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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Why do so many Latin American leaders have legal troubles?
By Sofía Benavides, CNN
Updated:
8:00 AM EDT, Sun September 14, 2025
Source: CNN
Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro – who was this week of
plotting to overturn his country’s 2022 election and sentenced to
more than 27 years in jail – is far from being the first Latin
American leader to run into legal trouble.
In Peru, no fewer than four former presidents are currently serving
time in Lima’s Barbadillo prison, while in Colombia just last month
Álvaro Uribe, president from 2002 to 2010, was sentenced to 12 years
of house arrest after being found guilty of procedural fraud and
witness tampering (a verdict he is currently ).
Indeed, look closely at the rest of the region and it’s clear that
legal trouble for former leaders is not the exception but the rule. In
every Latin American country – bar one – at least one former
president (and often more) is under judicial scrutiny.
In Ecuador, almost every leader since 1996 – a total of eight – has
been investigated by law enforcement agencies (Alfredo Palacio,
2005-2007 is the only exception). Three of them have been found guilty
of criminal offenses, including Rafael Correa, who served as president
from 2007-2017 and was sentenced for a bribery case. He is currently
living in political asylum in Belgium. That ties with Peru where, since
the turn of the millennium, no fewer than seven presidents have been
brought to trial or faced legal challenges relating to allegations of
corruption or human rights abuses (while an eighth shot himself dead
when police were closing in). Francisco Sagasti and Valentín Paniagua
are the exceptions.
Following close behind are El Salvador, Mexico and Guatemala and
Argentina, each of which has five former presidents either facing or
having faced criminal probes. In Argentina, two have been convicted,
including Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who was found guilty of
fraudulent administration in 2022 and is currently under house arrest
and banned from running for election; while in Guatemala, three have
been convicted.
Costa Rica, Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia are next up, each with four
former leaders who have faced investigation – with at least two
convictions in each country. Rounding out the regional scorecard are
Panama and Honduras, with three investigations and at least one
conviction each; and Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Colombia,
Venezuela and Chile – all with at least one investigation.
There is just one exception to the rule.
The exception to the rule
In Uruguay, not one single president from the country’s democratic
period has been charged or convicted by the justice system, nor has any
open investigation against them.
Not only that, but the small country on the Río de la Plata regularly
tops democratic quality surveys – such as The Economist’s Democracy
Index, which in 2024 ranked it 15th in the world and described it as
the only “full democracy” in the region, followed by Chile at 29th.
The index takes into account such factors as electoral processes,
government functioning, political participation, political culture, and
civil liberties.
Ángel Arellano, professor at the Catholic University of Uruguay and
PhD in political science, says Uruguay’s unique position is partly
explained by what he terms a “political culture of respect for public
resources.”
“(In Uruguay) it’s normal for high officials to use their own cars
and live in their usual homes. They don’t have great perks,
especially compared to the rest of Latin America, and they have high
salaries, yes, but a certain austerity in their practices,” Arellano
said.
“For example, it’s common for a minister to walk down the avenue to
go from one office to another, or to drive their own car, or for a
parliamentarian to drive to parliament. No chauffeurs, secretaries,
helicopters – things that do happen next door in Argentina. That
infrastructure doesn’t exist in Uruguay, partly due to the
country’s scale, its economy, and, again, its political culture.”
On the other end of the spectrum, Peru is widely seen as having
extremely weak institutions and is ranked 78th in The Economist’s
democracy index.
Is the system to blame?
So, Uruguay aside, why do Latin American leaders seem so prone to legal
trouble?
Experts commonly point to two related issues: widespread corruption
among officials – characterized by bribery and embezzlement of public
funds – and a lack of trust in institutions among the public.
According to the latest 2024 Transparency International report, the
Americas average 42 out of 100 points on a scale where 100 is very
transparent and zero is very corrupt. This puts the region 22 points
below the European Union and only three points above the Middle East
and North Africa.
Arellano links corruption to another phenomenon: presidential systems
that concentrate power in the hands of a single individual.
“If you look at the map, there’s hardly a country that hasn’t
been touched by a corruption scandal, and many of those cases resulted
in the prosecution of the country’s top political leader,” he said.
“That’s because Latin America has inherited a very strong
presidentialist culture, where the president plays a central role in
the state, unlike European democracies where the president is
constrained by parliament. That concentration of power in the president
also explains part of the phenomenon.”
Is corruption getting worse or are investigations getting better?
Corruption is not the only charge former leaders stand accused of.
Bolivia’s ex-President Evo Morales, for example, was charged last
year with human trafficking after allegedly having a relationship with
a minor – allegations he insists are politically motivated.
However, corruption does account for a large – and seemingly growing
– number of cases.
Manuel Balán, an academic and specialist in judicial processes and
politics in Latin America, found in a 2018 paper that there had been a
“growing trend toward the prosecution of former heads of the
executive in Latin America since the democratization of the 1980s.”
That raises the question: is corruption really on the rise? Or, as
societies become more transparent in the democratic era, are
authorities simply getting better at investigating it?
Part of the problem in answering this question is that corruption
statistics are often based on people’s perception, as Catalina
Smulovitz, director of Political Science and International Relations at
the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina, points
out.
“A few years ago, corruption as such was not a matter of public
attention, so it’s hard to determine if the phenomenon has grown or
not,” Smulovitz said.
“A study might simply say, ‘Do you think there are many corrupt
politicians in your country?’,” she told CNN, “So according to
these studies, there are countries with very low corruption rates, but
not because it doesn’t exist, but because people don’t see it as a
problem.”
There’s another factor to consider too: the increasing reliance on
“lawfare” by political rivals who try to silence their opponents by
leveling baseless allegations against them.
“It’s not that corruption doesn’t exist or shouldn’t be
punished, but you can’t ignore the fact that complaints are also used
to silence political opponents,” Smulovitz said.
Still, she also cautions that it has become common for public officials
to try to avoid scrutiny by claiming lawfare is being used against them
– and that this could lead to a boy-who-cried-wolf situation by
undermining trust in the legal system
“If every time there’s oversight someone cries lawfare, then all
forms of oversight could be seen as irregular or unjustified,” she
said.
In such a scenario, Latin American leaders might run into fewer legal
problems, but it would hardly be a healthy development for the
countries themselves.
As Arellano noted, “oversight of public resources is part of the
design of Western liberal democracy.”
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