For decades, Chile looked at itself in the mirror with complacency. We told ourselves we weren’t a corrupt country. The highest authorities of the State didn’t enrich themselves while in office, and there was no widespread corruption in the administrative apparatus. That narrative was part of our identity and a source of comparative pride compared to other countries.
But that story shattered with the civic-military coup. The dictatorship established a form of corruption unprecedented until then: the use of absolute power to appropriate public resources and transfer them, without checks and balances or scrutiny, to private interests, starting with the dictator himself.
Since then, corruption has ceased to be an anomaly and has become a systemic risk. For years we consoled ourselves with a misleading phrase: “we’re better off than many.” That may be true in comparative terms, but it’s irrelevant to understanding the phenomenon. Corruption isn’t measured solely by international rankings; it’s measured by its impact on trust, social cohesion, and the legitimacy of institutions.
And that is its invisible cost.
Corruption erodes interpersonal trust and trust in the state. When citizens perceive that the rules are not the same for everyone, that power buys favors, and that white-collar crimes rarely result in proportionate punishments, the social contract breaks down. The consequence is not only moral outrage: it is civic disaffection, non-compliance with regulations, a withdrawal of social cooperation, and, ultimately, more crime.
Chile still resists taking a deep look at organized crime, which emerges where institutions are weak and establishes itself where it can buy silence, influence, and access. Without corruption, there are no systematic kidnappings, no extortion of “protection money,” no flourishing of illegal trade, and no consolidation of drug trafficking and human trafficking networks with territorial control.
The last few years have only revealed the surface of this phenomenon. Corruption within the Gendarmerie is not an isolated incident. Public safety deteriorates due to the corrupt infiltration of the state by criminal organizations.
In addition to this corruption, there is another, more sophisticated and less visible form: regulatory capture. This occurs when economic or sectoral interests decisively influence the legislative and regulatory process, shaping the rules to their advantage. This happened, for example, in the fishing industry and the pension system. It is a form of corruption that appears legal but is profoundly illegitimate.
And what we have seen in the last year is judicial capture, where the damage is even greater. The so-called Belarusian scandal, which ended with the removal by Congress of two Supreme Court justices, was not simply a matter of individual errors, but rather a sign of deep institutional degradation, apparently involving direct bribery.
Deciding to combat corruption to significantly reduce it requires abandoning hypocrisy, ceasing to compare ourselves to others, and acknowledging that the problem is structural: radical transparency, effective lobbying controls, whistleblower protection, specialized criminal prosecution, and tracing the money trail by following financial flows, front men, shell companies, and money laundering. But above all, it demands the political will to break the self-protection pacts among elites.
Corruption doesn’t just cost money. It costs security, trust, and the future. And that cost, though invisible in public accounts, is the highest a country can pay.
