Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Peru: President PPK resigns

Peru’s President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski has quit over a vote-buying scandal.

He has denied wrongdoing but said on Wednesday that he did not want to be an obstacle to the country’s development.

Party leaders in Congress later agreed to accept President Kuczynski’s resignation. He had been facing an impeachment vote on Thursday.

Pressure has been growing after footage emerged of his allies offering opposition politicians financial rewards if they backed him in the vote.

Is he gone for good now?
Congress still has to vote on whether to accept President Kuczynski’s resignation. Lawmakers will meet on Thursday to discuss the issue and are expected to put it to a vote later on Thursday or Friday.
. . .
Mr Kuczynski has already been through one impeachment vote. In December, his opponents wanted to remove him for allegedly receiving illegal payments from the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht.

You can tell PPK’s resignation is bad news when you realize the Venezuelan communists celebrated with fireworks.

I don’t know what comes next. All I know is that LatAm news is an endless “shampoo rinse repeat” cycle of news in countries where people never learn.

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Yet another oil industry corruption scandal

This time in Nigeria,

Inside the Bribery Scandal Sweeping Through the Oil Industry. Shell and Eni paid $1.3 billion for oil rights in Nigeria. Whether the money was mostly a bribe is at the heart of one of the industry’s most dramatic criminal cases.

As you may recall, Petrobras to pay $2.95 billion to settle U.S. corruption lawsuit earlier this year.

The Pemex-Odebrecht cases are still in the headlines.

And who could forget the UN’s oil-for-food?

It’s enough to make one suspect that government-owned and UN-connected agencies are ripe for the picking.

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Colombia: Odebrecht and elections

Luke Taylor reports on how The Odebrecht Corruption Scandal Is Already Shaking Up Colombia’s Presidential Vote

In August, Colombia’s Supreme Court called on President Juan Manuel Santos and several former ministers to testify about Odebrecht bribes to the Colombian government that the attorney general’s office says exceed $27 million. Investigations have already revealed that both of Santos’ election campaigns, in 2010 and 2014, received money from Odebrecht.

In December, the Democratic Center party led by Santos’ predecessor and key opposition figure, Alvaro Uribe, was also implicated when a former vice minister of transportation, Gabriel Garcia Morales, was sentenced to prison for taking $6.5 million in bribes in exchange for awarding Odebrecht a road construction contract in 2010 worth more than $1 billion. Morales has promised to testify against other Colombian officials, according to the attorney general’s office.

These scandals have discredited some of Colombia’s biggest political figures, including both the Santos and Uribe administrations, and could have significant effects on the upcoming presidential election, which will take place in two rounds in March and May.

As a result,

The fallout from Odebrecht has created the space for an unlikely leftist coalition. The image of many mainstream politicians has reached an all-time low, and polls show that corruption is currently the single biggest political issue for Colombian voters.

Taylor examines the coalition in the article.

How the elections turn out remains to be seen, but without a doubt, Odebrecht’s bribery machinery, a.k.a. the smoothly-run Division of Structured Operations, with its own hierarchy, its own accountants, and its own off-the-books communications system, called Drousys, kept a finger on the pulse of Latin American corruption.

In other election news,
FARC’s Political Party to Deploy Network of Militias throughout Colombia.

Timochenko said that the guidelines for FARC policies will be made through the creation of Tactical Units of the People throughout the country that will be responsible for spreading their propaganda in which he will collect men and women from amongst the common people.

What could possibly go wrong?

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Brazil: Rio police kill Spanish tourist

A Spanish woman visiting Rio was shot and killed by Rio police. Maria Esperanza Jimenez Ruiz, 67, was visiting a crafts fair at the Rocinha favela with her brother and his wife.

According to reports,

Police said officers opened fire on a vehicle in Rocinha, one of the city’s largest so-called favelas, or slums, hitting a passenger in the neck. The victim, whom police identified as 67-year-old María Esperanza Jiménez Ruiz of Spain, was taken to a nearby hospital but couldn’t be revived. After the shooting, police determined that the vehicle was providing an organized tour of the community.

Two police officers are now under arrest.

Police and other public employees are not getting paid because debt service over last year’s Olympics,

The surge in police violence has come amid severe budget problems in Rio following the Olympics last year. Police officers, like other civil servants, aren’t receiving their salaries on time, let alone sufficient funding for equipment ranging from office supplies to patrol cars. A touted initiative to introduce community policing to troubled neighborhoods like Rocinha has fallen into disarray.

Rio state police have killed over 700 people in the first eight months of 2017.

In other news, Odebrecht subsidiary Braskem deposited US$1,5million in a bank account belonging to Emilio Lozoya, advisor to Mexico’s president Enrique Peña Nieto and former Pemex director.

The 2012 transaction was discovered as part of the ongoing Odebrecht corruption investigation.

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The beginner’s guide to Brazil corruption

The BBC has Brazil corruption scandals: All you need to know. It’s clearly not all you need to know, since not only are entire books being written on the subject, the Beeb forgot to mention that the Federal Police shut down the Lava Jato task force, for instance, and Odebrecht is almost a second thought.

But the article is OK as a beginner’s guide to Brazil corruption, the way comic books used to be an introduction to classic novels like, say, War and Peace.

I’ve been posting on Odebrecht and Lava Jato for years, but the extent of the corruption is such that by now it is safe to say that Brazil’s corruption is second to none.

If you can read Portuguese and have hours to spare, browse through O Globo’s Lava Jato section. It is an object lesson on the corruption big government brings about.

Cross-posted at WoW! Magazine.

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Ecuador: Odebrecht stoolie turns in tapes of meetings with officials

José Santos, Odebrecht’s top officer in Ecuador, has turned in to investigators videos of his meetings with government officials, according to Veja.

In exchange, he received the shortest sentence of all seventy-seven of the company’s informants.

Seventy-seven singing: Big enough for a symphonic chorus.

Santos’s tapes must be music to the ears of the investigators of the bribes-for-government contracts case(s) against Odebrecht.

Karina Martín reports,

So far, investigations into the Odebrecht case in Ecuador have led to the imprisonment of eight people, among them an uncle of re-elected Vice President Jorge Glas and the former Minister of Electricity Alecksey Mosquera.

General Comptroller Carlos Polit, who is currently outside the country, has been involved, but due to his position, he reportedly enjoys judicial privilege.

Ecuador’s lead prosecutor Carlos Baca alleges that “60 percent of the corruption plot arrived and went through Panamanian ports.”

Cross-posted at WoW! Magazine.

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Brazil: The heaters in the heaters

From Miami to Rio, via air,

Brazil seizes 60 assault rifles hidden in pool heaters

Police in Brazil have seized 60 assault rifles that had been smuggled from the US city of Miami in a shipment of swimming pool heaters.

The weapons, which included 45 AK-47 guns, were found at the cargo terminal at Rio de Janeiro’s Galeao International Airport.

Four people have been arrested, police said.
. . .
It is believed the guns could have been sold in Brazil for up to $1.5m (£1.1m) in total. Detectives are investigating an exporter in Miami, Globo newspaper reported without identifying them.

In other headlines:
J&F Investimentos, the holding company behind meatpacking giant JBS SA, agreed to pay roughly $3.2 billion in fines

The penalty outpaces the one levied against construction conglomerate Odebrecht last year as part of the same investigation.

The Associated Press reports J&F plans to pay the fine over a span of 25 years.

Yet this penalty is just one part of the plea deal; another component played out in a very public way earlier this month, when J&F co-owner Joesley Batista turned over a secret recording to prosecutors. That recording — which appears to show Temer condoning the payment of hush money to an imprisoned politician — leaked to media earlier this month, prompting protests in the streets and questions of whether Temer’s tenure could survive the scandal.

Temer insists he will remain in office.

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Brazil: Lula trial reveals ties with Chavez

As you may recall, Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is on trial.

All sorts of things are coming out. For instance, Lula personally recruited

Mônica Moura and her husband João Santana, a couple whose marketing strategies helped keep Brazil’s leftist Workers’ Party in power for 13 years

for help in Venezuelan Hugo Chávez’s 2012 campaign. Current dictator Nicolás Maduro (emphasis added)

Mr. Maduro, then Venezuela’s foreign minister, personally handed Ms. Moura $11 million in cash in his Caracas office, she said in the testimony given in court to Brazilian prosecutors in exchange for a reduced sentence on corruption charges. Brazil’s two largest construction companies, Odebrecht SA and Andrade Gutierrez, which are under investigation in Brazil for allegedly paying bribes to Mr. da Silva, wired her an additional $9 million to an offshore account, Ms. Moura said.

As the article correctly points out,

Under Mr. Chávez, Odebrecht became the biggest contractor in Venezuela, receiving roughly $11 billion over 14 years for projects ranging from irrigation channels to airports.
. . .
Odebrecht admitted to paying $98 million in bribes in Venezuela.

Now

The heads of Odebrecht and Andrade Gutierrez, as well as Mr. Santana and Ms. Moura, are all in jail or confined to their homes after being convicted on corruption charges related to Car Wash.

And they’re willing to talk.

Will this have any effect on Venezuela’s deteriorating condition? I doubt it; but it will have repercussions in Brazil.

Stay tuned.

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