Fighting Chavez' corruption...

<a href=Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Monday, March 31, 2003 By: Gustavo Coronel

VHeadline.com commentarist Gustavo Coronel writes: When Hugo Chavez won the Presidential elections in 1998, I had been fighting government corruption for some years, under the governments of Perez, Lusinchi, Herrera and Caldera. Although I did not vote for Chavez, I welcomed his promise to fight corruption. He won but ... four years later ... not only he has not fulfilled his promises but, worse, he has allowed government corruption to attain even higher levels than those of the preceding governments.

There is no doubt that the fight against corruption has to originate within government itself.

As president of a NGO engaged in fighting corruption in Venezuela since 1990, I had established excellent contacts with Transparency International, a worldwide organization which fights corruption. In fact, I became its representative in Venezuela.

I had the moral and the financial support of a US-based civic group. I had developed good chemistry with the government office leading the anti-corruption efforts.

All this ended with the arrival of Chavez.

The Moral Power, organism in charge of fighting corruption according to the new Constitution, became staffed with Presidential friends, and has never moved a finger to attack government corruption.  Without the government will to engage in the fight, our own efforts soon came to a halt.  I wrote Transparency International saying that if the government did not try, our efforts would be futile.

The results of these four years of government without accountability, without checks and balances, without a strong civil society auditing capacity, have been tragic. Venezuela is today the fourth more corrupt country in Latin America, only perceived as more "honest" than Ecuador, Haiti and Paraguay.

In spite of its civil war, Colombia has made significant progress in the fight against corruption, due to the existence of a government will.

Corruption in Venezuela generally has three main causes: Motive, Opportunity and Impunity.

Motive is claimed by thousands of public employees who feel underpaid and distrusted by the community. Many of them feel that they might as well get what they can while they can. Their Code of Ethics has only one word: Greed.

Opportunity is everywhere present in our government. When you combine ineptness with lack of controls and administrative procedures, chaotic management and indifferent bureaucrats, opportunities for corruption are present in every government office. The President has made this tendency worse as he tries to take all decisions and control all agencies, from the financial to the industrial. As a result nobody is moving things along and the backlog of pending tasks is piling up. This is the ideal "soup" for the microbes of corruption.

Impunity and is the most damaging. No one is punished, no one is indicted, everybody is doing "a great job." Some $10 billion have been wasted or stolen during these four years but no one is made accountable. If you ask how can an elephant go unnoticed in Main Street, the answer is simple: As part of a large group of elephants! Scandals are already so numerous in the times of Chavez that one more is bound to go unnoticed.

Fortunately, Transparency International is coming back to Venezuela, now allied with a new civic group called "Mirador Democratico." They know all about the Venezuelan situation and this will put them in a collision course with the government.

In their first meeting, held in Caracas last Thursday (March 27), they accepted that the fight against corruption has to go on ... in spite of the indifference of the government ... in spite of the government being part of the problem and not part of the solution. The speakers already noted that corruption in time of Chavez has been enormous.

• I, personally, contributed a list of the ten major scandals under this government ... what could be called the Hit Parade of Venezuelan Corruption ... at least two of these scandals directly involve the President.

An organized reaction against corruption during this administration ... and we use this term with considerable poetic license ... has started in earnest. National and international organizations are, again, together in this fight.

We welcome these renewed efforts!

Gustavo Coronel is the founder and president of Agrupacion Pro Calidad de Vida (The Pro-Quality of Life Alliance), a Caracas-based organization devoted to fighting corruption and the promotion of civic education in Latin America, primarily Venezuela. A member of the first board of directors (1975-1979) of Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), following nationalization of Venezuela's oil industry, Coronel has worked in the oil industry for 28 years in the United States, Holland, Indonesia, Algiers and in Venezuela. He is a Distinguished alumnus of the University of Tulsa (USA) where he was a Trustee from 1987 to 1999. Coronel led the Hydrocarbons Division of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) in Washington DC for 5 years. The author of three books and many articles on Venezuela ("Curbing Corruption in Venezuela." Journal of Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 3, July, 1996, pp. 157-163), he is a fellow of Harvard University and a member of the Harvard faculty from 1981 to 1983.  In 1998, he was presidential election campaign manager for Henrique Salas Romer and now lives in retirement on the Caribbean island of Margarita where he runs a leading Hotel-Resort.  You may contact Gustavo Coronel at email ppcvicep@telcel.net.ve