Why do so many Latin American leaders have legal troubles?

Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro – who was this week convicted of plotting to overturn his country’s 2022 election and sentenced to more than 27 years in jail – is far from being the first Latin American leader to run into legal trouble.

In Peru, no fewer than four former presidents are currently serving time in Lima’s Barbadillo prison, while in Colombia just last month Álvaro Uribe, president from 2002 to 2010, was sentenced to 12 years of house arrest after being found guilty of procedural fraud and witness tampering (a verdict he is currently appealing).

Indeed, look closely at the rest of the region and it’s clear that legal trouble for former leaders is not the exception but the rule. In every Latin American country – bar one – at least one former president (and often more) is under judicial scrutiny.

In Ecuador, almost every leader since 1996 – a total of eight – has been investigated by law enforcement agencies (Alfredo Palacio, 2005-2007 is the only exception). Three of them have been found guilty of criminal offenses, including Rafael Correa, who served as president from 2007-2017 and was sentenced for a bribery case. He is currently living in political asylum in Belgium. That ties with Peru where, since the turn of the millennium, no fewer than seven presidents have been brought to trial or faced legal challenges relating to allegations of corruption or human rights abuses (while an eighth shot himself dead when police were closing in). Francisco Sagasti and Valentín Paniagua are the exceptions.

Following close behind are El Salvador, Mexico and Guatemala and Argentina, each of which has five former presidents either facing or having faced criminal probes. In Argentina, two have been convicted, including Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who was found guilty of fraudulent administration in 2022 and is currently under house arrest and banned from running for election; while in Guatemala, three have been convicted.

Costa Rica, Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia are next up, each with four former leaders who have faced investigation – with at least two convictions in each country. Rounding out the regional scorecard are Panama and Honduras, with three investigations and at least one conviction each; and Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Colombia, Venezuela and Chile – all with at least one investigation.

There is just one exception to the rule.

The exception to the rule

In Uruguay, not one single president from the country’s democratic period has been charged or convicted by the justice system, nor has any open investigation against them.

Not only that, but the small country on the Río de la Plata regularly tops democratic quality surveys – such as The Economist’s Democracy Index, which in 2024 ranked it 15th in the world and described it as the only “full democracy” in the region, followed by Chile at 29th. The index takes into account such factors as electoral processes, government functioning, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties.

Ángel Arellano, professor at the Catholic University of Uruguay and PhD in political science, says Uruguay’s unique position is partly explained by what he terms a “political culture of respect for public resources.”

“(In Uruguay) it’s normal for high officials to use their own cars and live in their usual homes. They don’t have great perks, especially compared to the rest of Latin America, and they have high salaries, yes, but a certain austerity in their practices,” Arellano said.

“For example, it’s common for a minister to walk down the avenue to go from one office to another, or to drive their own car, or for a parliamentarian to drive to parliament. No chauffeurs, secretaries, helicopters – things that do happen next door in Argentina. That infrastructure doesn’t exist in Uruguay, partly due to the country’s scale, its economy, and, again, its political culture.”

On the other end of the spectrum, Peru is widely seen as having extremely weak institutions and is ranked 78th in The Economist’s democracy index.

Is the system to blame?

So, Uruguay aside, why do Latin American leaders seem so prone to legal trouble?

Experts commonly point to two related issues: widespread corruption among officials – characterized by bribery and embezzlement of public funds – and a lack of trust in institutions among the public.

According to the latest 2024 Transparency International report, the Americas average 42 out of 100 points on a scale where 100 is very transparent and zero is very corrupt. This puts the region 22 points below the European Union and only three points above the Middle East and North Africa.

Arellano links corruption to another phenomenon: presidential systems that concentrate power in the hands of a single individual.

“If you look at the map, there’s hardly a country that hasn’t been touched by a corruption scandal, and many of those cases resulted in the prosecution of the country’s top political leader,” he said.

“That’s because Latin America has inherited a very strong presidentialist culture, where the president plays a central role in the state, unlike European democracies where the president is constrained by parliament. That concentration of power in the president also explains part of the phenomenon.”

Is corruption getting worse or are investigations getting better?

Corruption is not the only charge former leaders stand accused of. Bolivia’s ex-President Evo Morales, for example, was charged last year with human trafficking after allegedly having a relationship with a minor – allegations he insists are politically motivated.

However, corruption does account for a large – and seemingly growing – number of cases.

Manuel Balán, an academic and specialist in judicial processes and politics in Latin America, found in a 2018 paper that there had been a “growing trend toward the prosecution of former heads of the executive in Latin America since the democratization of the 1980s.”

That raises the question: is corruption really on the rise? Or, as societies become more transparent in the democratic era, are authorities simply getting better at investigating it?

Part of the problem in answering this question is that corruption statistics are often based on people’s perception, as Catalina Smulovitz, director of Political Science and International Relations at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina, points out.

“A few years ago, corruption as such was not a matter of public attention, so it’s hard to determine if the phenomenon has grown or not,” Smulovitz said.

“A study might simply say, ‘Do you think there are many corrupt politicians in your country?’,” she told CNN, “So according to these studies, there are countries with very low corruption rates, but not because it doesn’t exist, but because people don’t see it as a problem.”

There’s another factor to consider too: the increasing reliance on “lawfare” by political rivals who try to silence their opponents by leveling baseless allegations against them.

“It’s not that corruption doesn’t exist or shouldn’t be punished, but you can’t ignore the fact that complaints are also used to silence political opponents,” Smulovitz said.

Still, she also cautions that it has become common for public officials to try to avoid scrutiny by claiming lawfare is being used against them – and that this could lead to a boy-who-cried-wolf situation by undermining trust in the legal system

“If every time there’s oversight someone cries lawfare, then all forms of oversight could be seen as irregular or unjustified,” she said.

In such a scenario, Latin American leaders might run into fewer legal problems, but it would hardly be a healthy development for the countries themselves.

As Arellano noted, “oversight of public resources is part of the design of Western liberal democracy.”

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