Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Corruption seen rising during pandemic
Latin American officials accused of exploiting health crisis for financial gain
Even as Latin America has emerged as an epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, with deaths and infections soaring, efforts to contain the crisis have been undermined by a litany of corruption scandals.
Last month, prosecutors in Ecuador announced they had identified a criminal ring that had colluded with health officials to win a contract selling body bags to hospitals at 13 times the real price.
Then, one of the men implicated, Daniel Salcedo, fled Ecuador in a small plane that crashed in Peru. Salcedo is now recovering in the custody of the Ecuador police.
Dozens of public officials and local entrepreneurs stand accused of exploiting the crisis for personal enrichment by peddling influence to pricegouge hospitals and governments for medical supplies, including masks, sanitizer and ventilators. Some of the gear was so flawed that it was rendered useless — and may have contributed to even more sickness and death.
“People are dying in the streets because the hospital system collapsed,” said Diana Salazar, Ecuador’s attorney general. “To profit from the pain of others, with all these people who are losing their loved ones, it’s immoral.”
Investigations into fraud have reached the highest levels of government. The former Bolivian health minister is under house arrest awaiting trial on corruption charges after the ministry paid an intermediary millions more than the going rate for 170 ventilators — which didn’t even work properly.
In Brazil, which has the second highest number of coronavirus deaths after the United States — and Friday surpassed 1 million reported cases — government officials in at least seven states are under investigation on suspicion of misusing more than $200 million in public funds during the crisis.
In Colombia, the inspector general is investigating reports that more than 100 political campaign donors received lucrative contracts to provide emergency supplies during the pandemic.
Peru’s police chief and interior minister resigned after their subordinates bought diluted sanitizer and flimsy face masks for police officers, who then began dying of infections from the virus at alarming rates.
Prosecutors are investigating links between police officials and the suppliers of the equipment to determine whether they colluded to defraud the government, according to Omar Tello, the head of anti-corruption investigators in the prosecutor’s office.
When Peruvian prosecutors began to look into the purchase of protective gear this month, several boxes of evidence disappeared at the headquarters of the police’s investigative crime unit in Lima. Police officers told authorities that several security cameras were not working the day they disappeared.
Tello said the monitoring system appeared to have been manipulated, and prosecutors are working to extract images of people who removed the boxes.
More than 11,000 police officers in Peru have been infected and 200 have died of the virus, according to the government, forcing the country to shutter some stations at least temporarily to contain outbreaks.
The coronavirus is testing nations that were struggling with corruption long before confronting a global health emergency. Presidents in Brazil, Peru and Guatemala have been forced from office in cases of bribery and kickbacks over the years.
But the pandemic has broadened the opportunities for public officials in Latin America to pilfer from state coffers, corruption experts say. Declaring a state of emergency, several countries suspended some regulations governing public contracts, paused in-person congressional sessions or did away with rules requiring them to respond to media requests for information.
“You have the ideal conditions for doing whatever you want,” said Eduardo Bohorquez, director of Transparency International Mexico, an anti-corruption nonprofit group. “There is less transparency, less access to information and zero independent oversight from Congress.”