This all-star team of eight governance and anticorruption experts has produced a powerful indictment of Latin American institutions. The authors condemn both public and private elites for “undermining sound policymaking and the rule of law, entrenching impunity, and diverting public resources and investment away from the public good.” The prosecution continues: “Though some [Latin American] countries . . . have been engaged in selected anti-corruption reforms for the last decade, these have been uneven, partial, and focused more on enacting laws and regulations rather than implementation.” Although the report provides an invaluable compilation of state-of-the-art anticorruption initiatives, the authors fail to confront the inconvenient contradiction in their work: the very same elites they indict are called on to enact comprehensive reforms that would presumably prejudice their own interests.
