Latin America's Anti-Corruption Strength Slips, Ranking Shows

• An index evaluating Latin American countries' ability to weed out corruption showed most countries moving backwards, according to the ranking released on Tuesday, June 27.
• The 2023 Capacity to Combat Corruption (CCC) Index, published jointly by Americas Society/Council of the Americas (AS/COA)) and Control Risks, covers 15 countries, which together represent 96% of Latin America’s GDP, pointed to a decline in the region's average score for the first time since 2020.
• Looking at 14 variables, including the independence of judicial institutions and the strength of investigative journalism, the CCC Index "relies on extensive data and a proprietary survey conducted among leading anti-corruption experts" to score and rank countries on a 0-10 scale.
• Notably, two of the 15 countries, Guatemala (2.86) and Venezuela (1.46), saw significant declines in their scores in 2023, and one country, Panama (5.39), saw a material improvement. Guatemala and Mexico (5.39) are the only two countries whose overall scores have decreased every year since the Index was released in 2019.
• Latin America's largest economy, Brazil (4.83), ranked 8th, with its score improving by 1.5% from 2022. The region's second-largest economy, Mexico, ranked 12th, showing "pronounced downgrades" in the civil society and media categories as Mexican journalists face "the world's highest rate of violence against reporters outside Ukraine," the report said.
• Uruguay (6.99) ranked first again, but registered a consecutive year of decline, a sign "that no country is immune from either stagnation or regression in the fight against corruption," the index said.

(Source: Reuters & AS/COA)