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Politization and Corruption of Justice
Carlos Ball*
MIAMI (AIPE).- Many plagues have swept Latin America in recent times, but the most pernicious one has been the growing politicization of its judicial systems. That, in turn, has led to widespread corruption. If the law is not worthy of respect, there is no compliance, and soon chaos follows. It is a regional phenomenon that as our countries became democratic and dictators and caudillos were displaced by democratically-elected governments, the appointment of judges began to be made in function of party allegiance and of the judge's political tendencies. As time passes this has tended to spread, leading to the law's general loss of prestige and its increasing exposition to political manipulation. In countries such as Venezuela, outrageous sales of rulings and decisions to the highest bidder take place almost every day. Winners either have deeper pockets or the right political connections.Another extraordinarily negative influence is that the wealthiest and most powerful multinationals now operating in the region are no longer the old United Fruit or the Standard Oil Company, but rather the Colombian drug cartels. Thanks to Washington's policy of declaring war on the foreign production and transportation of drugs rather than to its domestic consumption, the battlefield has been shifted South to our countries, where the monthly salary of a police officer or a judge is about what a street drug seller earns in a bad night in New York or Los Angeles. Without rule of law, investments and job creation cannot flourish. The openings of the economies have not led to general prosperity and high levels of employment in countries such as Mexico, Venezuela, and Argentina, where privatization has mainly benefited those close to the corridors of power. That explains the lukewarm electoral support earned by the political parties identified with economic reforms. On the contrary, often violent opposition erupts against a mislabeled "neoliberalism", the more common Latin American version that tends to benefit mainly the political and business elites, while the common people has to pay more for the goods and services bought from the old state-owned enterprises now turned into private monopolies. At the same time the income generated from the privatization of state corporations is more often than not applied to maintaining an excessive bureaucracy, to pay for electoral campaigns, and to be stashed in foreign bank accounts by the rulers, their families, and friends. A cynical political persecution has been unleashed in the past year by the Venezuelan government against "fugitive" bankers, accused of causing the largest financial crisis in the history of my country. There are some well-known gangsters among those that fled, but also many of those 400 bankers with arrest warrants issued against them are not guilty of gross misconduct; some may have committed minor irregularities or simply made managerial mistakes, but obviously they have no reason to trust a highly politicized and dishonest Venezuelan judiciary. Bankers were all dumped into the same basket because of President Rafael Caldera administration's despair to find scapegoats for the Venezuelan debacle, and following its all-out campaign against "capitalism" and the economic reforms started by former President Carlos Andrés Pérez. I was recently told by an old acquaintance, a high executive of a multinational corporation in Buenos Aires -who previously held a similar position in Caracas- that private sector corruption in Argentina is much more widely spread than in Venezuela, since in order to close important sales to other private companies large payments must be made under the table to purchasing managers. In other words, the private sector has been contaminated by government practices. The fundamental importance of the rule of law was described by F. W. Maitland, more than a century ago, when he wrote: "The exercise of power in ways which cannot be anticipated causes some of the greatest restraints, for restraint is most felt and therefore is greatest when it is least anticipated. We feel ourselves least free when we know that restraints may at any moment be placed on any of our actions, and yet we cannot anticipate these restraints... Known general laws, however bad, interfere less with freedom than decisions based on not previously known rule." When court decisions and the interpretation of the law are made according to political partisanship and expediency, political freedom becomes a sham, and people begin to feel nostalgia for the better times under some past autocrat, when at least everyone had a clear understanding of what was allowed or not allowed, and the circle of privileges was a lot smaller than under the current "democratic" regime.© * Venezuelan journalist, editor and publisher of AIPE, a Spanish-language news organization serving 15 countries. |
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