Aldo Anfossi

Correspondent

La Jornada Newspaper
Tuesday, October 8, 2024, p. 23

Santiago. The corruption plot uncovered in Chile in November 2023, when in an audio the criminal lawyer Luis Hermosilla Osorio, 68, now in preventive detention, demanded funds from a client to bribe public officials to resolve judicial and administrative problems, grew to It is evident that the case also affects the Public Ministry.

This time it was revealed that in 2015 and subsequent years, in connivance with Hermosilla, the then prosecutor Manuel Guerra, a prosecutor in cases of illegal financing of politics known as the Penta and SQM cases, which included tax crimes, influence peddling and bribery; conspired not to file charges punishable by actual imprisonment and offered alternative exits which included fines and ethics classes.

While he was supposedly investigating these cases, he asked Hermosilla to hire him, which happened in 2021.

At the center of the scandal, the name of Andrés Chadwick Piñera, a prominent right-wing leader, cousin and Minister of the Interior in the two presidencies of the late Sebastián Piñera, occurs again and again; appearing as an active participant in influence peddling and machinations.

Hermosilla and Chadwick are lifelong friends, they shared an office, he was his advisor during Piñera’s second government and in 2019 he unsuccessfully defended him against a constitutional accusation that disqualified him from holding public office for five years, in the context of the repression of the social outbreak.

The messages between Guerra and Hermosilla occurred between 2016 and 2023 and show how they coordinated with Chadwick to avoid trials in cases of shady money to politicians, as well as a multiplicity of conflicts of interest.

The revelation made lawyers who litigated unsuccessfully at the time, announce that they will sue Guerra and Hermosilla for crimes of bribery, violation of secrecy and administrative prevarication, and that they are analyzing including Chadwick in the accusation.

There are many edges and we will expand on each of them.said María Inés Horvitz, lawyer for the State Defense Council.

When in November 2023 the police searched the Hermosilla office and confiscated his cell phone, they found a million texts on WhatsApp that, as they come to light, leave the country stunned and the right-wing opposition blushing, with three weeks left to go. the municipal elections.