Last night Peru investigative reporting program "El Cuarto Poder" played audio tapes of APRA party insider Romulo Leon and PetroPeru bigwig Alberto Quimper as they discussed the best way to make themselves a nice slice of bribery and corruption money. Between them they arranged for a foreign oil company, Discover Petroleum of Norway, to land five concession blocks in Peru.To get the details, check out the Reuters story in English right here, but the fallout from this is that Juan Valdivia, Peru's Minister of Energy, has resigned. Quimper and his boss at PetroPeru Cesar Gutierrez have been sacked and Romulo Leon has quickly resigned as a member of the APRA party (though his daughter will continue as an APRA member of parliament no doubt. Got to keep the family tradition going...........).
The only surprising thing about all this is that these people were caught red-handed. Peru governments are never clean, but when APRA has the reins of power it becomes particularly corrupt. President Twobreakfasts is playing the indignant "we don't want these kind of people in gov't" line this morning, but anyone with the slightest idea of the wheels-within-wheels world of APRA knows full well that this shit goes on all the time and the party head trying the "oh gee shucks" is as pathetic as it is an intelligence insult.
LatAm political corruption is bit like cocaine trafficking. It's illegal, it happens, big money is made and once in a while a big consignment is intercepted and arrests are made. In Peru one packet of cocaine in ten is stopped. That sounds about the right proportion for the scum that run the wheels of power and the bribes they earn, too. So today let's all throw up our arms and say "oooh, what a terrible man!" and while we're at it, let's pretend it's going to be the last ever case of bribery, kickbacks and corruption in Peru.