Judicial corruption in Latin America: Ecuador in comparative perspective

This article describes the actors, the negotiation-process and exchanges take place in judicial corruption. From a theoretical proposal in which the dynamics surround corruption scandals are different depending on the place that the court has in the Judicial Branch, in the empirical analysis the paper describes how this social phenomenon works. For this purpose, the paper fo-cusses in an extensive study of the Ecuadorian judicial system, one of the most corrupt in Latin America, through one 121 in-depth interviews with justice operators. The findings show the existence of organized groups that promote the illegitimate exchange of resources for judicial decisions and that are not only made up of judges and prosecutors but also of lawyers who play as brokers between the citizenship and judicial actors.