The coexistence of predatory informal rules alongside formal democratic institutions is a defining, if pernicious, feature of Latin America’s political landscape. How do such rules remain so resilient in the face of bureaucratic reforms? This article explicates the mechanisms underlying the persistence of such rules and challenges conventional explanations through process-tracing analysis in one arena: Guatemala’s customs administration. During Guatemala’s period of armed conflict and military rule, military intelligence officers introduced a powerful customs fraud scheme that endured for more than 20 years, despite state reforms. Its survival is best attributed to the ability of the distributional coalition underwriting the predatory rules to capture new political and economic spaces facilitated by political party and market reforms. This illustrates that distributional approaches to institutional change must attend to how those with a stake in the status quo may continue to uphold perverse institutional arrangements on the margins of state power.

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掠夺性非正式规则如何超越国家改革：来自后威权危地马拉的证据

掠夺性的非正式规则与正式的民主制度并存，是拉丁美洲政治格局的一个决定性特征，即使是有害的特征。面对官僚改革，这些规则如何保持如此有弹性？本文阐述了这些规则持续存在的机制，并通过一个领域的流程跟踪分析挑战了传统解释：危地马拉的海关管理。在危地马拉的武装冲突和军事统治时期，尽管国家进行了改革，但军事情报官员推出了一项强大的海关欺诈计划，该计划持续了 20 多年。它的生存最好归功于支持掠夺性规则的分配联盟有能力占领由政党和市场改革促进的新政治和经济空间。