Affiliation:
1. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
Abstract
The US and Puerto Rican governments’ anti-corruption and anti-fraud legislation and policies exacerbated the socio-economic impacts of the coronavirus disease (COVID)-19 pandemic in Puerto Rico (PR). This article demonstrates how anti-corruption interventions prevented those in most need from receiving the economic benefits of the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program and other unemployment insurance benefits. Analyzing this specific instance of anti-corruption and anti-fraud interventions amid the COVID-19 pandemic allows for a deeper examination of how colonial interventions undermined PR’s capacity to handle the pandemic, exacerbated its socio-economic impact and created an unequal recovery. Thus, the article illustrates the contradictions of anti-corruption as punitive governance and the way in which a specific notion of corruption is reproduced through governmental actions, legal practices, and policies. Altogether, this article aims to contribute to the discussion on how colonial and punitive anti-corruption interventions enhance social exclusion, disproportionately harm racialized communities, and undermine people’s capacity to address period of crisis.
Subject
Sociology and Political Science
Reference89 articles.
1. The State of Exception
2. Alvarez Y, Sepúlveda A (2020) El colapso de la plataforma del desempleo se pudo haber evitado. Noticel, 8 May. Available at: https://www.noticel.com/gobierno/ahora/top-stories/20200508/el-colapso-de-la-plataforma-del-desempleo-se-pudo-haber-evitado/
3. Corruption and the postocolonial state: how the west invented African corruption