Spanish Corruption: Between Pornography And The Mafia

I've recently written a couple articles about corruption in Spain, and I've always felt it was like a titanic task. Where to start? Is our political system or our deeply divided society at the bottom of it? Is it ok to single out a political party whose members have been — once and again — involved in corruption cases? Would that distract my readers from the fact that this is a social issue going beyond politics?

It's never easy to convey such a cultural (and messy) issue to an international readership. It's hard to prove how widespread this social malady is in Spain, even if everyone who lives in the country knows. Either writing or talking to friends from abroad, I always leave with the feeling that people from Northern Europe (my usual audience) haven't really understood what corruption really means.

Now, this article by Diego Torres for Politico could be better written. It could also have a catchier pace or a more solid structure. I would have probably written it differently. But there's something I wouldn't have done better than him: He has caught the spirit of Spanish corruption, in a sentence:

José Antonio Martín Pallín, a former judge at the Supreme Court, said the tone of the leaked conversations was somewhere “between pornographic and Mafia-like”.

That's it! So many word counts lost in long-winded explanations! Corruption here is somehow nasty, fake, exploitative and sexist, like pornography. And it's also scary, fascistic and bound to a code of silence, like the Mafia. So simple, yet so accurate. Thanks, Diego!

The article itself is a good explanation of the Lezo case, one of the latest to put a Spanish political leader in jail. It also includes a complete description of why judges in the country face serious challenges to their independence.

Read through, particularly if your country also has corruption problems, and tell me, is your corruption as nasty as ours?