Corruption Scandals Fade as Chile Prepares for Leadership Change.
| Autor | Witte-Lebhar, Benjamin |
As the sun sets on the presidency of Michelle Bachelet--Chile's first female head of state and the first since democracy was restored, nearly three decades ago, to serve a second term--the country also appears to be turning the page on the confluence of corruption scandals that did so much in recent years to damage her approval numbers.
A case in point is the quickly evaporating case against Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (SQM), a large and controversial chemicals and mining company that was privatized during Gen. Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship (1973-1990) and acquired by the strongman's then son-in-law, Julio Ponce.
The firm's ties to the brutal military regime have long made it a lightning rod for criticism. But it was another set of circumstances that put SQM on the hot seat starting in 2015, when accusations began to surface linking it to illegal campaign financing, influence peddling, and tax fraud. Like the concurrent Caso Penta, involving the multibillion-dollar holding company Grupo Penta, the allegations against SQM center in large part on the use of bogus invoices--sent by third parties for services never rendered--to channel illicit campaign donations to certain politicians (NotiSur, Feb. 13, 2015).
While the Caso Penta payments went primarily to members of the hard-right opposition party Union Democrata Independiente (Independent Democratic Union, UDI), the SQM scandal, in contrast, involved political figures across the spectrum, including some of President Bachelet's close allies, and was far more damaging to the center-left leader--especially as it coincided with yet another corruption case, the so-called Caso Caval, in which the president's son and daughter-in-law are implicated (NotiSur, April 24, 2015).
The cascading corruption scandals put the brakes on what had been a busy start for Bachelet in her second term, prompting her to make a major Cabinet overhaul and ease up on her ambitious reform agenda while she scrambled to develop a package of anti-corruption measures (NotiSur, May 29, 2015). "Some will want to resist [the changes] so that things stay the way they are," she said in a special, nationally televised address on April 28, 2015. "But my principle is clear: Democracy and politics belong to everyone, and we cannot tolerate them being co-opted by the power of money."
And yet, as recent developments suggest, the this-will-not-stand message Bachelet was so careful to articulate three years ago has since given...
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