What irony! Latin America’s leftist leaders are using the tragic suicide of Peru’s former President Alan Garcia — as he was about to be arrested in the Odebrecht bribery scandal — to claim that corruption is a byproduct of free-market economies.
In fact, it’s exactly the opposite.
Hours after Garcia’s death on Wednesday, Mexico’s leftist populist leader, Andres Manuel López Obrador, tweeted that he regretted Garcia’s suicide “and everything around the Odebrecht case. Corruption is the world’s new pest. Neo-liberalism (the free-market economy) has mixed up private and public businesses. It’s urgent to separate economic and political powers.”
However, the Odebrecht corruption scandal was born, thrived and spread to a dozen countries during Brazil’s governments of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) and Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016). That was at the peak of Latin America’s wave of leftist populist governments, which got the bulk of the bribes.