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Abstract
A dogmatic approach to crimes attempting against public functions presupposes the consideration of results from research conducted in social and political sciences on the corruption phenomenon as well as the sense in which this concept is used in international documents that have been the basis for the present regulations of those crimes, in particular, the Inter-American Convention against Corruption. In this context, this article attempts to explain the semantic connotations of the word corruption from its etymological, criminological, and systematic backgrounds; to inform about the different classes such a phenomenon can cover and its chief manifestations; and to show, as a conclusion, what the sense that ought to be applied in the legal area is, its relationship with the notion of deviation from the general interest, whether it has any value as a dogmatic category in the area of criminal law and whether it is appropriate to include in it, in light of the current code and from a criminal-political perspective, what is called private corruption today.