Dissident Spotlight: Daphne Caruana Galizia
Daphne Galizia's murder shows how journalists can be unsafe even in developed countries if their leaders are accustomed to dangerous levels of corruption.
In 2016, a set of documents called the Panama Papers came to light. They showed how wealthy politicians and businesspeople funneled money to offshore accounts and hid extravagant amounts of wealth.
One of the people reporting on the Panama Papers and her country’s leaders implicated in it was Daphne Caruana Galizia. She had built a career as an investigative reporter in part with a blog where she included investigations into her country’s most corrupt leaders.
On October 16, 2017, Galizia was killed by a car bomb near her home. Police arrested three men in connection with her murder in December, who were later charged with executing the bombing. One of the conspirators, Vince Muscat, claimed that the man who detonated the car bomb received information about Galizia’s whereabouts from former Minister Chris Cardona.
While lawsuits related to the murder remain ongoing, the lessons for anyone interested in digging into their leaders’ financial affairs are sobering.
Corruption Corrodes Everyone and Everything it Touches
People know to instinctively recoil from the idea that a representative of a country’s people would use their position to steal from them instead of representing their interests.
But the lengths that people will go to to protect the world they’ve built should concern voters as much as journalists.
Journalists who uncover financial schemes of powerful people are often faced with libel lawsuits, arrests, or other forms of intimidation to remove scrutiny from powerful people. Those same tools can easily be turned on ordinary citizens to prevent them from replacing corrupt leaders. Galizia’s murder is also a chilling reminder of how far some elites will go to hide their crimes, even in supposedly developed countries.
But corruption has another harmful effect. It makes extreme candidates who are willing to “disrupt the system” seem not just palatable but necessary for the country’s survival. The erosion of trust in a country’s elites can open an electorate to an outsider’s wildest claims.
Corruption doesn’t just degrade the people who engage in it or the state institutions that accommodate it. The quality of candidates who can capitalize on voters’ mistrust falls, too.
Anyone in a reasonably well-functioning society should bear that in mind when deciding who to place in power.