By Benjamin Gomez*

On the last decade, Chile has witnessed an explosion in its cartel history. Strangely enough, while the latest Antitrust reforms have aimed to higher sanctions and invasive investigation methods, and the public scrutiny has increased as more information becomes available, the major corporations seem to have assumed the risk of taking a go at it anyway. This sense of invincibility and recklessness has given way to some of the most outrageous cartels, involving public health (raising the prices of medicine in the “Pharmacy Cartel” [1]) and even daily life hygiene (see the recent “Toilet Paper Cartel” [2]).

But there is another recent case which has been considered as Chile’s biggest cartel in terms of economic impact and duration, affecting the most basic of commodities. The latest episode of this story was released to the media when on January the 6^th, 2016, the National Antitrust Prosecutor…