[NYTr] Latin Amer: Homegrown Anti-Corruption Measures

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[The international congress on fighting corruption, held in Havana from
Nov 7-9, has been utterly ignored by the mainstream english-language
press, naturally. Cuba has covered it in English, and now Patricia
Grogg of IPS has written this very interesting report. -NY Transfer]

IPS News - Nov 13, 2007
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40039

LATIN AMERICA:  

Homegrown Anti-Corruption Measures

By Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Nov 13 (IPS) - An anti-corruption programme being designed by
the Ecuadorian government of Rafael Correa could serve as a model in
Latin America, where many countries are plagued by this social ill,
which acts as a curb on development and even as a threat to political
stability.

In Transparency International’s "corruption perceptions index" (CPI),
Ecuador ranked 150th this year, with a score of 2.1 -- a far cry from
Chile, Uruguay and Costa Rica, which had the highest scores in the
region (7.6, 7.0 and 5.0, respectively), and only ahead of Venezuela,
which ranked lowest in the region with a score of 2.0.

According to the annual report, which is based on surveys carried out
by the Berlin-based global anti-corruption watchdog, a CPI score below
3.0 (on a scale of 10) suggests that corruption is "rampant."

Because of their qualms about the CPI, officials in the administration
of the left-leaning Correa, who took office in January, decided to come
up with their own index.

"The result may be even worse, but at least we will know where we
stand, based on our own reality, and can identify a starting-point for
tackling the problem," José Luis Cortázar, head of the National
Anti-Corruption Secretariat, told IPS.

The Secretariat, which has the rank of a ministry and reports directly
to the president, was created by Correa early this year as part of the
administration’s "frontal assault on corruption," which puts more of an
emphasis on prevention than punishment, said Cortázar.

The Secretariat aims to foment a new "anti-corruption trend" under the
theme "a policy of honesty, efficiency and fairness," to be launched
possibly "between Dec. 10 and 17, depending on President Correa’s
agenda," said the official.

The idea is to create groups of "legionnaires against corruption" --
ordinary citizens who will fan out across the country to promote the
anti-corruption movement.

The initiative emerged from "a participative process for drawing up a
national policy to fight corruption," said Cortázar.

Ecuador’s new civilian anti-corruption corps would have some points in
common with the young "social workers" who were assigned to gas
stations in Cuba in late 2005 to keep track of inventory and receipts,
in an attempt to crack down on petty corruption among employees.

Shortly after 10,444 of these young monitors were deployed at 2,039
government-owned gas stations around the country, sales revenues more
than doubled, to nearly 100,000 dollars a day on average, according to
figures released by President Fidel Castro in December 2005.

Thousands of young men and women are now working as monitors in
different sectors of the economy to prevent the siphoning off of
resources.

In an interview published Monday by the state-run daily newspaper
Trabajadores, Osiris Martínez, head of the directorate of penal
prosecutions in the Cuban attorney-general’s office, said the
corruption that exists in this socialist country is "basically"
administrative and economic. She mentioned, for example, the use of
public goods for private gain.

"Luckily, at the highest levels of the state and government we do not
have political corruption, which is why we say that this problem has
not undermined the essence of society here," said Martínez. And
although she admitted that "there could be one isolated case, one
person," at those levels, she said it would be quickly detected, and
that the individual would be severely punished.

Martínez agreed with other experts that the economic crisis that shook
Cuba in the 1990s, and monetary measures adopted to confront it, "to
some extent favoured the resurgence of this problem, which was not
entirely absent in Cuba, but was not widespread either."

At a Nov. 7-9 international meeting on society and the challenges posed
by corruption, held in Havana, assistant attorney general Carlos Raúl
Concepción announced that the government was working on "perfecting"
the description of about 30 different crimes in the penal code, in
order to apply stiffer sanctions.

The official also said that "the reappearance of cases of corruption"
in this Caribbean island nation has been seen "mainly in the business
sector and at the middle management level," and that so far, there are
no "criminal organisations."

For his part, Cortázar spoke with a small group of foreign journalists
after describing Ecuador’s new anti-corruption policy in one of the
sessions of the international meeting, which drew experts from around
20 countries to the Cuban capital last week.

The 17th Ibero-American summit of heads of state and government, which
took place Nov. 8-10 in Chile, also issued a special communiqué warning
that corruption threatens social cohesion -- a key focus of the summit
-- and stressing that in order to fight the phenomenon, it is essential
to strengthen cooperation at the national, regional and international
levels. The statement put out by the leaders of Latin America, Spain,
Portugal and Andorra said the United Nations Convention Against
Corruption was a major step forward in terms of international
standards, with respect to promoting preventive measures and bolstering
enforcement.

With a view to the second session of the conference of states party to
the Convention, to take place Jan. 28-Feb. 1, 2008 in Indonesia, the
leaders underscored the importance of the Ibero-American countries
coming together to establish a regional and international oversight
mechanism. (END/2007)