickers were trying to influence policy, and a secret videotape of politicians and military officers socializing with a drug kingpin, Roberto Suárez Gómez, was shown on television.
In the same year it was reported that police and prosecutors were returning large drug finds to narcotics traffickers and turning only small caches over to the authorities.
[20] In January 2015, 20 prosecutors, 18 judges, and 12 police officials who had handled corruption and drug- trafficking cases were investigated for irregularities in their declarations of assets.
Bureaucratic procedures are complex and burdensome, and often involve illegal “facilitation payments.”[1] Several sectors, notably public procurement and natural-resources extraction, are characterized by extensive patronage networks and clientelism.
The same is true of the land administration sector, because property rights are not often protected in practice and expropriation is common, with compensation amounts being determined by negotiations rather than through consistent and transparent processes.
[15] The product procurement sector is especially corrupt, with bribes being exchanged for government contracts and public funds often being diverted to favored companies and individuals.
Scandals involving nepotism, kickbacks, and other forms of corruption have plagued the YPFB for years and led to the firing and imprisonment of several individuals.
[22] In 2009, an executive of a Bolivian-Argentine hydrocarbon firm, Cartler Uniservice, was shot in La Paz while allegedly delivering a large kickback to the family of the then president of YPFB, Santos Ramirez, and a close friend of Morales's.
In 2012, in a case called “Santos Ramitez II,” two other YPFB officials were charged with bribery, abuse of public resources, and illicit enrichment.
[15] Local communities officially control their own natural resources, but are not protected from federal intervention, and are susceptible to corruption by government agencies or corporations.
[1] The Ministry of Anticorruption and Transparency, founded in 2009,[4] is tasked with promoting anti-corruption policies and investigating corruption cases at every level in every government branch.
Bolivia is also part of the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Convention against Corruption, with an ombudsman appointed to protect human rights and guard against government abuse.
[4] Bolivia is not a member of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, but is a signatory of the 1958 New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards.
[1] A September 2015 article in Foreign Policy described how La Paz “freed itself from a ubiquitous culture of corruption.” This took place thanks to Juan Del Granado, elected mayor in 1999 on a platform of “transformation.” When he ordered fuel for municipal vehicles and the supplier handed him a check for $1,000, the usual kickback, he expelled the man from city hall.
In 2004, Del Granado established a Transparency Unit, which provided a special telephone tip line, email address, and online complaints procedure for reporting corruption, and whose staffers posed as public-service users to ferret out officials who demanded irregular fees and bribes.
Del Granado also instituted rewards for good practice, giving out awards to “efficient, transparent, cordial, and honest” city employees.
In addition, he vigorously enforced the 1990 Financial Administration System and Governmental Control Act (SAFCO) and encouraged citizen participation in neighborhood governance.
