Latin America’s top problem is corruption

(Photo: Daniel Ochoa de Olza, AP)

When Peruvian-born Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa told me in a public interview in front of 300 newspaper editors last weekend that “corruption is the biggest threat to Latin American democracies, ” my first reaction was to think that it was an exaggeration. But, on second thought, he may be right.

At first, when Vargas Llosa made that comment during the interview at the annual meeting of the Inter American Press Association in Charleston, South Carolina, I thought that other problems — such as Latin America’s excessive dependence on commodity exports, drug-related violence, lack of competitiveness, and dismal education and innovation standards — are just as serious problems for the region as corruption.

But Vargas Llosa’s explanation, citing the case of Brazil, made a convincing case that — at least in the short run — corruption may be the region’s No. 1 problem.

“Brazil’s case is very interesting because Brazil was a country that seemed to have taken off, that looked like an emerging power. And suddenly, what is it that put an end to that, and set Brazil backwards? It’s corruption, which peaked during a government that the rest of the world was seeing as a model government, that of (Luiz Inácio) Lula da Silva, ” he said.

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