All that you won’t find in the Peruvian Congress’s Lava Jato majority report you will find in Francisco Durand’s latest book ‘Odebrecht: The Company that Captured Governments’. The book is on its way to becoming a best-seller in Peru, selling more than 500 copies in its first 24 hours. Published by Oxfam and the Catholic University, it analyses the activities of Odebrecht in buying up successive governments in Peru in its attempt to secure privileged access to public works contracts.

Among the largest contracts won by Odebrecht were the Lima Metro, the Inter-Oceanic Highway and the Olmos irrigation scheme.

The book follows up on a series of Oxfam publications, written by Durand, on the phenomenon of state capture in Peru. For a review of the book see.

As last week’s killings in Colombia show, there is still more to the Odebrecht corruption saga than meets the eye.

Also, Oxfam (along with CLACSO in Buenos Aires) is organising the publication of a comparative study into state capture in Latin America and the Caribbean based on reports from 13 countries. This will investigate how ‘capture’ by elites leads to fiscal policies that are unfavourable to the interests of the poor across the region.