Abstract

Over the last decades several Latin American countries have been involved in cases of corruption that bind political actors and private corporations. The Criminal Prosecutorial Offices (CPO) have the responsibility to lead investigations and establish litigation strategies to obtain accountability and judicial penalties against corrupt acts, which are key functions to strengthen a democratic rule of law (Langer & Sklansky, 2017). This research has the purpose of gaining understanding of the factors that favor successful criminal prosecution in cases of corruption that bind political actors and private corporations. This research argues that a successful criminal prosecution (characterized by the achievement of enough convictions, agreements, and damage reparations) will be obtained when the institutional structure and the prosecutor’s political strategies reinforce the accountability power of prosecutors over political actors and corporations. To test this argument, this study proposes a comparative analysis of the criminal corruption prosecutions that involve the transnational corporation Odebrecht in Peru and Mexico between 2016 and 2020, through a study of primary and secondary sources.

Principal Investigator

Mária de Lourdes Velasco Domínguez

Professor, Technological Institute of Monterrey

Bio

She is a PhD candidate in research in Social Science focused on Political Science at the Latin American Faculty of Social Science (FLACSO México) and has a master’s degree in Gender Studies by The Mexico’s College. She has researched several forms of gender violence in indigenous and urban contexts, as well as avenues to fight against them. Currently, her research aim is to understand the impact of political bias and corruption practices in criminal prosecution of offenses such as homicide, femicide and corruption in Mexico and Peru.