The order of the unbelievers. A corruption trial of bureaucrats

Abstract

In this paper we study a very complete trial for embezzlement by appropriation in an intermediate city in Colombia. We review not only the sentence and the entire trial report, but also evidence provided by the Prosecutor's Office and its investigators. This case allows an exploration of the objective and subjective barriers of the bureaucrats and the custom in the face of corruption that allows us to analyze what was definitive for there to be a sanction. It is important to advance that what was definitive in this trial was not the discovery and what we normally understand as an absent civil society, here the crime was alerted and began to be corrected from the internal part of the mayor's office (the municipal government); the crime was committed by officials of the mayor's office and also accused, which makes the municipal government the victim, but also that the criminal enterprise arises from the entrails of the same institution. The trial offers a correlate of responsibility and astonishment in the formal voice of the mayor's office (the municipal government), which may be sincere and well-intentioned, and a self-regulation of an excess in an informal voice of a treasury secretary that ends up recorded by judicial investigators.