A Corrupt Caribbean and its Colonial Roots

When we explore the intricate web of corruption in the Caribbean, a legacy deeply intertwined with its post-colonial implications can be illuminated. In a state of exploitation and systemic malpractice, the Caribbean’s corruption perpetually shapes the region’s socio-political landscape.

The Caribbean region spans the Bahamas, Trinidad, and Tobago and includes non-island countries, stretching from Belize to Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. Some of the wealthiest politicians reside in this region. Yet, posts on social media that concern the richest or best-paid in the Caribbean, exclude the millionaire or billionaire politicians of these islands from these lists. The net worth of these politicians is of interest, with surprising findings of some of them being of average wealth, only reaching such affluent status post-taking of office. The lack of representation of these individuals demonstrates a certain ambiguity at first surrounding situations of how this money affects their political position and how they may have obtained it.

In tandem, citizens who had elected these officials into power have become far from moneyed, incurring poorer lifestyles, disempowerment and disenfranchising. It is important to note how these politicians came to be so wealthy. There are controversies surrounding those such as Haitian former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Cuban former president Carlos Prío Socarrás. Yet, we find ourselves contemplating how such positions of power came to be in the hands of the corruptly inclined. While some careers are legitimate through pursuing professional fields in other careers, others have profited through their position as politicians, using insider information and receiving contracts through profits, such as their wives, friends and colleagues. Some of these are through kickbacks and bribes. 

Transparency International’s 2022 Corruption Perception Index (CPI) indicated significant falls in the scores of more economically developed countries (MEDCs). Widespread anti-corruption measures run aground as we turn to countries such as France, Switzerland, and Germany, once perceived as the least corrupt, having shown little to no improvement. 

Concurrently, in the Caribbean, no action has been taken regarding these countries languishing in the lower rungs of the CPI. 

The Corruption Perception Index or CPI is an index released by Transparency International that scores and ranks countries by perceived levels of public sector corruption, as assessed by business executives and experts. Subsequently, it defines corruption as “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain”.

Corruption in the Caribbean has shown no improvement over the last decade, and the region seems to be content with being at the bottom of the CPI. Barbados dropped from a score of 76 in 2012, to 65 in 2022. The Bahamas from 71 to 64. St Lucia went from 71 to an astonishing 55. To put this into perspective non-governmental organisations have been able to do little to mitigate such issues. Haiti ranks 17 on a scale from 0 (‘highly corrupt’) to 100 (‘very clean’) on the CPI, ranking 172nd out of 180 countries where the first ranked as the ‘most honest public sector’. 

These are just a few of the places to put this into perspective. Consistent in achieving low scores on the CPI as democracy continues to erode, moving steadfastly to autocracy, the political and business elite have captured legislature and law enforcement. The islands that are ranked poorly include Cuba, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti, with no significant improvement in any of these countries aside from Guyana. Despite an improvement from 28 in 2012 to 40 in 2022 – the recent discovery of large oil deposits may send it back down if wealth is permissibly exploited by its politicians and ‘business experts’ from its salivating neighbours. Social activists, financial intelligence units, integrity commissions and other agencies who attempt to crack down on corruption lack meaningful influence in creating change. 

Repeatedly, there has been nepotism, fraud, bribery, kickbacks, conflicts of interest and ‘revolving-door syndrome’, all of these forms of corruption normalised in the Caribbean without outrage or protest by the citizens and taxpayers. The metaphor of the ‘revolving door’ describes people switching jobs from working as lawmakers to lobbyists and vice versa. Examples include mismanagement of public funds on vanity projects and awarding unqualified contractors, which results in poor infrastructure. Moreover, corrupting political financiers' influence and gifting public contracts to families and romances all contribute to a crumbling system devoid of democratic practice. 

We turn to the human and financial costs of the Caribbean, the well-being of vulnerable people threatened by corruption in addition to COVID-19, the climate crisis and economic challenges. The Commonwealth Secretary-General has elucidated the impact of illegal practices such as fraud and bribery, on top of other serious issues addressing an anti-corruption training programme for the Caribbean. Illicit financial flows cost developing countries around $1.26 trillion a year, but if properly applied would lift the poverty of 1.4 billion who get by on $1.25 a day, and keep them at such status for at least 6 years. The region is confronted with the triple impact of the pandemic, climate crisis and serious economic challenges, with the overlay of the no less injurious but more invisible scourge of corruption. The pandemic which countries are fighting to control has corruption inflicting huge human and financial costs, putting in grave jeopardy the well-being of the most vulnerable. 

The vast majority of nation-states within the Caribbean have been purportedly independent since the 1960s to 1970s and are marked by a particularly interesting paradoxical political sovereignty and experience of development. Regional development analysis posts that although the 1970s began with a political revolution in many of the islands, it ended with an industrial one that opened doors to Western-centric capitalist logic, colonial mimicry and the predation of the IMF. Capitalist logic defines human beings as individuals motivated purely by self-interest, not as social. Consequently, the region continues to be plagued by plantation logic, the Westminster system, debt and import dependency and heteropatriarchal social relations. Plantation logic has the conception of blackness deemed inhuman with whiteness constituting what it fully means to be human. This drives processes of displacement, capitalist accumulation and longing implicating racialised bodies geographically. Deeming positions of power from arbitrary information as opposed to qualification and objectivity in politics is what further drives processes of exclusion that exacerbate corruption. 

Post-colonial political geographers assert that much of the Caribbean is currently coping with its most prolonged and complex development crisis vis-a-vis since emancipation, in security, vulnerability and resilience. Hence, based on this paradigm, civilising missions of development have historically been an inherent exercise of power among disparate and hierarchically ordered geography and subjugation. Capitalist colonial logic has been promoted and lauded through various political ministries, social institutions, and media, marketing, and advertising genres. Ideas of self-interest drive projects for those in power and those in their inner circles as opposed to what is good for the public. Hence, these institutions are plagued by incompetent practices benefiting an elite demographic further driving instability. 

Some researchers assert that conventional notions of development were a manufactured phenomenon based on the Eurocentric hegemony of a paradigm, operating for the benefit of those who created it, the Western Powers. Development became a doctrine to aid and abet a dying and obsolete colonialism to transform into an aggressive instrument in recapturing factors of production (i.e. capital, land and labour) and curating new markets. Imperialism, as the highest place of capitalism was categorised as ‘development’ under state, corporation or bank, typifying the Caribbean experience. The underlying message of such development projects has been that the native methods of life and the mindset of those in the Caribbean are primitive, static, and relegated to lives of stagnation and torpor. These have been allegedly carried out on behalf of grassroots people across the region. Corrupt politicians in the Caribbean often follow this development model, exacerbating instability as this stigmatisation and marginalisation of Caribbean practises is prevalent in the status quo. Corruption only further exacerbates these issues as Caribbean states struggle to transition out of colonialist practices while dealing with further aggravating factors in high political positions. Often, even the methods used to stabilise the situation have corruption inherent within them, further relegating Caribbean nations to struggle to achieve independence years after formally having done so. 

An example of this is the Haitian investigations into the PetroCaribe program. The 1,000-page report detailed projects undertaken without a needs assessment or cost estimate, finding investment projects and contracts related to the PetroCaribe fund were not managed by the principles of efficiency and economy, as the court concluded. Set up at the initiative of the former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, the PetroCaribe program allowed multiple Latin American and Caribbean countries to benefit from Venezuelan loans under a system of preferential oil delivery. As Venezuela has not been held accountable, since 2008 the six successive Haitian administrations have spent $2 billion on projects, with mostly no concern for fundamental public funds management. The High Court of Auditors also condemned a lack of cooperation from institutions, which hindered investigative work in two initial reports in 2019, i.e., the judges could not trace a single contract to build an industrial park and 1,500 houses outside Port-au-Prince. This was the most ambitious public urban development project since the 2010 earthquake, ending in 2014. The court however stated more than $46 million was paid to a single company, Constructora ROFI SA, for the unfinished project. The company belonged to Dominican Senator Felix Bautista, who was sanctioned by the United States Treasury Department in 2018 for corruption. Unable to consult various contracts, the Court stated its inability to rule on the relevance of millions of dollars spent between 2012 and 2014 to strengthen the island nation’s police force. The judges condemned former Haitian president Jovenel Moise in a previous report, who was accused of being at the core of an embezzlement scheme before taking office. Despite recommendations from the High Court of Auditors and popular protests since 2018, no prosecution in 2020 was brought against the dozens of former ministers and high-ranking officials involved in the PetroCaribe scandal. 

In this benchmark, underdevelopment is hence not the absence of development as every individual has experienced it one way or another to a greater or lesser extent, however, it makes sense only as a means to compare levels of development. Subsequently, it is tied to the fact that human social development is uneven and from a strictly economic viewpoint some human demographics have advanced further by producing more and becoming wealthier, attributing this to corruption and extortion of civilian funds. 

Economically, development revolves around exploitative ideas and extractive practices of putatively ‘free trade’ privatisation, industrial production and transfer of wealth and resources. Hence within the region ‘development’ is largely a process of siphoning and accumulating capital. This notion of ‘development’ is wielded as a monolithic hierarchy-inducing discourse, identifying groups as ‘lesser-than’ should they be ostensibly thought to be lacking where they are conceived to be on a linear timeline. An otherwise post-colonial implicative Western hegemony of a chronology doesn’t account for other temporalities and perspectives, however corrupt politicians continue to perpetuate this as do other powers to exploit the positions of these unstable countries in the past and present.

Up Next