This article identifies four frames of corruption in the discourse of three leaders of Operation Lava Jato, also known in English as Operation Car Wash, a large-scale Brazilian anticorruption operation (2014–2021). These frames are inequality, hidden pact, backwardness, and chronic disease. The frames were identified by analyzing a wide set of press interviews, opinion articles, and books by two prosecutors and one judge whose work has revealed scandals involving the state oil company Petrobras. The operation had a major impact on politics and the economy and left a controversial legacy. We noticed a contradiction between one frame invoking judicial activism (inequality) and three frames focusing on specific techniques that appeal to a more conventional view on the judiciary’s role (hidden pact, backwardness, and chronic disease). Furthermore, even when scholars were still largely positive about the operation, the discourse showed signs of judicial activism. This analysis contributes to the debate on Lava Jato and judicial activism by focusing on discourse rather than action.

International reconsideration of Mexican film noir is a recent phenomenon. For decades, Mexican film criticism tended to dismiss the importance of this tradition and even to deny its existence, often citing the presence of melodramatic elements in would-be noir films and the lack of a crime novel tradition for screen adaptations. By comparing two Mexican films to similar American productions and examining the local political and economic conditions of the former, this article argues that Mexican film noir had its own pessimistic viewpoints, which were borrowed from journalism and the illustrated press. These viewpoints were based on existing social ailments and delivered relevant criticism of the institutions, classism, and sexual norms of the postrevolutionary Mexican state of the 1940s and 1950s.

When and why do legislatures impeach presidents? We analyse six cases of attempted impeachment in Paraguay, Brazil and Peru to argue that intra-coalitional politics is central to impeachment outcomes. Presidents in Latin America often govern with multiparty, ideologically heterogeneous coalitions sustained by tenuous pacts. Coalitions are tested when crises, scandals or mass protests emerge, but presidents can withstand these threats if they tend to allies’ interests and maintain coalitions intact. Conversely, in the absence of major threats, presidents can be impeached if they fail to serve partners’ interests, inducing allies to support impeachment as acts of opportunism or self-preservation.

This article explores the reasons why the most important anti-corruption campaign in twentieth-century Venezuela failed to win sustained support. Employing a constructivist approach to historical actors’ understandings of corruption, it analyses the debates that erupted when the Acción Democrática (Democratic Action, AD) party prosecuted 167 former officials for illicit enrichment. The ensuing debate demonstrates that AD and its opponents disagreed over the proper boundaries between the public and private spheres in a modern state. AD sought to punish officials who used public office for private gain, but critiques of the trials effectively countered AD and contributed to its overthrow in 1948.

This article addresses corruption as a negative practice displaying the ‘darker side’ of social capital in Chinese guanxi and Russian blat/svyazi networks. It presents a conceptual framework integrating several research streams to establish a conceptual linkage between social network characteristics and three forms of corruption between business persons and public officials: cronyism, bribery, and extortion. We argue that the forms of corruption in a society are determined by the nature of social network ties and their underlying morality, with particularistic and general trust being key factors. Our framework depicts networks as three concentric circles representing three types of corruption resulting from their corresponding types of reciprocity: open, closed, and negative. We then apply the framework to the practice of guanxi in China and blat/svyazi in Russia. We propose that different network characteristics and different forms of corruption may help explain what we label the ‘China-Russia paradox’ of why corruption and high economic growth have co-existed in China, at least in the short term, but less so in Russia. We conclude with ethical and legal implications for doing business in those two transforming economies and offer suggestions for future research.

This paper uses corruption in Mexico City's markets as a lens to examine state–society relations and the construction of the PRI's hegemony in post-1946 Mexico. It presents three case studies that show how some ostensibly corrupt practices supported state functioning, while others contributed to the process of party building. It demonstrates that these practices were driven by shifting social dynamics and conflicts among vendors, which operated through networks of formal and informal power. Historicising corruption illuminates the strengths and weaknesses of the Mexican state as well as the balance between co-optation and popular demands that lay behind it in this period.

The Mensalão trial was Brazil's most important political corruption trial ever and an emblematic ex post accountability success. More than 28 individuals were convicted in relation to a legislative vote-buying scheme, many by the very officials they helped appoint. We relay the trajectory of the scandal cum trial, explain its successful prosecution and assess its implications. The article argues that the Mensalão has proved pivotal for Brazil's institutional and legal advances and asks – more than a quarter of a century after a new constitution – whether the country is entering into a stronger, more enduring relationship with the rule of law.

Across Latin America, many former presidents have faced criminal prosecutions on corruption charges, with widely varied outcomes. As with an impeachment, law and politics intersect in the prosecution of a president. In this essay, I examine this nexus by mapping the actions of agents who mobilise to influence how the justice system processes presidential prosecutions: first, accountability actors located in state-based institutions and civil society; second, partisan actors in the executive and legislative branches; and third, defendants, and their partisan and civil society supporters. This study argues that variations in the make-up, resources and alignment of these sets of actors fundamentally shape the trajectory of legal cases. Proceedings against three former presidents of Ecuador are analysed: Abdalá Bucaram, Jamil Mahuad and Gustavo Noboa.