Power and corruption in the courts in Ibero-America

A former president being indicted makes a front page; serving the sentence in a cell is another story, much rarer. This tracker follows the second. It gathers twenty senior Ibero-American officials —presidents, vice-presidents, ministers— with a criminal case for corruption or crimes committed while in power, and measures in each not the scandal but the outcome: what sentence was imposed, whether it became final and, above all, whether it was served and in what form.

The sample is deliberately diverse in geography and ending. It began with an Ibero-American focus —Peru leads with five cases, the country hit hardest by the Odebrecht scheme— and has spread to four continents: Western Europe (Sarkozy in France, Berlusconi in Italy), Asia (Park Geun-hye in South Korea, Najib Razak in Malaysia over the 1MDB looting, Netanyahu in Israel, still on trial) and Africa (Jacob Zuma in South Africa). In total, nineteen countries and twenty of the twenty-nine cases led by heads of state or government. This is not a list of minor politicians: it is the summit of power passing through the courts.

The spectrum of outcomes

Half the cases carry a final conviction without nuance; others add final convictions already served. But the tracker's real value lies in the uncomfortable categories. There are fully annulled convictions: that of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose Lava Jato sentences were struck down by Brazil's Supreme Court in 2021, which restored his political rights and let him return to the presidency; and that of Juan Orlando Hernández, sentenced to 45 years for drug trafficking in New York in 2024, pardoned by Donald Trump in 2025 and with the conviction annulled by an appeals court in 2026. There is a final conviction without compliance: José Antonio Griñán's over the Andalusian ERE case, granted protection by the Constitutional Court in 2023, avoiding his entry into prison. There are convictions in absentia, like Mauricio Funes's in El Salvador, tried while living in exile in Nicaragua. And there are still-open proceedings, like those of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and Martín Vizcarra in Peru or José Sócrates in Portugal —Portugal's first former head of government tried for corruption—, where there is still no final sentence.

That dispersion is the finding, not the noise. A region where most convictions of former presidents do not end in actual imprisonment says something different —and more complex— than the simple narrative of 'justice works' or 'justice fails'. It says that between the sentence and its enforcement lies a wide margin shaped by age, health, legal remedies, parliamentary immunity and, in some cases, the geography of asylum. Pardon emerges as a recurring escape route: Alberto Fujimori in Peru, Park Geun-hye in South Korea and Juan Orlando Hernández at Trump's hand left prison —or avoided it— by political, not judicial, decision.

The shadow of Odebrecht

One thread runs through much of the Latin American casework: the Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht, whose network of bribes in exchange for public works splashed a dozen countries. In this tracker it appears explicitly in the convictions of Alejandro Toledo and Ollanta Humala in Peru and in Kuczynski's case, and indirectly in the very Lava Jato scheme that produced —and later annulled— Lula's convictions. Odebrecht turned a national scandal into a continental one and, with it, accountability stopped being each country's affair and became a regional phenomenon.

The other pattern is temporal: the sentences cluster in recent years —2023, 2024 and 2025 account for most—, suggesting that much of this casework, opened in the past decade, is reaching its outcome now. The judicial machinery is slow, but in this period it has produced more final sentences against former heads of state than at any earlier time.

Why guilt is not judged here

This tracker documents procedural facts, not moral verdicts. Several of those convicted —Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Rafael Correa, Jeanine Áñez— maintain that their cases were political persecution, and that claim is recorded as attributed to them, with the outlet neither endorsing nor denying it. The distinction matters: recording that a final conviction exists is not the same as asserting it is just, just as recording an acquittal or annulment is not the same as asserting innocence. The data point is the status of the process and its verifiable source.

That neutrality is precisely what allows the whole to be read without falling into the partisan trap. The tracker includes convictions of figures on the left and the right, in governments of both stripes, and its only entry criterion is that a criminal proceeding with an identifiable outcome and a public source exists. What the reader does with that map —and with the uncomfortable gap between conviction and cell it reveals— is up to them.