Foreign Capital, the State and Political Corruption in Latin America Between Independence and the Depression

Abstract

Compared with the national era, corruption in the colonial period of Latin American history is relatively well documented, even though the quantity of publications may be much lower than on other central themes of colonial history. According to Horst Pietschmann there were four principal kinds of corruption in colonial Spanish America: illicit commerce; bribes (cohechos y sobornos); favouritism and clientelism; and the sale of offices and bureaucratic services.1 Corruption, Pietschmann argued, permeated all levels of colonial society almost from the beginning. Indeed, the extent it had reached by the mid-seventeenth century so threatened the surplus the Habsburg crown was able to extract from its possessions that it was forced to legitimise the sale of administrative and judicial office, thus adding a further twist to the screw, since this compelled officeholders to find means of recouping their investment during the limited period during which they held their posts. Although corruption may have receded somewhat at the higher and intermediate levels of the administration as a consequence of the Bourbon reforms of the late eighteenth century, it remained widespread amongst the poorly paid lower ranks of the bureaucracy, thus continuing to engender the expectation among those who sought office and those who needed access to government officials and the courts that the use of state institutions for private gain was the norm.