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
what about uruguay?
