According to an investigation by the newspaper El Mostrador, the San Sebastián University (USS) may have paid an exorbitant and unjustified salary of 17 million pesos per month (something like USD 18,000 per month) to Professor Marcela Cubillos, former Minister of Education in the second administration of former right-wing President Sebastián Piñera and current candidate for mayor of Las Condes, a municipality located northeast of Santiago de Chile. The journalistic report has drawn the attention of the Attorney General’s Office, which has decided to open an investigation for a possible criminal offense.
30 people linked to the Chilean right wing who held positions in the Piñera government were later hired by the San Sebastián University. This modality of hiring ex-politicians of the same political line by the university, especially those close to the political party Independent Democratic Union (UDI), has led many people to affirm that the USS is a till of the Chilean right wing.
Also under investigation is an apparent conflict of interest on the part of the Piñera government regarding USS, which, despite being a private university, received 45.5% of its income last year from the Chilean state in the form of scholarships or Government Guaranteed Credit (Crédito con Aval del Estado). The seemingly strange thing has less to do with the allocation of scholarships or other items that USS received (aid that any Chilean university can ask for), but rather the enormous amount of money it received during the Piñera administration. For example, during the government of Michel Bachelet, the USS received more or less 1.1 billion pesos. Under the Piñera government, that amount tripled, reaching more than 3 billion pesos.
In addition, these resources came from the Secretary of Education, which was headed for a long time by Marcela Cubillos, a professor at USS. During her period as head of the Secretary of Education, Cubillos allocated more than 1,400 million pesos to develop teacher training, technical consultancies, and other activities.
USS in the “Audios Case”
The university is also at the center of public debate due to the “Audios Case”. Last November 14, a scandal broke out in Chile when Luis Hermosilla, a famous and powerful Chilean lawyer, was arrested by the police for the alleged crimes of bribery, money laundering, and tax crimes. According to several audios leaked to the press, Hermosilla talked about bribing public officials and other illicit activities. Police seized Hermosilla’s cell phone and found several conversations with various politicians and judges in which he discussed corruption and other crimes.
Several of these politicians and judges who appear in Hermosilla’s conversations work or have worked at USS. This is the case of Felipe Ward, former Secretary of National Assets in the Piñera government (Ward has already resigned from the university), and the former Metropolitan Regional Prosecutor, Manuel Guerra, currently a law professor at USS. However, the most serious case seems to be that of Andrés Chadwick, President of the Board of Directors of the USS and one of the most iconic politicians of the two administrations of Sebastián Piñera, who resigned from his position at the university to defend himself from the allegations against him, among them, the accusation of the socialist deputies Daniel Manouchehri and Daniella Cicardini.
Manouchehri stated on Radio Cooperativa “We see figures such as (former minister Andrés) Chadwick; (Supreme Ángela) Vivanco; (former prosecutor Manuel) Guerra; (Supreme Jean Pierre) Matus; (former ministers) Felipe Ward and (Sebastián) Sichel, and a series of actors who have in common being named in the Hermosilla case, and who work at the USS. It seems that [this university] is the lair of the network of (Luis) Hermosilla…Suspiciously, it seems that all the members of the right wing who were left without a job, ended up with millionaire salaries in the USS while they waited for the time to be able to enter some candidacy.”
Regarding the case of Marcela Cubillos, Manouchehri said “It is extremely suspicious because 17 million pesos is a salary that no teacher in the world earns. And when one reads the reports that have come out, the students are not even aware that she was teaching…We believe that it should be investigated thoroughly, because, eventually, we could be in the presence of hidden profit on the part of this university, and secondly, there could be some kind of illegal financing of politics.”
