Den of Thieves (roversnest), Kleptomania, Kleptocracy

Den of Thieves (roversnest), Kleptomania, Kleptocracy

26 November 2025

What concerns me is the report that a shipbuilder bribed the port authority’s leadership. The case is now before the court, according to media reports based on documents from the Public Prosecutor. For years, I believed that people in such positions would never engage in this kind of behavior. Others carried the stigma of corruption. But increasingly, corruption seems to be everywhere—look at Ennia, Giro, BZV, and many others. It can’t be true, can it? We have always resisted the label of “den of thieves” — and I still do — but the facts are the facts.

Today, while cleaning my library, I happened to find the booklet Grand Opening Symposium: Making the Connection to the 21st Century, 25–27 November 1999. It marked the opening of Jacob Gelt Dekker’s Kura Hulanda conference center. My Big Six organized that event. It was the height of neoliberalism, with figures like Ruth Richardson, the former Minister of Finance of New Zealand.

Around the same time, VVD heavyweight Frits Bolkestein called the islands — or our island — a “den of thieves.” And around 2006–2007, Gelt Dekker told an investors’ conference about the corruption in local politics. He was promptly declared persona non grata.

I had pushed much of this aside until, in 2016, I heard Adriaan van Dis speak about how cruel the Netherlands once was. That same year, Ewald Vanvugt’s book Roofstaat — State of Plunder — appeared. It made me rethink things. We did not learn these habits from nowhere.

Just before the COVID-19 pandemic, a regular at my Wednesday-morning café told me that a Venezuelan psychiatrist once said to him that all of Venezuela was kleptomaniac. Kleptomania is a psychological disorder: an uncontrollable urge to steal, not out of need or greed, but from impulse. Small things, sudden urges, tension beforehand, and relief afterward. He said he himself was a kleptomaniac, had learned to manage it, and that everyone in Curaçao suffered from it—a kind of pandemic. I felt strong cognitive dissonance, but now, as more facts surface, I must admit he may have been right.

And if that is so, then we live in a kleptocracy: a form of rule in which those in power systematically plunder the country: high-level corruption, misuse of state resources, patronage, hollowed-out institutions — a rule of thieves.

That means we must acknowledge something we long refused to see: as a society, we have a weakness for money. That is why countervailing power is essential. No one is entirely immune. We need structures that can restrain us, correct us, and protect us.

I was fortunate to learn this early in my career. An older friend, Charlie do Rego, once told me, “If you ever take office, make sure there are people and procedures in place to keep you in check.” That shaped me.

I also think of 1988, when Lucille George-Wout — now former Governor — stepped down as Commissioner of Finance. She had cleaned up the accounts and built up secret reserves; the opposition was outraged. On her last day, my supervisor and I visited her office, surrounded by boxes of files. She spontaneously offered me two pieces of advice: guard your boundaries in your dealings with people, and: “Never write an advisory note to please a politician. Not even me. Your task is to advise independently.” Values that shaped me. And there were many others.

Today, I see that “everything flies,” that under neoliberalism, everyone seems susceptible to kleptomania. And that makes it dangerous. That is why it is time to name the real den of thieves: not the island, but the system that continually tempts us.

And so we must build strong institutions — transparent, independent, robust — that protect us from ourselves. Only then can we prevent a weakness from becoming a system, and a system from becoming a culture.

Miguel Goede