Heavy losses in the fondo E, the most conservative fund in the pension system, have put the AFPs (Administradoras de Fondos de Pensiones, Chile's private pension fund managers) back at the center of criticism, according to Emol. This time the complaint focuses on the managers' responsibility for those results.
To put this in perspective, it helps to recall 2016. On July 24 of that year, the "No+AFP" coalition called its first national march. A second, larger march followed on August 21, filling the Alameda and spreading to more than 50 cities. At the time, people were demanding better pensions and an end to the fund managers.
Since then, the industry has weathered several threats. The first was the Convención Constitucional (Constitutional Convention), whose proposal called for a public social security system. In April 2022, during the "Con mi plata no" ("Not with my money") campaign, the full Convention rejected amendments to guarantee ownership of savings, the right to inherit them and protection from expropriation.
The second came in November 2022. Gabriel Boric, then President, sent the Congreso Nacional (Chile's national legislature) a pension reform with the promise of closing the AFPs. "With this reform, the AFPs come to an end," Boric said when announcing it. The law passed in 2025 added employer-paid contributions and solidarity mechanisms, but kept the fund managers in place.
According to Emol's analysis, the pension fund withdrawals paradoxically helped the AFPs. They reduced members' savings, but cleared up doubts about whether those funds existed and whether they belonged to contributors. It was like breaking open the piggy bank in front of everyone to prove there were coins inside.
Pablo Halpern, director of the Center for Corporate Reputation at ESE Business School of the Universidad de los Andes, wrote in El Mercurio that the 2025 reform secured an agreement on the system's continuity, though without restoring public trust. "After years of confrontation, the fund managers secured a truce, not necessarily legitimacy," Halpern said.
The academic warned that this truce could break. "The fund managers had left behind the debate over their existence. What happened with the fondo E forces them to face it again," he said. In his view, the gap between pensions and AFP profits fed the idea that the business paid off more than the protection of workers.
A week after the losses became known, none of the seven fund managers had offered explanations individually. The only voice was that of León Fernández de Castro, president of the Asociación de AFP (AAFP), the industry association. In Diario Financiero, he asked people not to "lump everyone together" and explained that the investments aim to match maturities, rates and currencies to fund lifetime annuities.
Luis Hernán Paúl, director of the Center for Corporate Governance at the Universidad Católica, distinguished a possible breach of rules from doubts about due diligence. He said decisions should be judged on the information available when they were made, though he acknowledged significant reputational damage.
If you have savings in the fondo E, what comes next matters to you. The Superintendencia de Pensiones (Chile's pension regulator) has opened a sanctioning procedure that reviews, among other points, the boards' supervision and due diligence duties, while lawsuits from members pile up and pressure grows in Congress.
