Public affairs, transparency and corruption : Hernan Charosky at TEDxRiodelaPlata

Hernán Charosky: Public issues, transparency and corruption It will be almost 30 years, 29 since we had the first elections, of what would be this democratic period. I was 12 years old. October 30, 1983. Many of those who are old enough to remember, will remember the feeling of that time. And those who are young, let's say, I envy them for being younger, but they envy me, and they envy us who are older for having lived that time, that emotion, that expectation, that hope of 1983. That everything good we could expect, could come true. That hope that came along with democracy, was the hope that after almost eight years of military dictatorship, of massive violations to human rights, our National Constitution would work again, the one I had studied 2 years before, during the dictatorship, in fifth grade. And I asked my teacher Francisca: "Why are you teaching us this if it's worthless?" Two years later I started to see that this set of rules I was taught had organized the country, that had separated the powers, that had guaranteed rights for people, started to work again. And maybe, fully for the first time because it would be the period - and thanks God, and thanks to you and everyone of us here - it's still the longer period of democracy we have lived. And that feeling we had in 1983 mainly has to do with the fact that for the first time there would be, after so long, the possibility that whoever was elected was someone who people put their trust in. Someone whose authority, resources and capacity to decide, were given to them for their fellow citizens' decision. That was one of the - for me in personal, but I think for many from my generation and above all in the previous ones, those who have lived as adults the 20th century, something that changed things deeply. In the first years of democracy, really important things kept on happening that reaffirmed the idea that Law was above Power, that Law regulated Power, and that guaranteed us our rights. One of the most exciting and founding moments of that is the image, that again the oldest of us will remember, of the "Juicio de las Juntas". That was another powerful message, after CONADEP's investigation, of trying to understand and document what had happened, that the law once again, beyond the important meaning it had in terms of human rights, in institutional terms, guaranteed us all that no matter how powerful or owners of life and death had been the ex commandants in that time, they would be judged under Civil Law. Nevertheless, few years later democracy started finding limitation, weaknesses. and a little later, specially when there was a transition in the economic paradigm, when privatizations started massively, corruption started being the larger limitation, and arisen from beneath the democratic political system, that threatened that confidence citizens had started to deposit in their authorities. Corruption progressively started to be a more common topic that occupied more place in journals, in the political debate, in the parliamentary debate. Scandals in privatizations, in tenders, in the distribution of public goods and services. The detective genre got into the political genre. And... in that time I personally felt that the initial promise of democracy was largely being betrayed. Because if we take... there is a classic definition, very common, of corruption, that is that corruption is the use of public resources and authority in private benefit or in particular benefit. If the confidence the citizens deposit in the authorities is used to the personal benefit of a civil servant who is enriched or that benefits a business, or that benefits a political group, so that with those resources is strengthened in power, in any of these cases, it is being betrayed that confidence that originally had been democratically entrusted. That is why I am going to ask you to, in this moment we are going to talk, think about corruption, that is an ethical topic and a topic of personal decisions, not entirely from this point of view, but from the political, democratic, institutional point of view. From the point of view of what are those in charge doing with the power we give them. Then, if we look at it from this point of view, we will see that citizens capacity of remembering that the power is in their hands and that they can do something to limit the abuse of that power, is the key to recover the latent democratic capacity we had almost 30 years ago. There are lots of examples in Argentina and in other countries in which citizens wake up to their ability to control who has the power. And basically there are three common elements in these experiences. The first one is the use of common knowledge. Common knowledge, what I mean is: those things we share as knowledge that in part is public information, the information that the government, the state, the public administration have; but also the common knowledge of what we see every day. Let's see, if we see a pothole in the street every day or prices rise in a determined way every day there is a common knowledge beyond the public information we receive about it. Then, common knowledge plus public information or what we notice commonly plus public information, is this common knowledge that joined with collective coordination, to the capacity to act in function of that common knowledge, can produce changes. Common knowledge, collective coordination and changes. Those three elements can produce, in particular moments, the citizens' capacity of regaining their power, of controlling the abuse and setting up boundaries. An example, that for me was impressive for the context in which it happened, was the outrage of 2004, march 11, Madrid, Atocha. For those who remember it, you will know the first version the Spanish government gave was that the responsible of the outrage had been the ETA group. However, shortly after that, suspicions that this was not true started to arise. And there was a great storminess about the information that ran through SMS, through text messages, through internet forums in the newspapers, citizens started to suspect of that version and started to pass on messages that said: "We need to know the truth. Pass it over." And that derived in a series of street manifestations, in which the government was required to say the truth about what was going on. And a few days later, they had to admit that actually that hypothesis was wrong, not mistaken, but at some point distorted. And that the outrage responded to Al Qaeda. It was shortly before elections, and these facts changed the course of them. With time and the development of technologies, there started to appear new ways of collective coordination and of information sharing. For example in Kenya, in the year 2008, there was a terrible political violence that lead into abuse and human rights violations in the civil population through all the country, specially in remote and rural locations. A Kenyan activist came to ask through social networks that a digital developer helped him create a system that would allow in real time and through text messages, to document the human rights violations. Both to empower victims, because anonymity weakens them and to document the process for what would happen after. And that is how USHAJIDI appeared that is one of the main platforms that exist to map all kinds of events. It started to map this type of violent events, but nowadays for example, it is used in our country or in Perú to document irregularities in elections. or to document, for example, in another case in Kenya, shortages of medicines in health centers. A patient goes to a health center, he is supposed to receive medicine X. He does not receive medicine X and sends a text message to a particular address, that appears in a web page, and in that page it is shown if that medicine should be in stock or not. And if it should be in stock there is evidence that there is someone who is diverting medicine. That's to say, there are many possibilities to recover those capacities. When I worked in the Anti-corruption office I saw in the health area, for example, many funds deviations were done by supposed payments that never actually happened. In famous corruption cases, like the famous case of bribery in the Senate, we saw how Intelligence funds were used to pay the will of senators. Those same reserved funds have been used, for example, to buy wills, to buy testimonies, in a case as painful to us as the AMIA case is. And what I could prove in these investigation is that when citizens participate actively and get organized, and when the victims or the affected ones get organized, they have greater capacity to generate knowledge, to coordinate themselves, and to produce changes. When I was in 'Citizens Power', we tried one of these initiatives of collective coordination. And using the information that during many years this organization, that is a member of Transparency International, a global net against corruption, what it had achieved was to document during many years the outgoings of official publicity. And using the information of the electoral justice, campaign finance donations. Two databases: official advertising, campaign donations. We reintroduced that information in an even bigger platform that went with an action in social networks, mainly in Twitter, were we asked people to document what they were seeing in the streets about the campaign, so we could compare the information we were documenting about official advertising, governments outgoings in advertising, campaigns outgoings, and those things citizens saw in the street. That gathered common knowledge, public information and capacity of collective action, because we asked to politics to tell us in real time who was supporting their campaign. Something that they had to do all the same by law, but at the end of the campaign, and what we wanted them to say was who were their sponsors, to see what was the influence of money in politics and to see up to which point, candidates of the ruling party were being benefited with money for official advertising from the public administration which they belong to. All of these examples, show us that there are latent capacities to generate control, for, let's call them, civic activities that basically consist of, and many times without leaving the comfort of our computers, information about public policies that affect us. If we are users of the Health Insurance System, PAMI, Medical Insurances, we should ask ourselves where is the information about the contracts with which services are paid off and what is what we should be receiving. Or if we are public transportion users, knowing what happens with the subsidies, with the money of our taxes, that concessionaires are given. The recent prosecution of public officers and businessman in the Once case, painfully shows us that corruption kills. That when funds are massively deviated, the proper provision of a service is at risk. And that this can end up in fatal consequences which could be controlled beforehand. If we get involved publicly as citizens we develop our capacity to read public information, sharing it and generating action. And where there is no public information, because we have lots of limitation in our country, we have a half-full glass: more than half of the provinces have information access laws. We have a half-empty glass: Less than half and at a national level, do not have a information access law. We have a half-full glass: We have a national decree that allows us to ask for public information. We have a half-empty glass, severely half-empty: we do not have reliable statistics. But overall we have the capacity to use the information that is available. For example, the Executive Power officers sworn declarations could be obtained in 48 hours if you write to the Anti-corruption Office. The audit reports from the "National General Audit" that permanently monitor transport, health, infrastructure public policies are online: you can inform yourselves about what the audit is saying about how public policies are working. The NGOs produce information permanently about political finances, official publicity, information access, national judges designation about city judges. All this information talks about policies that affect us. If - independently of our political sympathy - we capture this information, we share it, and we generate demands, demands of improvement in policies, demands of reliable information that is missing, possibly we could regain that promise and that democratic capacity that in 1983 had been promised. And that depends only of us, maybe of that 1% of our time we can dedicate to it, that this could happen again. Thank you so much. (Applause)