The Elementary Forms of Corruption: Moral Imagination and Political Change in Brazil, Aaron Ansell, 2025, Hau Books
It takes a special type of imperial hypocrisy to accuse Latin American leaders and politicians of corruption while ignoring the indelible stains left by organised crime on yourself.
Of course, Donald Trump is the global champion of such a dirty habit, which the capricious US Caesar has even turned into something of a political advantage.
Not only did Trump hire Mafia companies to help build Trump Tower and Plaza apartments in Manhattan, his business empire benefited from money laundering by Colombian drug traffickers through his Ocean Club in Panama.
Indeed, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston is just one of several writers to investigate Trump’s uncomfortably cosy relationship with criminal gangs prior to his first term.
Writing in 2016, Johnston stated: “From the public record and published accounts … it’s possible to assemble a clear picture of what we do know. The picture shows that Trump’s career has benefited from a decades-long and largely successful effort to limit and deflect law enforcement investigations into his dealings with top mobsters, organised crime associates, labour fixers, corrupt union leaders, con artists and even a one-time drug trafficker…”
And let’s never forget that Trump is the first—and only—convicted criminal ever elected to the US presidency, having been found guilty in 2024 of falsifying business records.
Nonetheless, such is his brazen attitude to his own corruption, that he flaunts it—earning him perverse credit for authenticity and taking the sting out of scandals uncovered by muckraking journalists.
In a brilliant article, Guardian writer David Smith quotes Larry Sabato, director of the Centre for Politics at the University of Virginia: “This is a dangerous notion that, just because a president chooses to be corrupt in public openly, it’s OK. People say, well, if it were really corrupt, it would be hidden. It’s a false assumption, but many people have it. It’s a new theory of scandal.”
So when Trump, through his deranged pro-consul Marco Rubio, pressures countries like Mexico to prosecute politicians with suspected links to organised crime then extradite them to the US, it sticks in the craw to say the least.
Rubio himself has been the focus of investigations into corruption, he has faced awkward questions about his brother-in-law’s links to a drug cartel, and he has actively frustrated efforts to investigate allegations elsewhere: in May 2018, Rubio blocked $6m in State Department funding for the successful International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG).
Such is the exaggerated impunity that Trump, Rubio et al. enjoy for their endless mendacity when pointing the finger of corruption at foreign leaders, that they have embarked on extrajudicial executions of their citizens without a shred of evidence—or the slightest fear of legal repercussions.
The point here being that Trump and Rubio demonstrate beyond doubt that the notion of “corruption” is a moveable feast, overwhelmingly defined by the powerful in ways that enable them to use it as a club with which to beat the weak.
What we understand as corruption, especially when judging countries in the Global South, is based on Western and Christian moral inflections by powerful or influential northern countries that routinely judge others.
Aaron Ansell alludes to this “transnational, colonising movement of the hegemonic Western model of corruption” in his study of small-town Brazil, beginning with a reflection on what corruption actually means at this local level and then examining how the understanding of it can change over time.
How are we possibly able to know what is really going on in places like Brazil if we cannot even agree on what “corruption” means?
A transcultural analysis of corruption, he suggests, requires a more open, neutral framework for modelling how people use money and other resources in ways that violate sacred distinctions.
His aim is to construct a working definition of corruption open to cultural and historical contingencies—and hence to escape the overbearing Western conceptions of corruption that might be considered little more than colonial ethical standards and categories.
Ansell’s objective is to polish atheoretical lens that enables him to track corruption discourses in the sertanejo region of Piauí state, a region often considered in nationalist rhetoric to be the very core of Brazilian-ness.
His approach distinguishes the varying moral impulses underpinning different senses of “corruption” that map particular ways of viewing one’s own group and legitimising power.
The sertão and northeast Brazil in general is notorious for a longstanding culture of illicit political patronage, but as the author observes, “what sertanejos meant by ‘dirty’ or ‘corrupt’ and what the journalists and urban middle classes meant by those terms never seemed to overlap completely or achieve semantic stability”.
He has set himself an important task, not least because between 2003 and 2022, Brazil was awash with talk about corruption and endless scandals and stings.
In this period, anti-corruption “lawfare” became a vehicle for virulent Left-Right polarisation amid the rise of the equally divisive Bolsonaro regime.
The author takes as his focus municipal-level governance to trace a history of four periods: first, patronage, a traditional colonial-era political legacy that views good leaders as generous father figures; second, “amicopolitics”, a more egalitarian politics of friendship from the mid-twentieth century; third, the politics of redemocratisation during the 1980s that regarded both patronage and amicopolitics as forms of corruption in the modern sense; and finally the period under Bolsonaro’s new Right, in which this authoritarian populist mobilised ideas about corruption that conflated antipoverty policy with an attack on cherished family ideals.
What the author learns is that in today’s sertão there has been no decisive transition from one morality to the next, but continuity and overlap—the ethics of patronage continue to exert a pull on people who otherwise hope to transcend personalistic politics in the name of universal rights and administrative impartiality.
Citing the esteemed anthropologist Michael Herzfeld, the author points to how modern bureaucracies disavow the principles of patronage (loyalty and reciprocity) while relying on them to bolster national solidarity.
Herzfeld’s work has suggested that it is precisely because patronage is derided as atavistic corruption that it binds unruly citizens to one another in a “fellowship of the flawed”, thereby increasing a sense of national authenticity among participants.
That is not to say that notions of corruption do not provide a powerful moral framework in the sertão, merely that they are understood differently and often in several ways—what Ansell calls ethical pluralism.
He writes: “All of this indicates that sertanejos (like everyone) harbour moral sensibilities that are irreducible to those pegged to the classical liberal tradition with its emphasis on universal formal equality, the distinction between the public and private spheres, and so forth.”
Yet at the same time, there appear to be moral transgressions that, if not directly shared across cultures, suggest parallels that offer the possibility of developing an analytical framework or “gradient” of corruption, as the author puts it.
Ansell’s work is therefore valuable for challenging a reluctance among anthropologists to put forward a “general-order concept of corruption” that would provide a framework for exploring its variations within and across cultures.
He argues that there is “a class of moral transgressions that pertains to those offences that threaten the elementary moral organisation of society, a class that differs from those offences perpetrated against particular members of a society (theft, assault, etc.), against the nation (tax fraud, treason, etc.), or against the divine (blasphemy, desecration, etc.) If there are multiple varieties of ‘corruption’, this is because there are multiple ways of configuring moral sociality.”
The common thread in the forms of corruption he considers in four historical periods is a materialist vector—the channelling of resources from those higher in the hierarchy to those lower down and vice versa.
These include money, labour, farm inputs, and other expressions of capital that politicians, in their capacity as fathers, friends, and good citizens, channel downward to their voters.
These resources can be called “gradient-specific currencies”—socially relevant forms of wealth—and in each gradient/currency combination there are models of transgressive behaviour (corruption) that threaten to bring each gradient toward a state of disorder.
This reminds one strongly of the enlightening case of Hilario Ramírez Villanueva, a former mayor in the Mexican state of Nayarit, who candidly told a local re-election rally in 2014 that, yes, he had stolen public funds while in office—“but only a little”.
Just like Trump, he was able to get away with this in a cultural climate in which the powerful flaunt their transgressions as entirely legitimate, meaning they are simply expected to steal, and doing so gives them a perverse populist legitimacy.
After all, it was the notoriously corrupt Mexican minister Carlos Hank González—whose involvement in drug-trafficking Washington believed posed a major criminal threat to the US—who stated the now famous phrase: “Un politico pobre, es un pobre politico”.
Trump and Rubio would be in perfect company with these morally plural politicians of Brazil and Mexico—so perhaps they should examine their understanding of corruption.
Sertanejos condemn those in high office not only for their theft, bribery or electoral fraud, but as Ansell points out, “for their absence from the daily lives of the poor and for the self-aggrandisement that dissipates their coalitions”.
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Categories: Brazil, Mexico, North America, South America