Park Geun-hye / Choi Soon-sil scandal (2018): Convictions, then a pardon

The Park–Choi scandal is a public-record case of informal power: leaked devices, conglomerate money, candlelight crowds, impeachment and convictions — then a pardon. JTBC's October 2016 tablet story and follow-ups by Hankyoreh, Kyunghyang and others documented Choi's edits of speeches and her role in channelling chaebol donations into foundations, notably Mir and K-Sports. The public charge was that state authority had been used to solicit or pressure support for private projects. This page does not reconstruct how to extract money from a firm.

A separate cultural wound was the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster, already a crisis of Park's presidency. Protesters in 2016 tied the two: a government that had seemed absent in 2014 now looked captured by a private circle. Sewol is its own dossier in this atlas; here it is political atmosphere, not a second trial.

The Saturday protests were large, intergenerational and, in the main Seoul events, strikingly orderly. Organisers and police counted hundreds of thousands to millions across peak weekends; exact peaks remain a press-estimate band. The candles became the English visual. The legal work happened in the Assembly and at the Constitutional Court.