Hours of waiting at the entrance of dilapidated hospitals, without equipment, with exhausted medical staff. Medicines bought at high prices on the black market. Desperate families who sell their meager possessions to buy oxygen cylinders at exorbitant prices and save their sick relatives.
The health crisis due to the new coronavirus has highlighted in Latin America the extent of the deficiencies of the health systems, victims of a recurring lack of public investment but also of corruption, an endemic disease that affects all the countries of the region. – which totaled, Saturday, October 10, 10 million identified cases, nearly 330,000 deaths with the highest death rate in the world.
“Health is the most affected sector after infrastructure and education”
Purchases of overpriced equipment, embezzlement of public aid funds, white elephants, mafias who trade in falsified medicines, hospitals ordered, paid for and never built… the list of acts of corruption and trafficking during the health crisis is long. And is no stranger to the fact that six of the ten countries in the world with the highest number of deaths from Covid-19 as a proportion of their population are located in Latin America. In May, a report by the Lawyers Council for Civil and Economic Rights, an American organization, found that in twelve of the fourteen countries in the region studied, corruption was found in public procurement contracts related to the fight against the pandemic.
In Colombia, recalls Andres Hernandez, director of the organization Transparencia por Colombia (local section of Transparency International), health is “The third sector of activity most affected by corruption, after infrastructure and education”. From the “AIDS cartel” to the “hemophilia cartel,” Colombia has a long history of dealing with health scandals. The Covid-19 crisis has not helped. “To fight effectively against the pandemic, it was necessary both to open the tap of public expenditure and to speed up the procedures”, underlines Mr. Hernandez, describing a situation that has repeated itself across the region.
In eastern Colombia, the governor of the rural department of Vichada, Alvaro Leon, was suspended on August 28 for four months: the additional cost of food purchase contracts signed by his services is estimated at 300 million pesos (65,000 euros), a fortune in this poor and neglected region.
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