A wealthy and well-connected anti-abortion group has gone to court to block the disclosure of its private donors following an investigation by openDemocracy and La Pública.
It comes after a year-long effort by the two news organisations that reveals how three powerful anti-rights nonprofits in Chile are using legal loopholes to protect the identity of funders while influencing politicians to limit reproductive and equal rights for women and LGBTIQ communities.
Two of the groups – Cuide Chile and the Organization for Research, Training and Women’s Studies (ISFEM) – have not declared any private donations at all in their tax returns. The other group – Chile Unido (United Chile) – has declared private donations, but not the source of them. So, earlier this year openDemocracy and La Pública asked Chile’s independent Transparency Council for Chile Unido’s donor information to be made public. The request was granted, but the country’s tax laws allow nonprofits and private foundations to keep donors’ names secret and Chile Unido is appealing the Transparency Council’s decision on those grounds.
The case could set a legal precedent on the robustness of privacy and financial disclosure shields for Chilean nonprofits and foundations. The Transparency Council ruling, which granted disclosure, cited a legitimate “public interest” in the donors because they receive tax breaks. It said that tax breaks are “a benefit” granted by the state and paid by society as a whole.
openDemocracy and La Pública, a Chilean news outlet that specialises in data-driven investigations on transparency, have worked around Chile’s donor privacy laws. We scoured the legislative calendar going back 15 years, as well as a database of 45 civil society organisations, in order to shine a light on Chile Unido, Cuide Chile and ISFEM’s work to shape constitutional and civil rights in the country.
Our findings show the connections their leaders have in the world of politics, business and public policy – and the scale of their wealth. Cuide Chile founder María Pía Adriasola is a lawyer who is the wife of former far-right presidential candidate José Antonio Kast, ISFEM founder Ismini Anastassiou Mustakis is a Chilean metals magnate, and Chile Unido’s president Heriberto Urzúa Sánchez is the director of an international chain of retail shops and a board member of more than a dozen companies spanning agricultural export and real estate.
Economist Eduardo Engel, who chaired a 2015 advisory body appointed by former president Michelle Bachelet to fight corruption, says the lack of transparency is troubling. “Chile’s legislation doesn’t even guarantee to know who are the main funders of foundations that frequently have an impact on the public agenda,” he told us.
The investigation also found a curious loophole in Chilean law. Although foundations are legally required to submit annual reports listing their activities and balance sheets to the Ministry of Justice, as well as tax returns to the tax authority, there is no penalty if they don’t.
Cuide Chile and ISFEM have failed to file annual reports, the justice ministry confirmed to us in 2022. Chile Unido has filed them for each year from 2016 to 2021.
Chilean tax authorities do have a publicly available list of annual philanthropic donations. Updated to 2022, it is based on the sums declared in tax returns. But, as well as being incomplete, the list does not match the funding source to the recipients.
As such, through Chile Unido’s own publicly filed documents we found amounts received as grants, but not the identity of the donor. We made multiple public information requests to the tax authority and the justice ministry regarding Chile Unido and the other two organisations. But the answers we received from the justice ministry fell short and our requests to the tax authority were denied under Chilean donor privacy laws.
When we appealed the decision and won, Chile Unido and the tax authority pushed back and launched their own appeals to uphold the right to donor secrecy. The first hearing in the case is yet to be scheduled. Our repeated interview requests to Chile Unido’s president Heriberto Urzúa Sánchez and Verónica Hoffmann, the group’s executive director, remain unanswered.
Far-right lobbying arm
Cuide Chile’s political connections to the far-right are clear, but its funding sources are not.
Some of the organisation’s members belong to former presidential candidate Kast’s Republican party. Kast, who suffered a resounding defeat in the December 2021 run-off vote at the hands of former left-wing student leader Gabriel Boric, now chairs the Political Network for Values. It is an ultra conservative transatlantic platform of politicians and anti-abortion, anti-LGBTIQ activists. Adriasola, his wife, is the public face of Cuide Chile. According to its August 2018 registration documents, Cuide Chile started with two million Chilean pesos ($2,000). Its current financial balance is unknown.
The implications of Cuide Chile’s closeness to Kast are troubling in light of his party’s decisive win in May’s election to a council that is working on drafting Chile’s new constitution. The Republican Party won 23 of the 50 seats on the constitutional council, and the traditional right won 11, which means conservatives will lead the latest attempt to rewrite the constitution. A previous attempt failed when voters rejected it last September.
Cuide Chile has had connections to the Republican Party since the latter was formed in 2019. Three members of Cuide Chile, including its executive director Pamela Pizzarro, ran unsuccessfully as Republican candidates for parliament in 2021. Our review of Chile’s parliamentary agenda and online bulletins shows that since August 2018 Cuide Chile has intervened in at least 14 parliamentary committees to oppose legislation to end gender discrimination, promote sexual education and grant same-sex couples the right to be parents.
It also opposes gender parity, which was in the draft constitution proposed last year. Along with other conservative groups, Cuide Chile wants specific policies in the new draft constitution. They include the right to life from the moment of conception, which would make abortion impossible even under exemptions currently allowed by law. They also include the right to individual and institutional conscientious objection, which would allow the denial of certain educational and healthcare services. Another is the parent’s right to choose what their children are taught in school, which would give them the power to oppose comprehensive sex education.
The justice ministry replied in August 2022 to our public information requests for activities and financial information about Cuide Chile. It said the organisation had never submitted annual reports or balance sheets as required by law. The tax authorities confirmed last year that as of July 2022, Cuide Chile had not offered any information about donations.
Luis Cordero, a lawyer and professor of administrative law, was appointed justice minister in January this year. Speaking to us last year, he said: “Strictly speaking, we have a problem with civil society organisations. Transparency policies rely upon entities’ self-declaration.”
The lack of transparency means the public don’t know who is funding Cuide Chile and whether any of it comes from the personal coffers of Kast or Adriasola.
Kast, Adriasola and Cuide Chile declined our interview requests.
Kast and Adriasola own a long list of shell companies, including investment and real estate businesses. In 2015, the family formed Inmobiliaria e Inversiones Padua Limitada, a real estate development company. Open source information on its activities is not available. Six years later, seven of their nine children, who control dozens of investment companies, contributed more than four billion pesos (nearly $5m) to Inversiones Padua.
As a presidential candidate in 2021, Kast finally admitted he had investments in tax havens. “A company was set up in Panama in order to be able to invest later in the United States, because the lawyers at the time said it was quicker that way,” he said in an interview.
He didn’t mention Inversiones Padua, even though he had a 96% controlling stake through another shell company, Inversiones Bavaro SpA. After his ownership of Inversiones Padua was revealed by the newspaper La Tercera, his campaign team said he had declared as much to Chile’s general accounting office, but they admitted it was not in the assets and interests disclosure that public servants and candidates for public office must submit on a public website.
Molybdenum power
ISFEM, the Spanish initials of the Organisation for Research, Training and Women's Studies, is a lobby and advocacy group against equal rights for LGTBIQ people and sexual and reproductive rights. Its wealthy founder, Ismini Anastassiou Mustakis, belongs to one of the two families that established Molymet, a multinational firm with the largest global processing capacity for molybdenum, a mineral that plays a critical role in commercial alloy production.
Anastassiou Mustakis appears registered as owner of 1% to 5% of Molymet’s shares, while two other companies created by her, her husband and children have minority share ownership.
Another relevant Molymet stakeholder (with 5% to 10% of the shares) is Fundación Gabriel y Mary Mustakis, a family foundation established in 1996 to support educational programmes for children. The president and vice-president of the foundation are the son and a sister of Anastassiou Mustakis. And Fundación Gabriel y Mary Mustakis donated money to Anastassiou Mustakis’s group, ISFEM, in 2015 and 2016, according to the foundation’s annual reports. But they don’t say how much.
Molymet has inclusion and diversity policies that reject any act of “discrimination, harassment or offence” on grounds of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, illness or disability, social origin, marital status, political opinion or union membership.
There is no suggestion that Molymet is funding ISFEM. The company refused to answer our repeated requests for comments. Anastassiou Mustakis did not respond to any of the multiple interview requests sent through emails and calls to ISFEM or visits to the Mustakis Foundation.
Anastassiou Mustakis, who has led ISFEM for 20 years, is known for her advocacy of ultra-conservative causes. She has also advised right-wing lawmakers, thereby gaining insider access to policy debates. ISFEM has lobbied the Chilean legislature since 2005, according to a review of parliamentary agendas and bulletins.
However, Anastassiou Mustakis’s work has not always been publicly documented. While reviewing documents we found she worked as an external adviser to senator Francisco Chahuán of the centre-right Renovación Nacional in 2015 and 2016. But she was not registered as such, according to the senate response to our public information request. The rules require support staff and external advisers to be registered and paid from the public budget, but do not require pro bono advisers to be registered. It is not known if Anastassiou Mustakis was a pro bono adviser.
Rabindranath Quinteros, who chairs the Parliamentary Allocations Resolution Council that oversees the parliament’s budget and spending says this is troubling: “Our hands are tied. How do we identify someone who has no contract? As we are worried, we’ve been asking both chambers’ secretariats to regulate these lobbyists, these pro bono advisers.”
From 2005 to 2022, Anastassiou Mustakis and other ISFEM members, such as Carmen Croxatto and Rebeca Garcés, participated in 45 committee hearings and debates, arguing against legislation granting some family rights to same-sex couples, the decriminalisation of abortion on three specific grounds and the gender identity law. Despite their opposition, some progress was made. The civil union law was approved in 2015 – and followed by an equal marriage law in 2021. In 2017, abortion was decriminalised in cases in which a woman’s life is in danger, when a fetus is unviable, or when the pregnancy resulted from rape. And in 2018, the gender identity law allowed transgender people to change their name and gender in official records.
ISFEM has also been active in controversial court hearings. In 2001, the group filed the first appeal against the sale of the emergency contraceptive known as the morning-after pill, initially preventing it from being marketed. In 2011, it intervened in a case before the constitutional court, whose task is to rule on whether a law conflicts with constitutionally established rights and freedoms. The case, which revolved around same-sex couples’ right to marry, had ISFEM arguing that homosexuality was an “anomaly” and a “curable disease”' linked to “paedophilia”.
Groups such as the three investigated by openDemocracy and La Pública “may be building influence in Congress, doing things that look like legislative politics, such as drafting bills, and you don't know where they come from,” said lawyer María Jaraquemada, who chairs the expert group set up last month by Chile’s President Boric to draw up rules for the relationship between private nonprofits and the state.
Rolando Jiménez, former president of the advocacy group Movement for Homosexual Liberation (Movilh), says the main problem is that “the power of the churches, economic power and political power are linked here”.
Going to court
Preventing abortions is Chile Unido’s main mission, which it carries out through its “support programme for women with vulnerable pregnancies”, which includes “psychosocial support” and “concrete solutions”. Based in a wealthy neighbourhood in Chilean capital Santiago, it has a network of professionals and volunteers and offers free care. It claims to have brought “more than 6,900 children into the world”.
In September 2020, during an event organised by Kast, Chile Unido’s executive director Verónica Hoffmann described the organisation’s resources. The picture that emerged was of an extensive support network of psychologists, psychiatrists, physicians, midwives, shelter houses, health clinics and ultrasound services. People seeking abortion services are targeted through a hotline and dedicated website, Embarazo no deseado (Unwanted pregnancy), which offer “free and safe help”.
“According to our experience, 90% of women who express their desire to have an abortion and who agree to have an ultrasound scan, desist from the abortion and continue with their pregnancy,” Hoffmann said at the time.
The methods used are similar to those of ‘crisis pregnancy centres’. Set up by pro-life organisations to lure abortion-seekers with offers of free counselling and health care, they instead provide misinformation to discourage termination of the pregnancy.
Chile Unido has received 478 million pesos ($442,000) from public funds and leading politicians, between 2004 and 2023, according to a publicly available registry of organisations that have dealings with the state.
Vitacura and Las Condes, two wealthy Santiago municipalities, gave the organisation 318 million pesos ($255,000) to help cover expenses such as salaries, rent, communications and the internet, the registry shows.
The nonprofit also received money from Chile’s executive branch during wealthy businessman Sebastián Piñera’s two presidential terms from 2010 to 2014 and 2018 to 2022. The finance ministry transferred 160 million pesos (about $187,000) in four payments in 2013, 2014, 2018 and 2020 to Chile Unido, whose president Urzúa Sánchez is a Piñera confidante and worked with him at Citibank in the 1980s.
The government grants explicitly state they were meant to “support the operation of Acoge una vida [embrace a life] programme” and to “expand and strengthen the programme of comprehensive support for women with vulnerable pregnancies at the regional level, with regional teams of volunteers, regional media campaign, equipment and new funds to give it sustainability over time”.
According to its most recent annual report from 2021, Chile Unido had a staff of 18, including psychologists and social workers.
Reports prepared by Chile Unido between 2017 and 2021 disclose that the nonprofit received nearly 700 million pesos ($821,000) in private donations. These account for at least 40% of its income in those years, according to our analysis of their balances, which do not include the funding source.
The tax authority denied openDemocracy and La Pública’s request to review the donations received by Chile Unido between 2018 and 2022 but our appeal was upheld in March. Chile Unido and the tax authority have gone to the Court of Appeals in Santiago to argue for tax secrecy for donations to nonprofits. The first court hearing, initially scheduled for August, has been postponed.
If Chile Unido loses the case, it may become possible to reveal both the identity of its donors and crucially, perhaps the amount of public funds and who is getting tax breaks out of it.
Human rights lawyer Branislav Marelic, who is representing our reporters in the Chile Unido case, said: “Donations benefited with tax breaks are ultimately paid by all the citizens. As such, they are a matter of public interest.”
