International Anti-Corruption Commissions, Elite Manipulation, and Democratic Backsliding in Central America

Amid the growing global anti-corruption push, international actors have promoted hybrid interventions, partnering with domestic officials to investigate and prosecute graft. Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras became testing grounds for these international anti-corruption commissions (IACCs), which assumed different structures with divergent effects. Moreover, all three were disbanded leading to broader authoritarian regressions. What explains variation in the trajectories of Central America’s IACCs? Why did these institutional innovations end in greater democratic backsliding? These cases illustrate how the region’s political and economic elites leveraged the reputational benefits of inviting in IACCs, while learning from one another how to constrain their authority and undermine them. Deepening democratic backsliding, moreover, demonstrates the challenges of strengthening rule of law institutions amid fragile democratic architecture. Despite a growing consensus around the need for post-conflict statebuilding before democracy-building, the Central American cases demonstrate that such efforts remain vulnerable absent political party, electoral, and institutional autonomy-enhancing reforms.