Santiago, Chile
Across Latin America there are a slew of cases in which governments are engaging in more or less transparent misconduct, ranging from simple corruption to repression to murder, and offering patently implausible excuses. The litany includes Venezuela, where the most popular antigovernment mayor has languished in prison for the past year while sham judges maunder. Then there is Ecuador, where President Rafael Correa has taken to tearing up newspapers in public and prosecuting them when they are critical of the government. Add to the list Argentina, where a prosecutor was murdered the night before he was going to exposit his case that President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was being bought—by Iran! Finally there is the comparatively benign case of Chilean president Michelle Bachelet’s son taking advantage of his mother’s position to extract a massive low interest loan from a prominent bank, a misdeed about which President Bachelet has remained aloof.
In each case, the government claims, implausibly, that nothing wrong has taken place. Why do governments caught in flagrante across the gamut from opportunistic influence peddling to murder make such lame excuses?
A guide to what’s going on can be discerned in the 2006 “murder by state” of Alexander Litvinenko, a critic of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. Litvinenko was poisoned by a minion of the Russian government using a radioactive isotope of polonium found in nuclear reactors. The Russian government might as well have advertised its involvement with a full-page ad in a major newspaper. No private individual, indeed no nongovernmental crime syndicate, can lay its hands on the exotic poison used to murder Litvinenko—yet the Russian Federation denied any role, and to this day feigns indignation that anyone would be so unkind as to suspect its involvement.
Given their long experience with such matters during the Cold War years, it beggars belief that the Russian secret police could not have found a more surreptitious means of committing murder. Why act in such an obvious fashion? Precisely because everyone will know from the use of polonium that Litvinenko was murdered by the Russian government to silence him, and so others will be intimidated. And because it is convenient for its diplomats to be able to show up at international events, because of the comity of conducting business with a pretense of being civilized, and to allow the British government an excuse to humiliate itself by not taking stern reprisals, the Russian government goes through the motions of denial.
In the epitome of what we might call implausible deniability, Putin sent his message: The world knows Litvinenko was killed for speaking out against me. The flimsy fig leaf of implausible deniability is there only to provide the rest of the world with an excuse not to act.
Perhaps out of nostalgia for the Cold War, the Latin American left seems once again to be following Moscow’s lead. Consider the case in Venezuela of Leopoldo Lopez. This principled public figure was elected mayor of the municipality of Chacao. Last year he called for peaceful protests against the rule of despot Nicolás Maduro; he has been in military prison ever since. False corruption accusations against Lopez brought by the government of Hugo Chávez spluttered to failure in the courts. Since then the government has gained firmer control over the judiciary. President Maduro’s new strategy is to deny Lopez’s lawyers access to tribunals, and to keep the brave leader in jail without bothering to convict him of anything.
As if to mark the first anniversary of the detention of Lopez, 80 of Maduro’s hooded henchmen descended on the offices of metropolitan Caracas mayor Antonio Ledezma and brutally abducted him. Ledezma is now in the same infamous prison as Lopez. Maduro has also recently jailed several pharmacy executives who had the imprudence to continue trying to serve the Venezuelan public. The pretense? There were queues of customers at the pharmacies. No one mistakes Maduro’s actions for law enforcement, but we are not supposed to be fooled. The real message is that with the new, low price of petroleum, the government of Venezuela will be replacing its earlier policy of badly administered subsidies that appealed to the greed and envy of a segment of the public, with a system of control based on fear—criticize the government, and you can join Lopez and Ledezma in prison.
Not to be outdone by his Venezuelan OPEC partner, President Correa of Ecuador has loosed his country’s police and judiciary—both sedulously follow orders from the president’s palace—against the gifted political cartoonist Xavier Bonilla, and the independent newspaper, El Universo, that has the audacity to publish his work. The attack is predicated on the paper-thin pretext that a cartoon critical of government legislator Agustín Delgado, who became flummoxed during his own speech in the Ecuadorian congress, was motivated by racism (the assembly member and quondam soccer player is of African heritage). The government has sentenced El Universo to apologize. It is also likely to levy a huge fine. Of course, nobody believes Bonilla is a racist, but we’re not supposed to—the message is that government critics will pay, and pay dearly.
In Argentina, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, a critic of the “dirty war” waged by her country’s former military government, now finds herself accused of negotiating amnesty for the Iranians who in 1994 bombed a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people. The accusation was delayed when, the night before he was to testify on the matter before a congressional committee, the tenacious prosecutor, who was being “protected” by the Argentine secret service, was fatally shot in the head. The government’s string of absurd denials of responsibility, punctuated by witness intimidation tactics one might expect of a crime syndicate, fool no one. But they’re not intended to deceive. The message is that prosecutors who pursue a trail of evidence that leads to the government will die.
In contrast with its sister republics of Venezuela, Ecuador, and Argentina, Chile remains a free country, and the level of scandal is two orders of magnitude less severe. Yet the same outlines emerged in the recent exposure of unseemly behavior on the part of President Bachelet’s son, Sebastian Dávalos, who exploited his connections with the president to extract a substantial concessionary loan from a major Chilean bank to his wife’s business, Caval Limited. Tagged “Nueragate” in the press (which translates as “daughter-in-law-gate”), the scandal was sufficiently severe to cause Dávalos to resign from his sinecure as presidential socio-cultural director. President Bachelet maintained silence for weeks and then laconically declared that she knows only what she’s read in the press about her son’s abuse of influence. And the government’s only official comment on the case has been that Dávalos acted legally. The remainder of Bachelet’s coalition, who never resist the chance to noisily denounce scandal when it taints the opposition, have, with a few noble exceptions, devoted more time to misrepresenting concerns in the press as mere caviling about Caval than they have to denouncing Dávalos’s abuse of influence.
The message is clear: Businesses should expect to provide concessionary loans and other favors to family members of high ranking government officials—especially if that high-ranking relative is Her Excellency the President of the Republic. The forecast for the future? Expect more implausible denials.
John Londregan, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, is the Ernesto Silva Bafalluy visiting scholar at the Universidad de Desarollo.
