Sarah Chayes: This is how kleptocracies work

Unstructured, even unruly, though these networks may be, they are highly successful. But not at governing, for governing is not their objective. Their objective is to enrich their members. Government functions, such as ensuring that hospitals are stocked with basic supplies, falter. Great sums of money, provided for post-crisis rebuilding or borrowed from international financial institutions, flow to insiders, while ordinary people needlessly suffer and die.

Mechanisms intended to defend citizens from such larceny are disabled. In some countries, they may simply be abolished, as were the CICIG and its Honduran counterpart, the Mission to Support the Fight Against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras. If that solution is too blatant, audit bodies, inspectorates, or other watchdogs may be understaffed or starved of funds, or handed over to network loyalists.

The point is to ensure that network members are left in peace as they perform their duties—duties to the network, that is. These fall into two categories. One is rewriting the rules of the political and economic game to favor the networks and their ongoing dominance: to turn what ordinary people consider corruption into “business as usual.” Party politics, often just a cover for the rivalry between competing corrupt networks, may serve to cripple the public’s ability to protest. As a Honduran villager put it to me in 2016, “None of our political parties really represents us. They just come in here and divide people. Their aim is to pit the people against each other.”

The other duty that corrupt government officials perform is to steer public moneys to their fellow network members. This is a critical feature of such systems. It is wrong to think—as some Americans do—that corruption happens only when functionaries fill their own pockets. Corrupt networks are bound together by a dense tissue of reciprocal favors, sometimes only repaid years later. The anthropologist Janine Wedel has spent much of her career studying such dynamics, especially in the former Communist bloc. “Individuals,” she emphasized in an article for the journal Trends in Organized Crime, “are acting as part of a group whose members’ agendas and activities are interdependent.”

An emergency offers unparalleled opportunities for the coordinated looting of public coffers that feeds such networks. Life is upended; emotions run high. In the scramble, tested procedures are ignored and structures are disorganized. Exhausted decision makers, pressured to “do something,” miss crucial details, even as quantities of cash are injected into the chaos.

As the United States mobilizes unprecedented resources to address the coronavirus pandemic and the attendant recession, the Trumps and allied officials and business leaders—like corrupt networks in countries most Americans once assumed we could never resemble—could attempt to exploit the crisis, deepening and prolonging the damage caused by the pandemic itself.