I join Greg and certainly others in congratulating you on the tour de force of corporate transparency and accountability posts. While the T/A movement has taken ahold in Latin America’s public sector in recent years, corporate T/A initiatives remain nascent and disparate, as you well point out. In order to build a similar movement in Latin America’s private sector, PODER in Mexico, Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente and Poderopedia in Chile, Dejusticia in Colombia, and others must seek opportunities for synergy and collaboration. For our movement to succeed, the basic principles of corporate responsibility, sustainability, and transparency must emerge beyond legal texts, annual reports, and business school classrooms to become cultural, economic, political, and social norms. As a society, we must demand of the corporations that operate in our communities the same standards of compliance, disclosure, and justice that we expect from our governments. These are matters of public interest. However, for these principles to become norms and for all sectors of society to agree on their importance for democracy and development, our movement must be seen, heard, and read. This is where your blog post fits perfectly, providing a panorama and a forum upon which to build. I look forward to further conversation, and action!

Regarding PODER’s Quién es Quien Wiki (Who’s Who Wiki), which you mention in your post (thanks for the plug for the programmer position we seek to fill), we’re eager to collaborate and share information in order to build this movement more effectively. In fact, we’re already in communication with some of the whistleblower platforms that you name to do just that — build from points of mutual strength instead of reinvent the wheel.

As for inequality and elite influence over public decision-making, at PODER our latest research on Mexican corporations and investors, for example, reveals that 48 men and their families – all members of the über exclusive Mexican Council of Businessmen – exercise heavy albeit indirect influence over 27% of the country’s GDP. And this does not even include two of the country’s three richest men: Carlos Slim and Ricardo Salinas Pliego! Perhaps unsurprisingly, this concentration of capital has only increased since 2008.

Thanks again for the important contribution.

Ben Cokelet / PODER

I think we should look at these innovations as aids in accomplishing the sleuthing required to expose hidden conflicts of interest. Politicians often register assets or interests in the name of other people, even unassuming people. In Brazil they call these people “laranjas” (oranges). It takes the elbow-grease of investigative reporting strategies to reveal these deep cover-ups. However, if we were to map these laranjas, we might also see that they’re unconnected nodes, and thus suspicious in-and-of themselves.