Corrupción

The author or editor of over 30 books on various topics, Hermes Tovar Pinzón is best known for his pioneering work on Colombia's economic and statistical history and his ability to integrate such perspectives into social history. But with the publication of La batalla de los sentidos: Infidelidad, adulterio y concubinato a finales de la colonia in 2004, he made clear that, although he had not abandoned archival work or the power of quantitative approaches, he would be writing with more soul. In this vein, he has given us this unconventional book, a passionately presented argument that corruption has been a corrosive element in Colombia's history that has undermined all possibility of building a just society. The work blends Tovar's legendarily razor-sharp tongue and generous nature in a narrative of historical exposition and withering condemnation. The book recalls Alfonso W. Quiroz's Corrupt Circles: A History of Unbound Graft in Peru (2008), but the two are very different. Where Quiroz presented an encyclopedic chronology, Tovar has given us an episodic meditation that follows a chronological structure while incorporating observations about multiple centuries in each discussion.After an introduction, the first chapter considers the colonial epoch as the era when “the seed of corruption” was planted as an integral component of public administration (p. 50). As he elaborates, “Corruption functioned as a constructor of colonial political order, turning into a functional element of the economy, society, and culture” (p. 59). The church, he argues, was fundamental to enabling a system structured around nepotism and connections. He draws on stories of mineowners negotiating to pay only a fraction of what they owed for the royal quinto. Even readers long inured to the excesses of Spanish America's extraction economy will find the ratio of money owed to what was paid remarkable. Tovar argues that such practices foreclosed investment in infrastructure or institutions that would benefit the majority of the population. Though the point is indisputable, focusing on the criminality of those who defrauded the Real Hacienda suggests that, absent such practices, the crown and its agents would have put the lost revenue to better use. This is probably not Tovar's intent, but the possibility seems to linger.The specter of this unrealized potential hangs over the following chapter. Tovar writes with scorn about the leaders of the republic after the dissolution of Gran Colombia, noting later in the book that “the nature of politics in Colombia conserves the criminal caste that the founders of our republic defended so quickly after the triumph of the counterrevolution of 1834” (p. 210). Here he presents details on the startling, and legal, process whereby Francisco de Paula Santander, José Hilario López, and others acquired enormous chunks of public land. Without pausing to explore the parallels between this history and the role that land acquisition has played in contemporary political violence, Tovar turns to three-time president Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera's central role in building a road from Cali to the Pacific port of Buenaventura, a debacle of infrastructural investment. He then points out that the era's interparty conflict was a contest to control the government mechanisms that offered control over such “loot,” an important reminder to those immersed in the rich historiography on republican political culture to not lose sight of the era's central dynamics (p. 139).He passes over the Regeneration (1886–1930), which brought the first effective central government, wealth through coffee exports, and its share of corruption, to consider the dynamic from the 1930s on. This discussion intersperses statistics on education and literacy with observations on the inherent corruption of narcopolítica, parapolítica, and the government's war with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia. In place of anecdotes about the underpayment of taxes or corrupt land acquisition, he focuses on political violence. His sources here come from prosecutions, which he uses to demonstrate that some sort of accountability is possible. These examples explain the passion driving the book and remind the reader that corruption in Colombia has brought not merely wasted opportunities but millions of domestic refugees and hundreds of thousands of killings. This chapter includes a critique of the statistical indicators used to measure poverty, particularly a recent change whereby the World Bank has reclassified millions who were deemed “poor” as “vulnerable,” along with critiques of statistics on Colombia's inequality and on the declining rate of political participation. The final chapter centers on archives and memory, while again considering paramilitary violence and corruption. Here Tovar argues that archives provide both a tool for denunciations and a means of charting official silences, as he does in pointing out the lacuna of congressional records from the years of La Violencia (1948–1958).By turns a survey and a critique, the book levels a challenge for Colombians, for others living in societies marked by elitism, corruption, and violence, and perhaps for historians, who need to work harder to produce work with value outside academia

Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Colonialism · Element (criminal law) · Exposition (narrative) · Humanities · Language change · Literature · Narrative · Order (exchange) · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Settlement (finance) · History · History and Politics in Latin America · Law