No craft against graft
Nothing locally last week to compare with the Lula inauguration in Brazil but a trio of sub-ministerial senior officials seeing the old year out without seeing the new year in could be an opportunity to dig into a couple of aspects easily overlooked when covering the news – the backroom boys (and girls) in the public sector and the question of what exactly are the official antibodies against a corruption which does in contrast make the headlines, indeed leading to the judicial sphere being given a centrality in the government agenda which by no means corresponds to most people’s priorities, thus deepening political disenchantment.
The trio consisted of Victoria Donda of the INADI Anti-discrimination Institute, Félix Crous heading the Anti-corruption Office (OA in its Spanish acronym) and Mint Director Rodolfo Gabrielli. This column will have the least to say on the latter – because this establishment founded in 1875 is the most institutionally neutral with continuity under various constitutions and governments (even if Mint heads like the Carlos Menem crony Armando Gostanián, who died last August, were not always colourless) and because the reasons for the change seem to have been the simplest (the 1991-95 Peronist governor of Mendoza was dumped at the behest of the Economy Ministry rather than the Presidency for not printing money fast enough to keep up with inflation, needing to outsource issue to Brazil and Spain).
INADI will not occupy much more space because even though it might be thought that the virtues of opposing discrimination, xenophobia and racism would be beyond dispute, this institute has been curiously stillborn long before Donda. It was conceived in 1988 at the tail end of the Radical Raúl Alfonsín administration but Menem taking office the next year was in no hurry to give it birth – when he did in 1995, it was probably both a gesture of gratitude to the Radicals for permitting his re-election and a favour to its first president, Patria Grande leader Víctor Ramos (the son of the left-wing nationalist firebrand, Jorge Abelardo Ramos). At the turn of the century the Alliance placed the institute under the trusteeship of the progressive judge Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni, who ran it until 2002 (becoming a Supreme Court justice the following year). Only between 2002 and 2009 did INADI formally recover its autonomy under Enrique Oteiza and María José Lubertino (who used the post to condemn any suggestion that Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in any way owed her presidency to being the wife of the previous president rather than to her own exceptional talents as being grossly discriminatory against women). But since then there has been a succession of trustees named by the government, of whom Donda was the fifth (the previous four were complete nonentities).
This brings us to the OA and Crous, who turned it into an oxymoron – his understanding of an anti-corruption office was to withdraw the OA as a plaintiff in any trial involving Vice-president Cristina Kirchner or her family on the grounds that the charges of money-laundering were the province of its UIF (Unidad de Información Financiera) watchdog. This in turn raises the question of who the UIF are and how many other sentinels against corruption there might be.
In fact aside from the OA and the UIF, there is an Auditor-general and a Sigen (Sindicatura General) comptroller whose offices are supposed to keep a beady eye on public accounts while when I first started working in Argentine journalism in 1983, the denunciations of corruption were tirelessly monopolised by the Fiscalia Nacional de Investigaciones Administrativas under the stridently ethical Ricardo Molina Jr (1918-2006) – this unit has been absorbed into the umbrella of the Attorney-general (Procurador General) since 1992 with its task of monitoring state spending taken over by the Auditor-general’s office created in that year alongside Sigen.
The Auditor-general’s office has at least heeded its founding principle of naming an opposition figure as head in order to avoid the government being poacher and gamekeeper – a Radical under Menem, the former Supreme Court justice Rodolfo Barra during the Alliance, 14 years of the Radical Leandro Despouy throughout Kirchnerism, none other than the controversial former AFIP tax bureau chief Ricardo Echegaray (facing numerous fraudulent administration charges at the time) under Mauricio Macri and now the Radical Jesús Rodríguez. Hailing from the ultrakirchnerite Justicia Legítima, Crous is a total negation of that principle but Macri was no better, placing the supine PRO deputy Laura Alonso in charge of the OA – when accused of a summary dismissal of conflict of interest charges against Macri’s Energy Minister Juan José Aranguren (Shell CEO during the previous 12 years), Alonso replied that she had not been arbitrary because she had read the file. Alonso was preceded at the OA (created in 1999) by Julio Vitobello, today the presidential chief-of-staff, who had previously run Sigen (2007-9).
Crous may have relinquished his role as plaintiff in favour of the UIF (born with this century under the Alliance government) but this had no better reputation while under José Sbatella (2010-15), who was rapped internationally by the Financial Action Task Force (GAFI in its Spanish acronym) for the laxity of Kirchnerite whitewashes and domestically for concealing sensitive information regarding the crony capitalist Lázaro Báez and the misallocated funds of the Shared Dreams housing scheme of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo mismanaged by Sergio Schoklender.
We could go on about the malfeasance, misfeasance and nonfeasance of state anticorruption agencies but whether it is a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth or a watched pot never boiling, the multiplicity of watchdogs seems to be in inverse proportion to their bite.