Peru’s fight against corruption: ‘Encouraging’ or ‘horrible’?

For Gino Costa, a past member of Peru’s Congress and a former United Nations’ human rights official, Peru’s recent history of corruption has been “terrible and horrible.”

But it has also been encouraging.

“We’ve had all this corruption that has been so pervasive,” Mr. Costa says. “But then there’s the encouraging part. ... We have had chief prosecutors do their work, pursuing cases all the way to the top; we have prosecuting teams that go on investigating when powerful politicians try to stop them.” And of critical importance, he says, the Peruvian public supports those fighting to root out corruption.

Both the “terrible” and “encouraging” of Peru’s history of corruption are getting fresh attention in the wake of the December arrest and detention of former President Pedro Castillo, who tried to carry out a “self-coup” and dissolve Congress. Mr. Castillo is now one of seven recent presidents who have either been imprisoned or investigated for graft.

Peru’s ability to pursue corruption cases and take down high officials has roots in everything from history and culture to the existence of an investigative press and the unintended use of past judicial reforms.

Now, many in and outside Peru are asking if its continuing ability to prosecute corruption cases, even when they implicate powers at the very top, has staying power.

“What Peru is attempting – the prosecution of several ex-presidents at once for corruption – no other Latin American country has achieved before,” says Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York.

And while he notes Peru’s judicial system “really has the legal teeth” to successfully pursue those cases, the question is whether prosecutors can “score a first big win” quickly enough to “renew the public’s faith” in the rule of law.

A regional challenge

Many regional experts say Latin America is prone to above-average corruption, but they don’t think the number of high-profile corruption cases in Peru sets it significantly apart from its neighbors in terms of corruption levels. Indeed, several of the biggest corruption scandals of recent years, from Operation Car Wash to Odebrecht to the Panama Papers, reached across borders, implicating officials – including presidents – in numerous countries.

Revelations from the “Lava Jato” or Car Wash case, which originated in Brazil in 2014, ended up staining officials in more than a half-dozen countries, including Peru.

“Since the wind down of the Lava Jato investigations in Brazil, Peru [became] one among a tiny handful of countries in Latin America where top officeholders who embezzle and bribe still face a serious possibility of investigation,” says Mr. Freeman.

The chief prosecutor’s office gets some credit for successfully using strong laws, intended for attacking terrorism and organized crime, to pursue high-profile corruption cases.

“Peru has been modernizing and toughening criminal law to better fight organized crime,” Mr. Freeman says. “Prosecutors figured out that these same laws ... were useful for investigating politicians.”

But from the perspective of José Ugaz, a criminal lawyer who served as state’s attorney in the investigation into former President Alberto Fujimori, this ingenuity also underscores Peru’s corruption Achilles’ heel: While smart and courageous prosecutors and judges have been in the right place at the right time, the country’s institutions are not necessarily strong.

“Peru’s successes really have to do with strong individual actors much more than they are an expression of strong and healthy institutions,” Mr. Ugaz says.

In Peru during the Car Wash scandal, “you saw a number of young prosecutors and young judges who were determined to pursue the case – and were backed up by a good attorney general,” he says. “But it was not a sign of systemic strength. It was individual determination that could be squelched by a bad attorney general.”

“We don’t trust each other”

Yet in another, ironic way, weak institutions may have played a direct role in past corruption investigation successes, others say. Ineffective political parties, a constitutionally weak presidency, and a deeply divided Congress, have together paved the way for prosecutorial successes, Mr. Costa says.

“Why was Peru able to put an ex-president in jail for 15 years when many other countries couldn’t?” he asks, referring to Mr. Fujimori. “It’s really because of our weak political class and our weak political institutions,” he says, noting that in a number of neighboring countries, stronger political institutions have been more successful at controlling a nominally independent judiciary.

For example, in places like Colombia and Argentina, Mr. Costa says political leadership – including the executive branch, Congress, and political parties – is stronger and has maintained more control of the country’s institutions. “The downside of that,” he says, “is that they also have tighter control of the judicial institutions like the prosecutors.”

Trust – or a lack thereof – also plays into the hands of Peru’s prosecutors, Mr. Costa says.

“A trait of Peruvians is that we don’t trust each other, especially among the elites, and that, in a way, is a positive for the independence and functioning of the prosecutor’s office,” he says. Divided business and political elites are more likely to enjoy the prospect of seeing rivals prosecuted, he says, than to circle the wagons in common defense.

To underscore that point, Mr. Freeman of CFR points to Guatemala, where in recent years investigators pursued multiple high-profile corruption cases against important politicians.

“At one point the progress in Guatemala was even more surprising than what’s going on in Peru,” says Mr. Freeman, whose work focuses on corruption and the rule of law. But then, he says, unity among Guatemalan elites kicked in.

“They weren’t as distrustful of each other [as in Peru], and as soon as the [attorney general] started implicating the sons of the president, they banded together and said, ‘This has to stop,’” he says.

“And with that, the days of the independent judiciary were basically over.”

Are investigations enough?

Still, despite Peru’s successes, some corruption watchdogs and experts express growing concerns that slow-moving investigations and the evident failure of past corruption convictions to change political leaders’ behavior are causing the public to lose faith in the ability of institutions to stop corruption.

“The long line of accused and disgraced public officials, right up to presidents, has demonstrated that there are no ‘intocables’ [untouchables], and that has encouraged people,” says Mr. Freeman. “But then elected officials continue to rob – and the result is that faith in the impact [of corruption investigations] has worn thin,” he says.

But as frustrations among the populace grow, Gustavo Gorriti, head of the investigative news website IDL-Reporteros in Lima, says Peruvians are increasingly relying on independent, investigative media outlets to keep them informed. In some cases it’s inspiring public action.

“I don’t think anyone can say whether Peru will go forward or backward on corruption at this point,” says Mr. Gorriti, whose website has been a key source of information on a range of public officials in recent years.

“We published things proving the corruption of the current attorney general, and nothing happened,” Mr. Gorriti says, referring to a February report that revealed that the attorney general shuttered a drug-trafficking investigation into her sister, who is a judge.

But then recently when the website ran a video documenting the killings of protesters by police forces, the supportive public response was overwhelming. The video has been cited widely by political leaders and street protesters alike.

“It’s still a wait-and-see moment,” he says, but “the forces of democracy that I thought were comatose are waking up.”