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Society for Cultural Anthropology
Oral Presentation Session
Alejandra Azuero Quijano
PhD Candidate
University of Chicago
This paper explores how two discursive modes of framing a financial crisis in contemporary Colombia worked to disrupt corruption as a framework of accountability. The scandal involved the design of a complex financial scheme for funding water infrastructure in Colombia’s most impoverished municipalities. The financial instrument, which came to be infamously known as water bonds, strangled already economically fragile towns with exorbitant interest rates, forcing the Colombian state to bail them out. When opposition in Congress denounced the secretary of finance as both designer and beneficiary of the scheme calling him to testify before Congress, mainstream media and political parties critical of the national government quickly turned the crisis into a corruption narrative. Crucially, two other frames of accountability emerged on the sidelines that sought to account for the wrong produced by the water bonds and those responsible by turning to finance. The first one compared the Water Bond scandal to the 2008 U.S. real estate bubble; a line of argument that not only encouraged the public to understand the crisis as a financial engineering project, but also linked it to Colombia’s 2014 investment banking debacle. The second one drew from a long history of Latin American postcolonial critical political discourse to analyze the water bonds as a type of financial instrument that produced various temporalities of harm that would continue to be actualized for generations to come. Even though they seemed marginal, both insurgent frames worked to prevent finance itself from being swept under the rug by “corruption talk.”