Corruption as a threat to liberty

It seems that the majority of Latin America’s presidents and ex-presidents had “irregular” dealings with the Brazilian companies involved in Operation Car Wash, chief among them Odebrecht, where the scale of the corruption was on a par with the scale of its construction projects. This grand corruption that makes the headlines day after day, leaving the public feeling angry and powerless, has come to overshadow the petty corruption practised by public officials who extort money from people in exchange for speeding up bureaucratic procedures.  Transparency International defines grand corruption as the abuse of high-level power that benefits the few at the expense of the many, and causes serious and widespread harm to individuals and society, often going unpunished. This definition highlights how those in power take decisions with the complicity or collusion of a sufficiently large proportion of key roles in the judiciary and comptroller’s office to ensure that the beneficiaries go unpunished in spite of the harm caused to society.