At the Root of Indignation

-5 am. Her alarm rings punctual to take her out of bed, no matter if outside is raining or the sun is shining. At that time it’s always dark.

Nevertheless, weather actually matters. On her way to work, Angela Araya, 58 might have to wait 45 minutes in open air to take the first bus that connects her neighbourhood in the suburbs with the city center. From there, another bus will take her to the wealthiest sector in Santiago, in the eastern end of the Chilean capital.

In a normal week - when she doesn’t have to be early in the waiting line for medical attention in the public hospital - her day starts by traveling for an hour or longer across the whole city, to clean up someone else's house, and take care of somebody else's children. She works as a housekeeper.

She started in this job when she was only 16 years old. Finishing secondary school was impossible at that time, since her parents needed her to afford the living costs of a three-children family, in the difficult seventies that shattered this southern country, when poverty affected the 40% of Latin American households.

Yet for her, that reality never changed. Now she works from 7am to 5pm, taking care of two children, preparing lunch and cleaning the house before the bosses arrive. She is earning approximately USD 530 per month, which is hardly enough to afford her living costs and those of her 17 years-old daughter. As a single mother, her salary is the only one.

When I asked her about corruption, she tried to find the right words to achieve a proper definition. “For me, corruption is something wrong, something that shouldn’t be done”, she said, sketching a question gesture seeking for confirmation. “I think corrupt people are those who are turbid, who don’t go with the truth ahead. People who have no principles, no education”.

Are always the badly educated people the corrupt ones? – I asked, trying to reach a better understanding of whom she was referring to. “No, don’t get me wrong. I mean no education as a lack of principles, something that your parents teach you at home”.

Her definitions of corruption are made within the framework of values and principles, not probity. Maybe that is why the last corruption case uncovered in Chile, involving high officers of the Chilean police, makes her so angry. “It offends me because they supposedly have education, they have money, but they are corrupt. What is expected of a poor person, then?”

I couldn’t respond that question. Instead I wonder, does that indignation comes from corruption scandals alone? Probably not, because even though scandals are a strong catalyst of people’s anger, what remains as a common root for all Latin American countries is a fierce inequality. As will be explained in the following analysis, when people’s feeling of unfairness for an unequal system clashes with cases of corruption, there is no possible outcome but intolerance towards corrupt behaviour, anger and, hopefully, collective action.

Inequality, the cause of unfairness

Angela’s story is far from being an exception in Latin America. Her two-people family lives with USD17.6 per day, which makes them part of the vulnerable groups, a socio-economic category where incomes per person stand between USD4 and USD10 per day.

According to the World Bank, in 2013 vulnerable people represented the largest socio-economic group in the region, with 38%. Middle-income groups were 35%, while the poor represented 24%. Looking at these numbers, the uneven distribution of wealth becomes visible. If we sum up these three social groups, they represent a 97% of all Latin American people, making evident that 3% enjoys way better living-conditions than the rest.

Talk about inequality is a rough endeavour. Numbers make this topic complex to translate into reality, even when all those figures are meant to be an actual representation of the daily life of ordinary people. When Alicia Bárcena, Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and The Caribbean (ECLAC) explains that ‘in 2014 the richest 10% of people in Latin America had amassed 71% of the region’s wealth’ , she is basically describing a huge gap in the living standards; the money-metric measure of a multidimensional problem.

What inequality concretely means is an uneven human development. Uneven access to job opportunities, education, health, housing and transportation. Even green areas are unevenly distributed, and low-income people are less likely to have the opportunity to enjoy nature, fresh air and drinkable water. Inequality also means uneven exercise of rights and autonomy; unequal participation in public affairs and uneven influence in political decisions. According to the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, inequality is a form of “structural violence”.

This violence is exhaustively described in “Kingdom of Elites”, the analysis made by Oxfam, an international confederation of NGOs working to end with poverty around the globe. Oxfam concluded that in spite of the advances achieved in the last decades, in Latin America ‘elites continue to accumulate extreme wealth and excessive power’. Thence, ‘while 164 million men and women in the region live in poverty, 113 Latin Americans are on the list of the world´s billionaires’. Alicia Bárcena, from ECLAC, said it as well. ‘A sizeable portion of the benefits of Latin America’s growth is being captured by a small number of very wealthy individuals, at the expense of the poor and the middle class’.

With a long-standing problem as such, within Latin American society the feeling of unfairness has been growing up. To see this in figures, in their 2016 annual report, a study carried out by Latinobarómetro throughout the region found out that a 73% of people believe that their governments rule for the benefit of a few. This makes possible to understand the low satisfaction with democracy (34% in 2016) and the general fall-down of trust towards institutions. Therefore, inequality is damaging legitimacy and democratic governance as a whole.

What now? Corruption scandals

In this stage, corruption is already part of the recipe. However, its magnitude remained unexpected until 2014, when Odebrecht opened a Pandora’s box.

The case has been described as the largest global corruption scandal in modern history; a web of bribes involving 12 countries and well-known political figures. Odebrecht, the Latin American largest construction firm -founded by a Brazilian businessman- paid USD 800 million

to individuals between 2001 and 2016, in exchange of public contracts to build highways, subways and power plants, among many others projects.

Although the size of the scandal was big, it was not the only one. Corruption seems to be everywhere, with loud-cases shivering local agendas, while revealing tax evasion, irregular finance of political campaigns and misappropriation of public funds. From Mexico, and the so-called White House of the President Enrique Peña Nieto, passing through Honduras, Panama and Guatemala, to Chile and Argentina in the extreme south. Apparently, as said by The World Economic Forum in 2015, corruption “is the biggest concern currently facing the region”.

Scandals uncovered their perpetrators as well, offering a parade of high-ranked detainees, including known figures from private and public sector. According to Alejandro Urizar, Regional Counsellor for the Americas at Transparency International, these cases finds themselves within the definition of ‘grand corruption’, which is, in fact, ‘in the hands of the elites’. They ‘use it to modify or influence electoral systems, through financing political campaigns, or disrupt the processes of public procurement’, he clarified.

The limit of tolerance

What happens when feelings of unfairness rooted in a long-standing inequality meets corruption scandals? Powerful people to the firing wall.

Manfredo Marroquín is starting to see a pattern in Latin Americans. The president of the Guatemalan organization Acción Ciudadana, which played a starring role in dismantling the network of corruption built by the government of President Otto Pérez Molina, has been feeling the people’s vibes towards corruption at least since 1996, when this NGO was founded. ‘During the nineties, civilian governments in Latin America were debuting, so there was high expectation’, he said, contextualizing and then introducing what he thinks is the greatest disappointment. ‘I think people are still assimilating the deformation of the political and economic system in their countries’.

According to this Guatemalan social leader, Latin American elites are increasingly the main target of people scrutiny. “Now, there is a pessimistic view that everything related to politics and business is corrupt”.

His words find correlation with the confidences-analysis made by Latinobarómetro, which assessed figures of trust towards institutions and persons between 1995 and 2015. They concluded ‘Latin America is the most distrustful region in the world. In the indicator of interpersonal trust, only 17% of Latin Americans say others can be trusted. This figure has remained stable over the last twenty years’. Even though this analysis has not been updated after the grand corruption scandals recently uncovered, the stability of distrust within the region is talking about a deeper problem, Latinobarómetro says. ‘This phenomenon (high levels of mistrust) is accentuated by the permanent presence of economic and political inequality, which makes citizens perceive themselves being discriminated’.

Then, is it right to conclude that this anticorruption sentiment comes from inequality? Inter-American Dialogue, a US-based organization for policy analysis, addressed this question in the report “Beyond the scandals: the changing context of corruption in Latin America”, released in February 2017. This study recognizes longstanding inequality as the ‘original sin’ in the region, which combined with others factors, can explain the phenomena of recent anticorruption activism.

Nevertheless, Ben Raderstorf, Coordinator of Research on Corruption in this organization, says they ‘don’t really have evidence’ to prove Latin Americans are actually linking corruption cases with the elite’s behaviour, as Manfredo Marroquín observed in Central America. More likely,

they do know people ‘are angry about the perceived unfair treatment by their governments’.

But societies move faster than figures. What the Guatemalan leader has perceived may be pointing out the need for a new indicator to understand the degree of awareness and indignation of people regarding their political and social system, going beyond the treatment of

governments alone. Alejandro Urizar agrees, saying that an indicator as such ‘is necessary to know for sure what is the perception of people regarding their elites’.

Encouraging unfairness, a call for collective action

After the recently uncovered corruption scandals, mistrust and feelings of unfairness are rising among people, since now –more than ever- is becoming evident that Latin American elites are not only being privileged by the system, but are also taking undue advantages of its weaknesses to earn even more. The increasing awareness of this situation is what Manfredo Marroquín identifies as the catalyst for collective action.

‘Now, Dominicans wants their government to set up a commission similar to the Guatemalan (independent prosecutors), to investigate all politicians and business people’, he said, recalling the citizen movement against corruption, with crowded demonstrations this year in Dominican Republic. ‘This is a reliable evidence to prove people has no longer the levels of tolerance they used to have’, says Alejandro Urizar.

But not only Dominicans are starting to take action. Similar initiatives have arisen in Peru, Honduras, Mexico and El Salvador, with anticorruption brigades, mass protests, online platforms to make citizen complaints, NGOs promoting transparent candidates, among many others. Latin America is currently the stage for an active civil society, which is mobilizing every

resource it has, whether in the streets, organizations or social media. "I think one of the main motives for people to take action on the matter is corruption", says

Richard Sandoval. This young journalist is one of the founders of Noesnalaferia, an independent

media outlet in Chile that publishes journalistic pieces encouraging people’s feeling of

unfairness.

‘We work with resentment as an emotion that must be channelled, to channel other people’s emotions as well. This way, a person could say ‘I think the retirement system is bad’, and with our texts that person would have well-based facts and accurate information to validate his or

her feeling’, says Richard Sandoval. Now, Noesnalaferia’s articles are been used in universities, primary schools and even civic education courses, to promote collective actions and the lively involvement of citizens in public matters.

‘This is definitely a good start’, says Alejandro Urizar, soothing the analysis while remembering that all these anticorruption initiatives are still limited to urban areas and from a specific portion of the population. Because ‘the other face of grand corruption is petty corruption, which occurs at the local level. This type of corruption is well-known and tolerated by most citizens’.

According to Latinobarómetro, what Alejandro Urizar just mentioned is where ‘Latin America shows its darkest side’, because ‘a significant portion of the population is willing to go above values to solve problems’. Again, inequality is generating a moral framework where ‘everything can be transacted’, Latinobarómetro says, adding that what is also needed in the region is a change in ‘culture, values and leadership’.

So, before seeing an anticorruption movement spread throughout Latin America, inequality must be fought with the same strength. Otherwise, those feelings of unfairness would never be able to overcome lethargy and hopelessness. The same sentiment showed by Angela at the end of her interview, when she insinuated that in spite of any demonstration, nothing will change

in the future: ‘yes, I think is necessary to go out and protest. Of course. But at the end, whatever

happens, I have to work tomorrow anyways’.