Preventing Corruption and Promoting Citizenship Participation: The Latin American Trend and its Challenges

During the last two decades Latin American countries adopted policy programs and a new legal framework to prevent corruption and promote an active and participatory citizenship. These actions led to a new type of process regarding the institutionalization of transversal accountability mechanisms that can be analyzed from the perspective of “state-opening processes”. Furthermore, this phenomena cannot be studied in an isolated way, due to the important advocacy role that development agencies, international organizations and social movements played in the region. Despite the fact most of Latin American countries had ratified the United Nations Convention Against Corruption, have endorsed freedom of information legislation, have established different sorts of anticorruption agencies and promoted new forms of citizen participation, corruption is still perceived as one of the biggest concerns that is currently being faced by the region. Therefore, this work aims to perform a comparative analysis among four Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Chile by analyzing the transparency and participation programs, acts and disposals each country has implemented, taking into account their differences and similarities as well as the contexts in which they emerged. Why did these countries decided to implement transversal accountability mechanisms? Were they created to prevent corruption? What has been their estimated impact on citizen´s corruption perception and on government control of corruption?. The result aims to shed light on what has been the impact of anti-corruption measures in the region and to what extent the rhetoric of anticorruption and promotion of citizenship participation has fulfilled its goals.