Lava Jato beyond Borders The Uneven Performance of Anticorruption Judicial Efforts in Latin America

Ezequiel Gonzalez-Ocantos ； Viviana Baraybar Hidalgo

《Taiwan Journal of Democracy》 15卷1期 (2019/07) Pp. 63-89

摘要

This essay uses an original database to trace the regionalization of the Lava Jato case, following revelations by judicial authorities in the United States in December 2016. It also investigates variation in the progress of national investigative efforts. Corruption investigations inevitably target powerful political and business elites. As a result, the permissiveness of the political environment is crucial to explaining why some chapters of Lava Jato have been able to make more progress than others. This essay acknowledges the relevance of such constraints, but also draws attention to the importance of judicial agency. We argue that the quality of anticorruption investigations is not entirely endogenous to the presence of a favorable political environment; certain choices and prosecutorial strategies can effectively expand narrow limits of political possibility, and help build momentum when there is none. More importantly, even when conditions allow for more independent prosecutorial efforts, judicial actors still need to be willing and able to overcome the many technical obstacles that characterize this type of inquiry. Securing high-quality evidence in information-poor environments, building relations with myriad national and international players, and leveraging media cover are all crucial to guaranteeing progress. We analyze the role of judicial agency in the cases of Ecuador and Peru, where investigators managed to secure a number of crucial victories, and in Mexico, where the investigation failed to deliver results. The essay thus contributes to the scholarly literature on the judicialization of grand corruption.

關鍵字

Corruption ； judicial politics ； Latin America ； Lava Jato ； Odebrecht

參考文獻

Matthew Taylor, “Getting to Accountability: A Framework for Planning & Implementing Anticorruption Strategies,” Daedalus 147, no. 3 (2018): 63-82.

Linda Pressly, “The Largest Foreign Bribery Case in History,” BBC (April 20, 2018), https://www.bbc.com/news/business-43825294 (accessed April 19, 2019).

James Mahoney and Gary Goertz, “The Possibility Principle: Choosing Negative Cases in Comparative Research,”American Political Science Review 98, no. 4 (2004): 653-669.

Donatella Della Porta and Alberto Vannucci, “Corruption and Anti-Corruption: The Political Defeat of ‘Clean Hands’ in Italy,” West European Politics 30, no. 4 (2007): 830-853

Anne Van Aaken, Lars Feld, and Stefan Voigt, “Do Independent Prosecutors Deter Political Corruption? An Empirical Evaluation across Seventy-eight Countries,” American Law and Economics Review 12, no. 1 (2010): 204-244