[jacquesm]

Because Chile is working very hard on improving their police force and not reporting an attempted bribe can get a police man there into serious trouble. Really, don't do it. It's a lose-lose situation. Either you end up fighting those that are improving the situation for people like you or you end up arrested for a very serious offense.

[andrewcooke]

where did you get this from? i've not heard anything about improving things - it's "always" been the case that you don't bribe here (and not just police - the only time in ten years i bribed anyone was one guy who sold bus tickets, and that was kind-of creepy). do you have any reference for this improvement work (if you're right i'm curious to read about it; corruption has been in the news quite a bit the last few years)?

[jacquesm]

"always" is indeed the operative bit. It wasn't always like this. Not at all.

Starting in 1994 Chile made a real push to clean up its act (which it really had to, it was making some other countries with very bad reputations look good by comparison).

They not only created a whole pile of legislation (which is the easy part), they actually acted on it. The net result of this is that Chile is now ahead of the United States in the corruption perception index:

http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2011/results/

A result they can be very proud of, especially given the surrounding countries. There is still a lot of work to do, there will always be a pressure for the return of corruption where it has already been dealt with but on the whole I think this is a fantastic achievement in a time-frame that makes it even more impressive.

The effect of cleaning up at the higher levels of government has trickled down to lower parts to the point where bribing police is no longer acceptable/required, as it should be.

In Chile the various achievements have been in reaction to scandals that got wide exposure, it seems that that is one avenue through which real change can be brought about.

If all of Latin America would adopt the various Chilean policies I'm pretty sure that it would benefit the region greatly, just imagine if 17 years from now you'd be able to say the same about Colombia, Peru and Venezuela. Apologies to Uruguay, they've been doing pretty good as well.

More reading:

http://csis.org/files/media/csis/event/070710_Penailillo.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

[andrewcooke]

ok, i think i have finally found what you're talking about - in 94 frei's govt created the Comisión Nacional de Ética Pública

but this was related to the transition from the junta to civillian rule (and of course the junta was corrupt). that is really old news.

so sorry, i misunderstood your original reply. yes, that's a/the historical explanation. but if you ask someone in the street why you don't bribe police it's because it's a simple fact of normal behaviour these days. the kind of corruption that occurred during the junta is seen as exceptional to those times.

there have been several scandals more recently, but they're generally related to politicians more than police (and probably helped pinera get elected in the hope that a new broom would sweep cleaner).

[edit: sorry, have been editing significantly; thanks for updated link]

[jacquesm]

Sorry about the broken link, I really hate it when google does not allow you to cut-and-paste links to documents, especially pdfs.

http://csis.org/files/media/csis/events/070710_Penailillo.pd...

Here is a re-try. The document linked is quite frank about achievements and areas that still need (a lot of) work.

Yes, the Junta was corrupt, but the government that replaced it had its issues too, and they worked quite hard on fixing those.

The kind of corruption that is not tolerated in Chile is par for the course in pretty much all the surrounding countries.

I'm not sure if pre-transition Chilean materials are representative of reality.