The Revolving Door Minister

She held a managerial position at Amazon Web Services (AWS), and the following month was hired by the government for a post in which she had to manage issues where the tech industry had stakes. She ended up taking part in a decision involving AWS, from which she should have recused herself, according to the Comptroller General of the Republic in 2023—the entity in charge of overseeing state actions in Chile. At the time of that ruling, Aisén Etcheverry was already Minister of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation (CTCI) in Gabriel Boric’s government, and few month later she led a plan to facilitate tech investments in data centers.

Etcheverry is a textbook case of the revolving door of power, a phenomenon that occurs when a person jumps from a private company to a public-sector post capable of impacting that company’s interests (or vice versa). If, as an authority, that person makes a decision affecting a company where they worked within the past two years, it constitutes a conflict of interest punishable under Chilean law—a law that is not particularly strict in this area.

The former minister’s case is just one of several revolving-door instances identified by La Mano Invisible de las Big Tech (“The Invisible Hand of Big Tech”), a cross-border investigation led by Agência Pública and the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP), together with LaBot and 16 other media outlets in 13 countries.

Etcheverry was questioned by the Comptroller’s Office for this conflict of interest, but that did not derail her fast-rising career in the State, often handling matters directly tied to tech companies’ interests. The now-former minister denied to this reporting alliance that she was ever exposed to any conflict of interest related to her time at AWS.

Her case could be pulled straight from a manual. Her career began in the tech sector. According to her LinkedIn profile, she started her professional activity as a business analyst at Oracle, where she worked for three years, and then entered government service in 2009. From then on, her stellar career in the public sector had only one pause of just over six months. During that time, she worked as Public Policy Manager for Latin America at AWS, Amazon’s cloud-computing infrastructure subsidiary.

In its investigation, the Comptroller’s Office gathered a series of records and documents concerning the process and Etcheverry’s career, which LaBot obtained after requesting a copy of the file under Chile’s Transparency Law, as it constitutes public information. The file includes the original complaint against Etcheverry, her defense, contracts, decrees, and summons, among other documents that allow for a step-by-step reconstruction of the events leading to the conflict of interest identified by the agency.

According to her employment contract with AWS, her duties included to “facilitate high-level meetings between AWS executives and key stakeholders, including state and local policy makers and executives, industry associations, and alliance partners to promote and advocate the company’s public policy policies” (see contract).

In a written response to this alliance, the former AWS executive detailed the tasks she actually carried out during her five months at the multinational: “My role was related to promoting regulations that would allow or facilitate the use of the cloud in Chile, particularly in the public sector. That was associated specifically with the installation of AWS’s data center in the country. The large volume of data generated by astronomy is a matter of interest for the entire tech industry—AWS was no exception. However, my functions were focused on the regulatory framework and the opportunities the country offered in general, not on that particular issue.”

A month after leaving AWS, in June 2018, she was hired as an advisor to then-Minister of Economy José Ramón Valente. A certificate issued by that ministry states that her role was to “advise the minister on economic matters related to the digital economy, science, and others linked to the Fourth Industrial Revolution” (see document).

Etcheverry joined a division of the Ministry of Economy called “Economy of the Future,” which “seeks to facilitate the availability of data for the development of science, technology, innovation, knowledge, and their applications in the economy,” according to an official document from the ministry. “I was part of a team of six professionals that developed, among other things, and giving continuity to a process initiated in 2016, the steps that led to the creation of the Data Observatory,” Etcheverry explained in writing.

The Data Observatory project aimed to create a private foundation, funded with both public and private resources, that would coordinate efforts among the tech industry, academia, and government to develop technologies based on the processing of astronomical data.

Chile is the country with the highest number of observatories in the world, thanks to the privileged geography of the Atacama Desert, over 3,000 meters above sea level, with a climate that has very few clouds and excellent visibility. These observatories produce “hyper-massive, complex datasets that must be dealt with,” explained in September 2018 Demián Arancibia, an engineer who at the time was the executive director of Corfo’s astrophysics initiative, a government development agency.

Arancibia was a colleague of Etcheverry in two places: at Corfo and in the Economy of the Future Division, according to Arancibia’s LinkedIn and official documents.

In that presentation—aimed at showing Chile’s academic community the government policy that would later lead to the aforementioned foundation—Arancibia explained that the volume of data generated by those observatories is comparable to that produced by major tech industries, opening up possibilities for collaboration between astronomers and Big Tech: “This has allowed us to talk with industry. We have a way of explaining how things are done in astronomy that makes sense to them.”

AWS entered the picture around the same time, as the Chilean government was then trying to secure a multimillion-dollar investment from the company to build its regional data center hub—a project that Argentina was also competing for. Press reports in Chile and the United States, published in August and September 2018, stated that government officials and the company “discussed the possibility of Amazon Web Services hosting ‘astrodata,’” and that if this happened, it would positively influence the company’s decision about which country would host its largest investment in Latin America. Indeed, between September and November of that year, AWS became involved in several data projects with astronomical observatories and universities, according to an official report from the Ministry of Economy.

According to Arancibia, AWS was not the only tech company contacted during the project’s development, as the initiative was presented publicly on “30 or 40 occasions” and received input from various academic and industry stakeholders. “The design was led by my team, and the synthesis of all the contributions was done by the State, independently and without giving in to capture by any of the actors we worked with,” he asserted.

In December 2018, then-President Sebastián Piñera signed the decree establishing the Data Observatory Foundation. To select its founding partners, the government launched a call that opened in January and closed on March 15 of that year. Etcheverry was part of the committee making that decision, and on March 10, 2019—five days before the close of the public call—she told the newspaper El Mercurio about three proof-of-concept projects, involving AWS and Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (UAI), which aimed to “show that the idea works.” The same article reported that the tech giant was supporting the Ministry of Economy’s idea of creating the foundation. However, the official project documents obtained by LaBot make no mention of those proof-of-concept trials.

In April 2019, the government announced the results of the call: AWS and UAI were the only qualified applicants, after a proposal from Deloitte was deemed inadmissible by the evaluation committee. As a result, those two institutions became the “founding partners” of the Data Observatory.

Regarding that initial decision, Etcheverry told this alliance that “the inclusion of AWS in the Data Observatory was the result of an open process, where different proposals were received.”

The rules stated that the financial contribution in cash would account for 40% of the evaluation score, the same percentage as the contribution in capacities, while the remaining 20% corresponded to strategic alignment. Official documents show that UAI offered $2.6 million in cash and an equivalent amount in capacities, while AWS offered $12.7 million in capacities—in the form of credits for computing services such as processing and storage—and only $1 in cash. In other words, since there were no competing offers, its proposal succeeded despite contributing almost nothing in actual money.

For AWS, the project was unlikely to generate profit but represented a commercial advantage: “For us, it was interesting to be seen as part of something like this, where large volumes of data were being handled,” Felipe Ramírez, AWS’s country manager in Chile, explained to this reporting alliance. “In the end, what we wanted was for private companies to say: ‘If they are capable of handling those volumes of data with that many users connecting, then I imagine in my bank or retailer they shouldn’t have any problems,’” he added. Ramírez was not in that position at the time of the award.

A month after the announcement, the Council of Rectors of Chilean Universities—which then grouped together the so-called “traditional universities”—complained that the process “was steered” to “prevent the institutions that were supposed to participate from doing so,” and argued that the government “rushed to hand over this valuable resource to a foreign company,” referring to the observatory data.

Arguing that the partners had been chosen “without proof of a public bidding process”—and further noting that there were no guarantees for the proper use of the data or assurances it would not be commercialized—the Comptroller’s Office ruled in September 2020 that the decree was not in accordance with the law and that such a process required a public call (see Comptroller’s ruling). The government’s solution was to keep UAI and AWS as founding partners and open a new call to add additional contributors.

In that new call, held in mid-2021, the only applicant was the Chilean Virtual Observatory of Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, whose proposal was rejected by a new evaluation committee (in which Etcheverry did not participate). As a result, UAI and AWS remained the sole private contributors to the Data Observatory.

On the rise

In the midst of all this, Etcheverry continued to climb the public-service ranks, enjoying the rare ability to earn the trust of governments from different ends of the political spectrum. In August 2019, she was appointed director of the National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (Conicyt), and when that agency became the National Agency for Research and Development (ANID), she became its first director. All this took place during the Piñera administration, yet she continued to hold significant posts under Boric’s government. First as head of the Interministerial Coordination Division at the General Secretariat of the Presidency (Segpres), then as chair of the National Council of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation (CTCI), and, since March 2023, as Minister of CTCI.

Demián Arancibia, the engineer who had been Etcheverry’s colleague during their time at Corfo and the Economy of the Future Division—where he also served on the evaluation committee of the Data Observatory—took the opposite path. In May 2022, he began working as a senior advisor at AWS on digital transformation issues in government, education, and health, among other areas. At the same time, since Boric’s arrival to the presidency, he served as director of Polla Chilena de Beneficencia, a state-owned lottery company. This past June, shortly after leaving AWS, he was appointed general manager of the state enterprise, according to his LinkedIn profile.

“My role as a consultant for AWS had nothing to do with the Data Observatory, and I did not take part in anything related to it during my time as an employee of that company,” Arancibia told this alliance.

The Data Observatory issue continued to haunt Aisén Etcheverry for quite some time. In 2023, as Minister of Science, she recused herself from serving on the board of the Data Observatory Foundation, as required by its bylaws for the head of that ministry. Her argument was that, as director of ANID in 2021, she had signed a transfer agreement with the Data Observatory (see resolution).

When the matter seemed closed for Etcheverry, the Comptroller’s Office received a complaint and, in August 2023, reprimanded her for a conflict of interest stemming from her participation on the evaluation committee of the first Data Observatory call, “despite the fact that only months earlier (until June 2018), she was employed at a managerial level at AWS, one of the applicants in this proposal.” According to the authority, she had the duty to abstain from serving on that committee.

Despite the reprimand, the Comptroller’s Office did not initiate a sanctioning process because she was no longer at the Ministry of Economy, although at the time of the ruling she was serving as Minister of Science (see Comptroller’s ruling).

In her defense before the oversight body, Etcheverry argued that AWS was the only applicant meeting the requirements, meaning she did not exercise “any authority that implied a decisional act”; and that during her tenure as an AWS executive she had not been involved in any work related to that project (see her full defense before the Comptroller here).

The ruling did not prevent her from strengthening ties with tech companies—including AWS—during her subsequent tenure as minister. She met with their executives, designed plans to attract industry investment in Chile, and celebrated when they materialized. Barely a month after the Comptroller’s decision, during a trip to the United States she met with executives from the Big Tech firm: Reuben Smith-Vaughan, Amazon.com’s Director of Public Policy for Latin America—whom she had overlapped with at the company in 2018, he in Washington and she in Santiago—and Marc-Etienne Ouimette, then AWS’s Global Policy Director for AI.

Esto, con decisión, pero también con mucha atención a los riesgos asociados. Aquí con Reuben Smith-Vaughan, Director de Políticas Públicas para Latinoamérica de Amazon y Marc-Etienne Ouimette, Director de Políticas Globales para AI de AMS. pic.twitter.com/hNkp5tWVDb

— Aisén Etcheverry Escudero (@AisenEtcheverry) September 20, 2023

“Major tech companies are present in Chile with infrastructure and investment, data centers, and connectivity. In these meetings, we wanted to explore how to move toward technological development and artificial intelligence,” Etcheverry said at the time, according to press reports. The former minister told this alliance that the meetings with AWS executives took place in the “context of a tour where I also met with representatives of Meta and Google. These meetings are publicly known” (see her foreign meeting agenda with tech companies, requested under Chile’s Transparency Law, as they are not published given that they took place abroad).

Months later, the government announced the creation of a National Data Center Plan to promote and facilitate the installation of such infrastructure in Chile, which would be implemented in December 2024. In May 2025, AWS announced a $4 billion investment in data centers in the country—the project they claimed had been in the works for years.

On that occasion, Etcheverry could not contain her enthusiasm, as the press reported: “The expansion of AWS infrastructure in Chile is a clear example of the country’s commitment to advanced technology and innovation, and of the work we have done to create an environment where tech companies can thrive.”

Although she was asked about AWS’s role in shaping the data center policy she led as Minister of Science, Etcheverry did not address that point in her response.

This reporting alliance asked AWS whether the Comptroller’s ruling had raised any concerns within the company, why its executives agreed to these meetings after the ruling, and what influence the company had on the design of the data center policy coordinated by its former employee. The company did not answer the questions directly and, in a general statement, said: “Amazon interacts with public policy decision-makers and regulators on a wide variety of issues that affect our business, our customers, and our employees.”

Etcheverry went on to serve as minister of two portfolios: not only Science, but also as acting Minister Secretary-General of Government. In other words, she was the government’s spokesperson, a role that illustrates the level of trust President Boric placed in her. She took on that second ministry in December 2024, when the incumbent, Camila Vallejo, went on maternity leave, and left it on July 9, when Vallejo returned to her duties. She had only been back full-time at the Ministry of Science for a few weeks when she suddenly resigned.

But Etcheverry did not retire from public life. She assumed the role of Head of Strategic Planning at the Presidency. While the new post might seem lower in rank than a ministry, reports in the press suggest it is another sign of Boric’s trust. A feature in La Tercera spoke of the “rising power of Etcheverry,” and another revealed that the president tasked her with coordinating the closure of his administration in the seven months remaining and ensuring the construction of a legacy. A difficult mission for a government whose popular support always remained low.

You can consult the full Comptroller’s file on Etcheverry’s case at this link.