On the morning of April 17, the former president of Peru, Alan García, locked himself in his home office and shot himself. Police on the scene, who had come to arrest him, but had let him go to his office to call his attorney, rushed him to Hospital Casimiro Ulloa in downtown Lima. He died a short while later.

On a personal level, García’s suicide is obviously tragic. The circumstances leading up to it, however, have as much to do with the broader disordering of Latin American politics in recent years as with the desperate plight of a single disgraced politician.

The police came to García’s house to arrest him on several counts of corruption tied to the Brazilian conglomerate Odebrecht, accused of bribing politicians from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela, among others, in one of the most sweeping scandals in modern history. It’s the latest development stemming from a deal Odebrecht struck in 2016 with American and Swiss authorities, in which the company admitted to orchestrating a vast transnational network of corruption in order to secure construction rights for many of Latin America’s largest infrastructure projects. Since then, dozens of politicians in several countries have been ensnared by ongoing investigations, with Peru one of the most deeply implicated. Odebrecht has admitted to paying $29 million dollars in bribes over three presidential administrations, including García’s second stint in office from 2006 to 2011. The man most recently elected president of Peru, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, was arrested earlier this month after resigning in 2018 amid corruption charges related to Odebrecht. For his part, García was facing two separate allegations. The first involved illegal campaign contributions to the tune of $200,000 during the 2006 presidential election, presumably helping ensure García’s victory. The second involved rigging bids for construction on Line 1 of the Lima subway. On February 19, 2009, García convened an emergency cabinet meeting on the same day that he met with an Odebrecht operator, Jorge Barata. In 2017, Odebrecht admitted to paying $8 million in bribes to secure the construction bid. The day before he died, García “emphatically” rejected the charges against him, The Guardian reported, calling them “speculations” and “moral assassination.”

García got his start in politics as a member of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, or APRA), founded in 1924 with the explicit aim of forming a continent-wide front against foreign exploitation and imperialism. After many years of military rule in Peru during the 1960s and 1970s, García, then a charismatic young lawyer, was elected to Congress in 1980. Two years later, he became the head of APRA, which had evolved into a moderate center-left party, abandoning the transformational ambitions of its early years even as it preserved a generally progressive discourse and a strong labor base. In 1985, García was elected president at the age of 35, the first member of his party to reach the country’s highest office. Some called him the Latin American Kennedy. Contending with hyperinflation and other severe economic challenges, along with the emergence of a violent Maoist insurgency known as the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), García’s first stint in office was widely considered a failure.

Sixteen years later, in 2006, he successfully rebranded himself as a centrist pragmatist who took pains not to identify too closely with the so-called Pink Tide, the wave of leftist governments that swept Latin America from the early twenty-first century until about 2016. In an interview at the time with the Washington Post, García declared that he could be “useful to Peruvian society, to its middle class, to its small businesses, to its people who have democratic ideas, who do not like [Venezuelan President Hugo] Chávez, who don’t like Evo Morales and feel that I am useful to do things differently.” He dismissed what he called the “Chavez phenomenon” as “militarism with a lot of money.” Asked if he had any intention of pursuing a larger role for Peru in the region as a counterpoint to Venezuela and, implicitly perhaps, in honor of the historic aspirations of his party, García told the interviewer that that was “the last thing I want, to be South America’s sheriff. I want to accomplish things in Peru.” Asked to describe his political inclinations at the time, he said: “I see myself between Chile and Brazil—both have been successful. [Brazilian President] Lula is a realist. And the Chilean governments have had good technical teams and have devised intelligent policies like credit for small businesses.” In retrospect, it’s clear that while often considered an inept populist by many in his country and beyond, García in 2006 was trying to signal his willingness to engage in a more practical manner with international financial institutions and politics as usual—which, as we now know, was rotten to the core.