A Guggenheim Fellow and Expert on Government Corruption

Professor Alfonso Quiroz knows a lot about corruption. Not so much the casual, incidental kind that leads people to pilfer hotel ashtrays and towels, more the systemic, institutional variety that enriches the elites of poverty-stricken nations, distorting and retarding national economic development. Professor Quiroz, who has been teaching at Baruch College since 1986, is the author of a new book, Corrupt Circles: A History of Unbounded Graft in Peru (2008) that examines the abuses of power for private gain over a 250-year period. The looting of Peru’s resources and interested mismanagement of its economy has, he concludes, cost the country dearly, inflicting much social harm and obstructing many promising possibilities for development.

Peru also happens to be the country where Professor Quiroz was born and raised, and where he first became interested in issues of economic development as an undergraduate at Universidad Catolica, in Lima. He uses Peru as a case history to illustrate how corruption feeds on itself, undermining both democratic institutions and economic progress.

Professor Quiroz recently received the Abraham Briloff Prize in Ethics for his book on Peru, as well as the President’s Excellence Award for Scholarship at Baruch College’s 2009 Commencement. These have been duly added to a trove of other awards that include a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright, a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Relations, the Robert S. McNamara Fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, and others distinctions too numerous to mention.

His teaching and scholarly interests are broad and far-reaching, including Latin American and Caribbean colonial and modern history, as well as economic history and policy development. Currently, he is engaged on two major projects. He is using his recent Guggenheim Fellowship to research a book on Latin American constitution-making. For this opus, which promises to be both hefty and important, he will compare key principles from the constitutions of Spanish-speaking countries, analyzing governing documents from first draft to most recent incarnation. “I explore problems associated with constitutional fragility, resistance to reform, and economic development,” he says.

A second project, one that draws on a long-standing interest in Cuba, will eventually lead to “A History of War and Peace in Cuba,” from the 1770’s to the 20th century. Professor Quiroz thinks that, “among countries in the Atlantic world, Cuba has this unique and particularly tense experience with war,” one that began with its prolonged fight to throw off the yoke of Spain. “Even today, Cuba has a kind of siege mentality,” he notes. This will be the theme of a book he has been thinking about and working on since 1992.

On academic leave during the 2009-2010 year, Professor Quiroz will soon be traveling to Spain to look at the origins of Spain’s and Latin America’s constitutional tradition in 1812. After that, he’ll go wherever the research trail leads him.