IDL-Reporteros: The Newsroom That Dares to Challenge Peru's Political Elite

[Judi Lynn]

by Santiago Villa • April 2, 2024

From toppled presidents, to a multitude of arrests, and billion-dollar fines, the Odebrecht corruption scandal shook Latin America to its core.

Across the region, parties from all sides of the political spectrum received campaign financing from the Brazilian construction firm, which in the decade between 2005 and 2014 won lucrative infrastructure contracts all the way from Mexico to Argentina.

But alongside the contracts came corruption. From a starting point in Brazil, where it emerged that a car wash had been used as a money laundering front, investigators began focusing on contracts signed by the construction goliath, and the scandal spread from capital to capital.

By 2016, the firm admitted to having paid “$788 million in bribes to government officials, their representatives, and political parties in a number of countries in order to win business,” according to the US Department of Justice, which criticized a “massive and unparalleled bribery and bid-rigging scheme.” The story would become one of the biggest corporate corruption cases in Latin American history.

Peru’s political establishment was among the hardest hit by the Odebrecht scandal — besides dozens of public officials, four of its former presidents have been investigated or are being prosecuted in relation to various revelations. One of those former presidents, Alan García, locked himself in his bedroom and killed himself with a gun when police showed up to arrest him.

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