ABSTRACT
Argentina's history of corruption from colonial times to the present shows that, following Susan Rose-Ackerman's institutional perspective, the country has moved from a state capture typology to a bilateral monopoly and, more recently, to a kleptocracy. Structural weaknesses (political instability, authoritarianism, lack of checks and balances, corporatism, among others) have influenced this 200-year process. In this context, anticorruption reforms (1999‒2001 and 2015‒19) ended in failure. Furthermore, because of real human-rights violations in judicial proceedings that were tainted by political influence, the second period yielded a backlash (2019‒present). The chapter draws on the concept of “lawfare” to argue that anticorruption reform abused the law and judicial proceedings by turning them into weapons to overthrow pro-poor governments. Drawing on this historical narrative, it confronts these failures through a political-economy analysis that identifies four permanent underlying hindrances to reform and highlights five lessons that anticorruption champions in Argentina and elsewhere should keep in mind when funding programs in structurally corrupt environments.
