Regardless of the progress made in the past two decades by the international anti-corruption movement in terms of its financial, technical, and human resources, the implementation of effective policies by national governments have rarely been in line with their discursive and legal commitments. Furthermore, literary progress on the subject has been hard pressed to find feasible solutions to the lack of political will hindering the adoption of domestic anti-corruption reforms. The present study addresses this issue by reinterpreting the meaning of political will for domestic anti-corruption activities, positing that anti-corruption, contrary to most other types of policies, cannot be stimulated solely by the promise of political support for reformist leaders: rather, it responds to the leadership’s calculus of both political capital and illegal profits. In other words, anti-corruption is only possible when it is appealing to the particular interests of a specific set of political leaders. This approach is tested by assessing the Peruvian experience with the adoption of a National Anti-Corruption Plan between 2001 and 2013. The empirical analysis shows that, contrary to the international emphasis on technical assistance as a vehicle for change, the attempts to adopt a national plan to fight corruption in Peru have closely followed the state and evolution of political events, driven mostly by the necessity to stimulate support for the incumbent party while also kept from affecting the status quo. At the end, the study concludes that the characteristics of the political leadership and context were the primary force behind any symbolic or genuine efforts to elaborate an official National Anti-Corruption Plan, which, notwithstanding its recurrent emergence in the government agenda, has yet to be institutionalized as a proper mechanism to support the fight against public malfeasance.