When Scandals Go Viral: Assessing Reactions to Corruption in Latin American Health Systems

Corruption scandals in the health sector often draw intense media attention and spark public indignation, yet their capacity to trigger lasting institutional or policy reform remains poorly understood. This study investigates whether—and under what conditions—health-related corruption scandals in Latin America have led to substantive governance changes. Excluding pandemic-related cases to avoid crisis-specific dynamics, the analysis compares a set of emblematic scandals across six countries (Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay) that came to light between 2015 and 2025, tracing their trajectories from initial exposure and media amplification to political contestation, negotiation and, eventually, policy response. As observed across a wide range of national contexts, heightened public attention to corruption scandals can generate not only citizen outrage and civil society mobilization in support of reform, but also tangible governmental responses. In some cases, scandals triggered political resignations, legislative initiatives, and/or far-reaching efforts to reform health systems. In other moments, the scandals dissipated after initial waves of outrage, producing limited or symbolic change. Despite the central importance of corruption for health governance and system performance, systematic research on corruption in the health sector remains limited. Corruption scandals—whether explicitly linked to the health sector or not— also remain notoriously difficult to measure, and the nature and magnitude of subsequent sanctions or policy outcomes are often challenging to identify empirically. The analysis seeks to address this gap by adopting a comparative national perspective, focusing on a set of countries that are structurally and institutionally comparable. The study draws on qualitative analysis of secondary sources, including judicial dossiers, investigative journalism, official audit reports and civil society inquiries. An innovative database was built encompassing data across the selected Latin American countries in 18 corruption scandals nationally reported, including the corruption agents involved; the targeted health policy, service or instrument; the typology of the scandal (e.g. bribery, procurement corruption, fraudulent billing and reimbursement, embezzlement); the bodies responsible for investigations, and the main consequences of these scandals in terms of institutional and/or policy change. The main goal is to understand which outcomes, and under which circumstances, these scandals generated, including bureaucratic restructuring or civil-society mobilization, as well as the factors that may inhibit such changes. By mapping these pathways, the study makes two main contributions. First, it introduces an innovative database of Latin American corruption scandals in health, allowing the analysis of health corruption in the region in a comparative perspective, which is underexplored by corruption as well as health policy and governance scholarship. Second, it brings theoretical and empirical advances by rigorously analyzing types and patterns of national corruption scandals, understanding how accountability dynamics operate in the health sector, and investigating under what conditions these scandals have become windows of opportunity, rather than fleeting moments of public outrage.