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An image that contains a list of the most corrupt countries in the world, headed by Colombia, went viral on Twitter and was spread by different public figures in the country, such as Daniel Samper Ospina, Gustavo Bolívar and Gustavo Petro. This corresponds to an issue of Noticias CM &, which was subsequently rectified.
The error of the news, published in January this year, is that CM & reaches an incorrect conclusion by confusing the information from two different sources. The list that places Colombia in the first place corresponds to a survey carried out by US News on the countries that are perceived as the most corrupt, applied only to 73 of these and to people of 36 different nationalities.
This does not precisely indicate that Colombia is the most corrupt country as it is a perception survey.
In fact, the main organization that measures the level of corruption in countries, Transparency International, in its latest report published at the beginning of the year found that the country ranked 96 out of 198 in transparency.
Similarly, CM & denied the news and clarified the situation. And while the study is real, it is an informal poll that contradicts what respected organizations such as Transparency International say. This has even been verified by media such as Colombiacheck, our partner of the Regional Network of Verifiers.
One day after the publication of the article by US News, the CM & newscast made its respective note entitled “What a shame! Colombia is the most corrupt country in the world, according to a study, “in which they mention that the survey was conducted on 20,000 people, who had to answer how close is the relationship between each country with the term” corruption. ”
For his part, on December 10, Senator Gustavo Petro shared the image of the list on Twitter saying: “Ladies and gentlemen, members of Uribe, do you really feel proud to have built the most corrupt country on earth? Colombia Humana promises to fully combat corruption in Colombia. We are moving towards the moral restoration of the Republic ”.
As a result of this, hours after the publication of Petro’s trill, Transparencia por Colombia issued a statement clarifying that said viral information is false.
In the statement, the organization explains that the US News study has nothing to do with Transparency International, as the journalistic report implies. Likewise, they indicate that the next transparency ranking (the 2020 one) will be released on January 28, 2021.
It should be mentioned that a similar statement had previously been disseminated, but this time leading to believe that it was information published by the International Transparency Organization, which turned out to be false. Colombiacheck verified such news. Read the article here.
Not the most corrupt, not the most transparent
On the other hand, different rankings have described the situation of global corruption and in no result does Colombia occupy the position to which it is attributed, so such a conclusion can be contrasted with results presented in other media. However, the country does have a high percentage of corruption, according to citizen perception studies.
For example, in the Global Barometer of Corruption in Latin America and the Caribbean, a survey carried out between January and March 2019, in one of these polls it was recorded that 52% of people maintain that corruption increased in the last 12 months, placing the country in ninth place on that list. These results were published by the same transparency organization.
Even in the same counting methodology of this ranking by US News, the rankings are based on “how global perceptions define countries in terms of a series of qualitative characteristics, impressions that have the potential to boost trade, travel and investment and directly affect national economies ”, it says in this note published by them on their website. Therefore, in the list of best countries, they placed Colombia in position 51.
On December 10, the newscast published a correction to express that it was a serious error on the part of the journalist Jimmy Pepinosa when he showed the information as if it were a report endorsed by the International Transparency Organization and not as a perception ranking prepared by the American magazine.
There they recall that this is an informal poll that has no relationship with the official reports of the mentioned NGO.
In conclusion, the statement provided by both the medium and the different influential figures through Twitter is wrong, since there was a wrong interpretation of the intention of the information in question.
And although Colombia does have a reputation for being a country with corruption scandals, the international organizations that measure this parameter place it in the middle of the world spectrum, that is, it is not the most transparent, but not the most corrupt either.
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