Santiago, Chile – When it comes to corruption in government, Chileans pride themselves on being different from their Latin American neighbors – a nation where the average citizen wouldn’t so much as bribe his way out of a speeding ticket.
But lately that pride has soured over a spate of scandals involving no-show jobs, corrupt lawmakers and the unexplained fortune owned by the late dictator Augusto Pinochet and his family.
The government is trying to put a positive face on the revelations, saying the very fact that they are coming out and causing an uproar is a sign of a healthy society.
“Corrupt countries are those that watch cases like the ones we are seeing with indifference, without astonishment and without reaction,” said Economy Minster Alejandro Ferreiro, a leading voice in the government’s effort to restore public confidence.
“What we have in Chile are serious, painful, unacceptable corruption cases, but what we fortunately also have is social rejection and indignation.” One scandal shaking the nation of 16 million stems from the discovery in October that a government agency in charge of promoting sports allocated money to scores of programs that did not exist. The suspicion is that part of the money went into political campaign coffers.
In another case, the Election Service says it is investigating allegations that Guido Girardi, a prominent pro-government senator, submitted false tax bills to obtain reimbursement of campaign spending that never happened. Girardi, who is known as a crusading reformer, denies any wrongdoing.
Then there are the funds allocated to an emergency jobs programs that allegedly were diverted to the campaigns of several candidates – mainly from President Michelle Bachelet’s Socialist Party and the allied Party for Democracy.
Most shocking for many Chileans are the allegations in recent years that Pinochet squirreled away up to $28 million in foreign bank accounts. Though still divided over Pinochet’s bloody 1973-1990 dictatorship, Chileans tended to view the general as personally incorruptible.
Pinochet died Dec. 10 under the shadow of tax evasion charges relating to the $28 million. His widow and four of his five children remain under indictment in the case.
A recent poll for the El Mercurio newspaper shows 61.2 percent of people in Santiago, the capital, consider corruption to be widespread, and 63.8 percent feel it has increased in recent years.
The poll by the Opina company queried 400 adults and had a margin of error of 5 percentage points.
Still Chileans can take comfort in ranking 20th, alongside the United States and well ahead of all other Latin American countries, in the 2006 index of perceived corruption compiled by Transparency International, a prestigious think tank.
Ricardo Israel, a political scientist with the University of Chile, says the country’s resistance to corruption dates back more than 200 years to colonial times.
“Chile was the first of the Spanish colonies to establish a real organized state, with control over its entire territory,” he said. “And politics were seen as an activity to earn prestige, to push for social changes, but not to become rich.” But the country’s newfound prosperity – it has the lowest poverty rate on the continent – may be straining the old system.
“For the first time, Chile has a relatively rich state, there is a lot to share, and that is making things change in relation to corruption,” Israel said.
But post-Pinochet Chile is also a thriving democracy where the conservative political opposition is working hard to expose corruption in a government controlled for 16 years by the same center-left coalition.
Bachelet, who nine months ago became Chile’s first female president, is responding to the pressure by proposing reforms that would turn hundreds of political appointments into jobs open to competition from all qualified applicants, and campaign finance laws that would allow candidates to take campaign contributions only from named individuals and not from businesses.
