The bankers were not satisfied with simply depositing these resources in their banks to trade them in credits. They decided to co-participate with large contractor octopuses that were configured throughout the country. Not only did the oil money arrive in full hands, but also the drug trafficking money.
Without much land to grab, public contracting became a golden opportunity for dollar laundering and rent capture, as economists say, i.e., theft of public resources.
This is how recruitment cartels were formed. To get a contract, the politician and the ruler were bribed with the same contract money, which left a financial gap that was only solved by extending the terms of the contracted work, renegotiating contracts, or acquiring new contracts, which, in turn, implied new bribes. Just as in a house of cards, the big contract cartels were being built, always under the protection of an eminent politician, an eminent ruler.
Uribe privileged the Nule, Solarte, and William Velez cartels, and Velez got a juicy jewel for drug trafficking: the privatized El Dorado airport. The Moreno Rojas forged a local cartel in Bogotá with their business friends Tapias and Gómez. Vargas Lleras forged the one of electricity and cleaning with the Ríos, and then the one of the big builders; his ally Char, had forged one in Barranquilla and had extended it to the whole Coast. Any mayor could forge his own on a scale of the municipality’s resources.
The piñata was unleashed. The cartels were castles of cards, fragile due to their financial gaps, those gaps being nothing more than the volumes of corruption: the financial gaps measured the transfer of public money that by hundreds of millions of dollars passed on to the politicians and rulers.
Drug trafficking, oil, and public money filled the coffers of corruption. Somehow all that money reached the banks and therefore the bankers, who gladly lent enormous amounts of money to the contractors of the country’s infrastructure projects.
The bankers, therefore, became contracting partners.
Odebrecht
The infrastructure projects were not finished, it could not possibly be of quality and they were not what the country needed. There was no care in planning such large investments. What mattered was that the works were expensive, so that everybody could get their share. That’s why the country was filled with dual lane roads for inefficient, big trucks and not with railroads; that’s why large urbanizations were developed where there were no services, where people couldn’t live, that’s why bridges fell, that’s why it didn’t occur to anyone to invest in university campuses, or in public hospitals, or in environmental and water improvement.
Out of those big contractor cartels came Odebrecht, which had already built one on an American scale, bribing several Latin American presidents. Odebrecht came in under Uribe, partnered with Luis Carlos Sarmiento, Colombia’s largest banker, dislodged the Nule cartel from the president’s favoritism, and bribed a good chunk of the traditional political class leadership. Odebrecht bought two governments, Uribe’s and Santos’. It financed all Uribism’s presidential candidates, from Arias to Duque, who strangely vanished when they financed Zuluaga.
Print
Gustavo Petro | Radio Free (2020-12-15T17:35:05+00:00) Colombia's Attorney General's Office is being devoured by corruption. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/12/15/colombias-attorney-generals-office-is-being-devoured-by-corruption/
Please log in to upload a file.
There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.