Tag Archives: video

Guest Post: Expert Interviews on Corruption Control in Latin America

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Today’s guest post is from Columbia University Professor Paul Lagunes, who this year is also a Visiting Fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy:

Elections in Latin America are freer and fairer than they used to be, and, with rare exceptions, political power in the region is no longer monopolized by a single individual, junta, or party. From Chile to Mexico, legal reforms have promoted higher levels of government transparency and citizen participation. But in spite of these improvements, the region continues to grapple with systemic corruption. Not only are individuals asked to pay bribes by lower-level government officials, but scandals such as Lava Jato (“Car Wash”) in Brazil, La Estafa Maestra (“The Master Fraud”) in Mexico, and La Línea (“The Line”) in Guatemala have revealed grand corruption at the most senior levels, making the fight against corruption a top priority for the region.

Prompted by these concerns, I contributed to organizing a conference at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy on corruption control in Latin America, which has already been featured (with links to the conference videos) on this blog. Some of the conference panelists stayed long enough that we were able to interview them about their important work. Tony Payan, my colleague at the Baker Institute and an expert on U.S.-Mexico border issues, agreed to conduct the interviews.

The videos of these interviews are now publicly available, and are well worth viewing for those interested in hearing a diverse range of perspectives on the corruption challenges currently facing Latin America. In this post I will provide links to the interviews as well as a brief summary of their content. (There’s also an online website, where you can find all the interviews, here.) Continue reading →

Video: Baker Center Conference on Controlling Corruption in Latin America

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A few weeks back I was lucky enough to attend a mini-conference hosted by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy entitled “A Worthy Mission: Controlling Corruption in Latin America.” The conference featured an opening keynote address by Yale Professor Susan Rose-Ackerman, with a brief response by BYU Professor Daniel Nielson, followed by two panels. The first of these panels (which I moderated) focused on anticorruption prosecutions in Latin America generally, and featured Thelma Aldana (who served as Attorney General of Guatemala from 2014-2018, and is rumored to be a likely presidential candidate), Paolo Roberto Galvao de Carvalho (a Brazilian Federal Prosecutor and member of the “Car Wash” anticorruption Task Force), and George Mason University Professor Louise Shelley. The second panel, moderated by Columbia Professor Paul Lagunes, focused more specifically on corruption control in Mexico, and featured Professor Jacqueline Peschard (former chair of Mexico’s National Anticorruption System), Claudio X. Gonzalez (the president of the civil society organization Mexicanos Contra la Corrupcion y la Impunidad (MCCI)), and Mariana Campos (the Program Director at another Mexican civil society organization, Mexico Evalua).

Video recordings of the conference are publicly available, so I’m going to follow my past practice of sharing the links, along with a very brief guide (with time stamps) in case anyone is particularly interested in one or more particular speakers or subjects but doesn’t have time to watch the whole thing. Here goes: Continue reading →

Video: “The Global Fight Against Corruption: What We’ve Learned and Where We’re Going”

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One year ago (in December 2017) I was invited to give a talk at the University of Indonesia on “The Global Fight Against Corruption: What We’ve Learned and Where We’re Going.” I recently learned that the video of the lecture and the Q&A that followed it is up on YouTube here. Because this lecture was a variant on a “stump speech” that I’ve given to various audiences—a talk that tries to hit on some big-picture themes about the fight against corruption that I think are important—I thought that perhaps some of our readers out there might find some or all of the video useful. (I hope this doesn’t come off too much as shameless self-promotion!) For what it’s worth, here are a few of the topics/themes that came up in the talk, with associated time markers for the video: Continue reading →

China’s Anticorruption Campaign Adds Popular Culture Entertainment Into its Toolbox

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A TV series called In the Name of the People, featuring China’s current fight against high-level government corruption, has gone viral in China. Dubbed the Chinese House of Cards, the show reached an 8% TV viewing rate (the highest in 12 years) and by the end of April 2017, had been watched over 20 billion times across major Chinese online video platforms. The show is widely acclaimed for its quality production, intriguing storylines, and, more importantly, for its bold, vivid depiction of the ugly side of China’s political and social reality. Shows like this are not merely entertainment: popular culture, including TV shows, can be an important tool in the fight against corruption.

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Guest Post: Using Animated Videos to Change Children’s Attitude Toward Corruption

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Robert Clark, Legal Research Manager at TRACE International, contributes today’s guest post:

Although corruption is a broadly entrenched social ill, each corrupt act is a decision made in its own specific place and time. To address the global problem of corruption, we need to focus our attention locally and join together in our individual acts of resistance. That dynamic is concisely expressed in the phrase “United Against Corruption”—the official slogan of 2016’s International Anti-Corruption Day (officially observed this past December 9th). The associated “United Against Corruption” campaign focuses on corruption as an impediment to development, and offers a wide range of suggestions for what governments, media, businesses, and individuals can do to participate in the ongoing struggle. The campaign’s website includes a series of powerful videos illustrating the dire effects of corruption.

Children are often the ones that suffer the effects of corruption, but they can also play a key role in changing a society’s tolerance of it. The United Against Corruption campaign encourages individuals to “[e]ngage the youth of your country about what ethical behavior is, what corruption is and how to fight it.” In that spirit, TRACE International has created a series of short animated stories featuring the “Bribe Busters”—an elite young team of corruption fighters who fight corruption around the world with the help of a time travel teleportation super-computer. Their mission: to ensure that children everywhere have a fair future. Each episode focuses on a different aspect of corruption, and shows the viewer that although the world is full of unfairness, things don’t have to be that way. (For example, in episode two, the team is able to convince a government safety inspector not to look the other way at building code violations by showing him—with the help of their time-traveling computer friend—the devastation of a consequent building collapse. In another episode, the team helps an underserved remote village organize to get rid of a kleptocrat whose greed has prevented an important road project from being completed.) These videos, which have already been viewed in 44 different countries, are available on YouTube in English, French, and Spanish, with Arabic coming soon. Additionally, comic versions of the episodes (in PDF form) can be downloaded here.

TRACE is working with anti-corruption networks around the world–including Anti-Corruption International (ACI), the Economic and Financial Crimes commission (EFCC) / Creative Youth Initiative against Corruption, the Global Youth Anti-Corruption Network (GYAC), and ZERO Tolerance-Wise Youth Trust –to distribute the videos. If you are interested in distributing the Bribe Busters series in your anticorruption network, please contact us here. We hope that this series can not only help teach children about the harms of corruption (as if they didn’t already know), but also help them develop a sense that they can do something about it. We believe that’s also the basic message of the United Against Corruption campaign, and it’s one we are happy to endorse.

Watching Out: Cambodian Corruption Video Documentation Where Censorship Fails

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Low-cost video, and easier video distribution, simple though it sounds, is emerging as one of the premier corruption-fighting tools. This is especially true for small countries with poor track records in public integrity. Consider Cambodia. Although Prime Minister Hun Sen’s 30-year rule has been rife with graft, cronyism, land grabbing, and political violence, the government has been able to keep the extent of this hidden from most of the Cambodian public. Yet video and video-sharing services have proved one form of protest that the reigning government cannot seem to quash.

The most recent video to provoke the ire of the ruling party has low production values and little action. Three men sit at a table, one talking for the majority of the eight-minute run time about a Global Witness report’s allegations of extreme nepotism and cronyism within the ruling family. The man speaking, Kem Ley, was an opposition politician who was assassinated in broad daylight at a gas station convenience store just two days after his remarks. Many commentators immediately suspected the killing was political; these statements themselves spurred lawsuits from the ruling party. Multiple YouTube versions of the video now have several hundred thousand views each, with video news stories covering the killing tallying hundreds of thousands more. Kem’s funeral procession brought out droves of Cambodians, some reports numbering the crowd at two million (in a country of around 15 million people).

Another recent video about an anticorruption campaigner has become extremely popular despite—or perhaps because of—the government’s best efforts to stop it. The video’s subject, Chut Wutty, worked to expose illegal logging in Cambodian forests, logging that often happened with police complicity or direct participation. While accompanying journalists to show them the extent of the illegal deforestation, Wutty was shot and killed by a police officer. The low-budget documentary about his life and death was released this spring. Banned by the government, the film also quickly racked up hundreds of thousands of views and gathered plenty of attention.

In a country with state-controlled media, sparse internet connectivity, and extreme poverty, the exposure to corruption-exposing video is ad hoc but growing. Videos like these hold promise for the future of the long-struggling country for several reasons:

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