Corruption in Bolivia is a major problem that has been called an accepted part of life in the country. It can be found at all levels of Bolivian society. Citizens of the country perceive the judiciary, police and public administration generally as the country's most corrupt. Corruption is also widespread among officials who are supposed to control the illegal drug trade and among those working in and with extractive industries.
Many Bolivians are uneducated and thus unaware of their rights as citizens or of laws against corruption.
Background
Ever since Bolivia was freed from Spanish rule in 1825, the country has experienced considerable instability. The government has been overthrown over 200 times and the constitution rewritten. Widespread poverty has been a major factor in the country's poor development and poor governance.
In the latter half of the 20th century, the government was passed back and forth between civilian and military control repeatedly, some of them notorious for corruption. In 1980-81, when Luis García Meza Tejada was dictator, several thousand civil servants were prosecuted for embezzlement; in 1986, García Meza was charged with treason, sedition, and many other crimes, along with 55 of his associates; he fled the country in 1989.
Victor Paz Estenssoro’s government (1985-89) introduced a degree of stability and democracy. Under Gonzalo “Goni” Sanchez de Lozada, president from 1993 to 1997 and from 2002 to 2003, however, witness the selling off state industries in a process that was widely viewed as corrupt, with many of the purchasers being firms with whom he had close ties.
Evo Morales, elected Bolivia's president in December 2005, convinced poor and middle-class voters that his promised social revolution would overcome establishment corruption. Increased revenues from the exploitation of Bolivia's rich natural resources helped improve macro-economic performance during the decade between 2002 and 2012. Transparency has also improved under Morales. Nonetheless, Bolivia remains the poorest nation in South America, with real GDP lower than it was a generation ago and most of the population still living below the poverty line.
Indicators, perceptions, and attitudes
Transparency International's 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index gave Bolivia a score of 31 on a scale from 0 ("highly corrupt") to 100 ("very clean"). When ranked by score, Bolivia ranked 126th among the 180 countries in the Index, where the country ranked first is perceived to have the most honest public sector. For comparison with worldwide scores, the best score was 90 (ranked 1), the average score was 43, and the worst score was 12 (ranked 180). For comparison with regional scores, the highest score among the countries of the Americas was 74, the average score was 43 and the lowest score was 14.
Similarly, the World Bank gave Bolivia a score of 38.9 for corruption on the Worldwide Governance Indicators scale from 0 (worst) to 100 (best), a decline from 2007 (43.7) but an improvement over 2009 (29.2). From 2007 to 2011, 80% of citizens thought corruption had worsened or stayed constant. A 2010 report suggested that citizens’ perception of the level of public-sector corruption was worse than the actual scale of such corruption. Business executives, by contrast, saw the situation as having improved since 2009.
Inhabitants of Bolivia tend to consider the state “hopelessly corrupt,” yet under Morales, paradoxically, have allowed it to control an ever-greater portion of the economy, greatly expanding opportunities for corruption. A 2015 report found that while Bolivians do not consider Morales personally corrupt, and re-elected him handily in October 2014, they do think there is more corruption than ever and that it is the fault of the government.
There is a degree of tolerance toward government corruption in Bolivia, a belief that it is acceptable given the “good things” the government does for the people. Many Bolivians subscribe to the traditional belief that only a fool does not take advantage of every opportunity to enrich himself, whether illicitly or not; others believe that with the ascent of Morales, who is an indigenous person, it is now the turn of that group to reap the benefits of corruption as other groups have done before. Indeed, a belief in the importance of group identify, and consequently a tendency to embrace the attitudes of the collective, often trumps individual ethics in Bolivian society.