Outsiders Can't Clean Up Latin America's Corruption

Just a couple of years ago, Latin America’s fight against political corruption began to break new ground. And perhaps nowhere has the renovation been more dramatic -- and successful -- than in Guatemala, where popular outrage, fearless auditors and most notably a team of crack foreign anti-graft investigators with a sweeping brief have pursued criminals in the highest offices. And yet as Guatemalans have learned, in a region where governing institutions have been clay in the hands of powerful elites, keeping up the good fight is much more difficult -- even when a key part of your justice system is farmed out to ringers.

Driving Guatemala’s anti-graft campaign is the United Nations-sponsored International Commission Against Impunity, or CICIG in its Spanish acronym, which was set up in 2007 to bolster wobbly national institutions and ensure that human rights violators were brought to justice for acts during the country’s 36-year civil war. The body’s task has since broadened to tackle another scourge -- impunity in cases of political graft and procurement fraud. This wasn’t mission drift: Many of the same elites charged with human rights crimes had segued into skimming from the public trough when the shooting stopped.