Former Brazilian President Jea Bolsonaro – convicted this week of overturning his country’s 2022 election and sentenced him to more than 27 years in prison — isn’t the first Latin American leader to encounter legal trouble.
In Peru, more than four former presidents are currently spending their time at the Barbadiro prison in Lima, but last month in Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, president from 2002 to 2010, was sentenced to arrest of home for 12 years (he is currently ordering) after committing procedural fraud and witness crimes.
Certainly take a closer look at the rest of the area. Legal trouble for former leaders is clearly the rule, no exception. All Latin American countries – Bar 1 – at least one former president (and often) is undergoing judicial scrutiny.
In Ecuador, almost all leaders (8 total) since 1996 have been investigated by law enforcement (Alfredo Palacio, 2005-2007 is the only exception). Three of them are considered guilty of criminal offences, including Rafael Correa, who was president from 2007 to 2017 and was sentenced in a bribery lawsuit. He currently lives in a political asylum in Belgium. It’s in relation to Peru, with more than seven presidents facing legal challenges related to allegations of corruption or human rights abuse have been brought to trial since the turn of the millennium (the eighth shooting has died when police were shut down). Francisco Sagusti and Valentin Paniagua are exceptions.
Nearby are El Salvador, Mexico, Guatemala and Argentina, each of which faces or faces crime research. In Argentina, two people have been convicted, including Christina Fernandez de Kirchner, who was convicted of fraudulent administrative crimes in 2022. Three were convicted while in Guatemala.
Next are Costa Rica, Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia, each with four former leaders facing investigations, with at least two convictions in each country. The regional scorecards are rounded out in Panama and Honduras, with three investigations and at least one conviction, respectively. Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile – all have done at least one survey.
There is one exception to the rule.
In Uruguay, there is no public investigation into one president in a democratic era in a country that has been accused or convicted by the judicial system.
Not only that, the small country in Rio de la Plata ranked 15th in the world in 2024, described as the region’s only “complete democracy” and regularly outperforms democratic quality surveys, including the Economist Democracy Index that followed Chile on the 29th. The index takes into account factors such as the election process, government functioning, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties.
Anchel Arerano, a professor of doctoral degrees in Uruguay’s Catholic University and political science, says Uruguay’s unique position is partially explained by what he calls “a political culture of respect for public resources.”
“It’s normal for senior officials to use their cars to live in regular homes. They don’t have great perks, especially compared to other parts of Latin America.
“For example, it is common for a minister to walk down the street, go from one office to another, drive his own car, or parliament drives to parliament. Drivers, secretaries, helicopters – nothing happens in Argentina.
At the other end of the spectrum, Peru is widely seen as having a very weak institution, ranking 78th in the Economist Democracy Index.
So, aside from Uruguay, why do Latin American leaders seem prone to legal trouble?
Experts generally point to two related issues. Wide range of corruption among civil servants – bribery and embezzlement of public funds and lack of trust in public institutions.
According to the latest 2024 Transparency International Report, it is an average of 42 out of 100 points, which are very transparent and zeros are very corrupt. This puts the region 22 points below the European Union and just three points above the Middle East and North Africa.
Arerano links corruption to another phenomenon. A presidential system that concentrates the strength of one individual’s hands.
“If you look at the map, there are few countries that are not touched on corruption scandals. Many of these cases have led to the prosecution of the country’s top political leaders,” he said.
“That’s because Latin America inherits a very strong presidentialist culture, where the president plays a central role in the nation, unlike European democracy, where the president is held in parliament. The concentration of power in the president also explains part of the phenomenon.”
Corruption is not the only accusation that previous leaders have been accused of. For example, former Bolivian president Evo Morales was charged with human trafficking last year, where he allegedly had ties with minors.
However, corruption describes cases that appear to be large and seemingly increasing.
Manuel Byrne, an academic and expert on the judicial process and politics in Latin America, discovered in a 2018 paper that there was a “trend of growth towards the prosecution of former Latin American executives since democratization in the 1980s.”
That raises the question: is corruption really increasing? Or is it just making it better to investigate it as society is becoming more transparent in a democratic era?
Part of the problem in answering this question is that corruption statistics are often based on people’s perceptions, as pointed out by Catalinas Murovitz, director of political science and international relations at the Turkato Diterra school in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
“A few years ago, corruption was not a matter of public attention, so it’s difficult to tell if the phenomenon has grown,” Smrovitz said.
“In this study, you might say, ‘Do you think there are a lot of corrupt politicians in your country?”,” she told CNN.
There are other factors to consider. Increased reliance on the “law” by political rivals seeking to silence their enemies by leveling out unfounded allegations against them.
“It’s not that corruption does not exist or should not be punished, but we cannot ignore the fact that complaints are also used to silence political enemies,” Smrovitz said.
Still, she also warns that it is common for civil servants to avoid scrutiny by claiming that civil servants are being used against them, and that this could lead to situations where they were tracked with the boy by eroding their trust in the legal system.
“Whenever there is surveillance, if someone screams for the law, all forms of surveillance can be deemed irregular or unfair,” she said.
In such a scenario, Latin American leaders may have fewer legal issues, but they are not healthy development for the country itself.
As Arerano pointed out, “surveillance of public resources is part of the design of Western liberal democracy.”
