Venezuela, after Haiti the most corrupt nation in America
We have written a lot about corruption in Venezuela and how the situation is deteriorating day after day. If we read just a bit about the historical development of different nations we can see corruption trends can be detected already centuries or millenia earlier. Still, there is no doubt corruption (or honesty) levels can improve or worsen depending on the decisions people take at any given time and moment. Chile's and Ghana's records are proofs things can get better.
I won't invent the wheel. I will just go over some points discussed in - the horror, the horror - Wikipedia.
Take a look at this. Is there something we can learn from there for a better Venezuela? Are there things we can make more concrete, sort of fool-proof?
Two little ideas:
1) Make transparency and the effects of corruption the subject of a weekly lesson early on in school at least for one year. The best timing would be when pupils get universal history of that of Venezuela. Right now there are some subjects like 'civil rights' and stuff like that . What pupils in Venezuela do now mostly is to learn by heart about voting rights and what a president and the National Assembly are supposed to do. Pupils need a course where they don't learn by heart, but have to reason, justify, think about Venezuela and its honesty/corruption levels. They need a course where they can discuss the results of corruption indexes and the situation in other countries. We need a course where pupils can ask and answer to the whys. Right people in countries such as Congo, Russia or Venezuela just say "es que aquí somos así". Why? It's not in the genes. I have another idea on that: let pupils watch at least 2 videos of pupils from other regions of Venezuela discussing the same ideas.
2) Make compulsory that every state and every municipality publish their expenditures of the last year on Internet. The details should be presented according to a unified form and they should be presented at the latest 6 months after the start of the next year. Not publishing them should automatically lead to some strict punishment. I imagine this would be very interesting. I can imagine the governor of Delta Amacuro publishing all the details about how much money she got and how she spent it. I imagine people in Curiapo, Pedernales or Tucupita reading about that information and comparing it with that of other regions.
I will keep discussing some of the topics treated in that Wikipedia article later on.