No one is to blame, and the citizen pays. In other words, we citizens have to give more and more of what we earn with hard work so that officials, who don't have to worry about generating income, don't lower their standard of living, because they are already used to it. Who pays for these crimes? Corruption stalls us. While "playing smart" is tolerated as part of the national character in an open cultural normalization, it promotes impunity, encouraging the repetition of these criminal behaviors. "If the authorities commit crimes, I as a citizen can do it too." The prevalence of corruption is the result of a vicious circle where the lack of firm sanctions, coupled with structural factors such as weak institutions, makes citizens see that crime does pay. In the parliamentary chamber, if you make a mistake with the budget, you simply ask for more money, which is nothing more than more state debt, more taxes, and more levies on the people. Have you ever seen anything like it? People who deliberately polluted rivers to save money, by improperly disposing of agricultural or human waste, should be in jail, but instead, they now demand respect and silence. "They created jobs," they say. Impunity condemns us. The government should have solved a decades-long problem immediately. But the honey of power intoxicates. The rubber can also be terrible, next time around. The author is a civil engineer and writer. Now they seek for criminals to be the ones to grant permission to those seeking truth to be publicly mentioned. What they don't say is that, for lacking ethics, they made people sick and killed them. In fact, it's a lucrative business. We have been more than just silent, wide-eyed witnesses to the parade of multimillion-dollar heists perpetrated by public officials and their relatives, as it becomes the family business to defraud the state. They catch the thief red-handed. And that's how we are doing. The capture of the state is reflected in the lack of capacity that many officials are accused of. As I said, a lucrative business. An agreement is reached where 6 million is returned and that's it. They leave a country in complete defenselessness, a country that needs intelligent people managing new and creative ways to generate income, because their efforts always go to maintaining the status quo of their seat. We have had decades of poor officials whose job was to watch over the well-being and health of the population, but who have limited themselves to sitting in offices doing absolutely nothing, but getting paid. The social and economic stagnation of a country go hand in hand with corruption. In the private sector, if you make a mistake with a budget, the company goes bankrupt. You steal 30 million, you return 6, and you are left with 24, clean as a whistle. The lack of accountability in public office simply shows that we live in a society with inverted roles. So, being "exposed" in the media for a little while doesn't affect them in the slightest, compared to the enormous economic benefit they get from looting the state. The very low success rate of Justice, especially in high-profile cases—that is, the worst criminals we have had, calling it what it is—is the biggest motivation for many other citizens to seek a way to approach that dark venture. 30 million of state money is lost. Poor things. While many professionals have to diversify their efforts to support their families honestly, in the parliamentary chamber they are too busy generating sterile discussions on how to silence public opinion even more. A fat and inefficient bureaucracy costs us millions in monthly expenses, without having to demonstrate a single result of their management to certify that it is worth what it costs us. Why? Because it is very profitable and has almost no consequences. For people who don't come with the "moral values" chip pre-installed, being shameless and unscrupulous comes naturally to them.
