Surprisingly, Brazil is never quite as high up as you might imagine on Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index. Brazil has remained far from the top of the list, coming in 79th place in 2016 and 76th in 2015. But the results of the NGO’s Latin America-specific report, released this October, had some surprises in store for Brazilians.
Although 78 percent of Brazilians believe that corruption has grown in their country over the past year, Brazil suffered from far lower levels of petty corruption than its neighbors. In nine of the twenty countries surveyed, more than 30...