Juan Jiménez Mayor: “The OAS is disqualified from proposing a dialogue in Peru”

Juan Jimenez Mayor He was the representative of Peru before the OAS for a little over two years. He warns about the speeches that are given abroad about the political and social crisis that our country is experiencing. But he also makes a call for attention to review the decentralization process and the capacities of the provincial and district authorities.

We are about to complete two months since that December 7th when Pedro Castillo carried out a coup. After several attempts to advance the elections, Congress has not reached an agreement. What is the way left?

LOOK: Peruvian Episcopal Conference calls for conditions of “true dialogue” to be generated in the regions

They had components of violence and legitimate social protest that require us to have a special look. We must be very informed of what happened in Colombia. It started in April 2021 from a tax reform by former President Iván Duque. This generated a rejection of the population and a series of demonstrations began whose epicenter was the city of Cali, but they spread to the entire country and lasted for months. 40,000 businesses closed, 300 shopping centers stoned and looted, almost 100 ambulances stoned and a series of roads interrupted. The cost for the Colombian economy amounted to 1% of its GDP: 1,400 million dollars. This implied that Colombia loses the investment grade, a kind of approval of the international markets to the economy of a country and a support for the flow of investments. Peru can lose the investment grade from the protests and we have to avoid this. Political actors must find a way out because today we are at a standstill.

In Colombia, the social outbreak ended up becoming political, because the one who benefited was the ex-guerrilla Gustavo Petro, who ended up becoming president. Are we going that way?

Somehow, we have already had a social outbreak that was channeled into the 2021 elections. They were protest elections and an outsider like Pedro Castillo was voted for, seeking to exercise a protest vote against the political class. Castillo arrived with the banners of the left, but he did not have the skills or qualities to give direction to the State. This leftist government has been an experience. Former President Castillo has a support quota that can reach 20%, but the rest of the country wants to get ahead, generate more employment opportunities and build greater well-being. We are the majority; however, if the politicians cannot come up with a solution, the elections have to be brought forward. We need a new beginning so that the electorate can speak out, we have a new government and Congress to get out of the crisis immediately.

And how do we avoid ending up once again disappointed in the new congressmen we would elect?

Each time we think that we have a worse Congress than the last and we can always go deeper. The main people responsible for this are the political parties, which in reality in Peru are business organizations that recruit people and come to look after particular interests. The parties have the responsibility of choosing better people with a vocation for service and not the vocation of becoming famous at any cost or negotiating issues, like the case of Los Niños, which has been pathetic.

Could the re-election of congressmen be discussed to avoid an inexperienced Parliament every five years?

That argument has been replicated a lot. It was probably a bad decision, but we are talking about 130 people, and there are 130 good and new people. The problem is recruiting them. Many people have to be convinced because today politics has become a high-risk profession.

Do you agree with the congressional re-election?

There could be re-election, yes, but we could also have new people who can contribute.

This week, Peru21 put on the agenda the issue of the district mayors’ inability to manage. How can we also bring proactivity to those instances of the State?

We have a very serious capacity problem in the public sector. The civil service law that was approved 10 years ago has not had the required impact. No entity has yet entered the civil service law. In Peru there is a body of public managers that allows us to have super-functionaries who can help local and regional governments with their capacity to improve their management standard.

And where are the superfunctionaries?

Unfortunately we have a cultural problem because public managers receive a raise, a bonus, which is paid by the PCM. So, the mayors or municipal managers –since they are going to earn more than them– they don’t want them there. So we lose capacities despite the fact that the national government gives them help so that they have this type of management. In addition, the salaries paid in subnational governments are not adequate, which means that many times engineers, economists and lawyers who can provide services in the State do not do so in those instances because the salaries are quite low. This is very dramatic in matters of public investment because, when we have to build a bridge, a highway, a hospital, or a health center, generally the personnel that work in the municipalities do not have the skills. Sometimes what subnational governments do is depend on companies. Suppliers do the projects that the public sector has to do. And we already know what is going to happen next, because surely whoever does the project ends up doing the public work.

Is it time to evaluate the decentralization process in Peru?

It is a subject on which one must reflect. Since 2008, 93% of powers have been transferred from the central government to regional governments, but it was done without respecting the law on transfer of powers, which first required that the regional government have the capacities to receive them. The national government has been giving outlets to this. Two key sectors were created: the Pronied and the Pronis. They are two entities that help local governments to do their technical files, but they cannot do the work. When we talk about strategic infrastructure of a certain magnitude, we should have mechanisms like the ones I’m telling you about. The way things are, and the governors are not going to like this, it is important that we have a way out of this.

And many times the citizens of those regions blame the central government for everything when the governors or mayors are the ones who are limited.

There is no mechanism in the basic decentralization law so that when a regional government falls within its management capacity, the central government intervenes and the supply of services to the population can be regularized. Many of the functions of the regional government, transferred from the central government, function through what are called rectories. It implies that the ministries have the rectories, and the operational part –salaries and infrastructure– is in charge of the regional governments. The rectories must not only be normative, but the quality of the services must be verified. The scope of quality of services from the rectories that the central government has is an issue that should be discussed in depth in Peru.

Abroad, comments from the media and political leaders that distort what is really happening in the country are becoming more frequent. What should the Foreign Ministry do so that the other version of the story is also heard?

As soon as the coup took place, and the Peruvian institutions responded articulately by distancing themselves from what the president wanted – to turn Peruvian democracy into a dictatorship – the OAS issued a statement in support of Peruvian democracy against Mr. Castillo. The governments of the world also rejected the coup. But some countries questioned what was happening in Peru by interfering internally and the most aggressive was the president of Mexico, López Obrador.

In the month of December.

What AMLO did was break a very old Mexican tradition of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other countries. This policy of non-intervention is a policy so that the United States does not meddle in its internal affairs and not so much with the rest of America. This could be a boomerang for them in the future. What is happening is a relaxation of Latin American standards of democracy. In the last 30 years we have advanced to build democratic foundations to distance ourselves from the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s. Today democracy is one of the fundamental values ​​and one of the aspects that unites us in the international community. There can be no dictatorships in the region because they are going to be strongly rejected and attacked. So, if we start today to relax the concepts and say that what was a coup was not a coup, but rather a little coup, we are giving a highly inadequate signal because we are affecting Latin American standards of democracy. This wave that has come from certain presidents and foreign ministries against Peru is very dangerous. I hope they reconsider and understand that what has happened in Peru is very serious. In addition, according to the latest OAS resolution, presidents cannot incite violence.

Was the OAS wrong to support Pedro Castillo during 2022?

Clearly the OAS had a mission, at that time, to support President Castillo. Almagro came to Peru, the assembly was held here and there was a speech to support Castillo. When Castillo invokes the Democratic Charter and the OAS makes that famous report, it did not go down very well with Peru because it was not a balanced report. The one who betrayed this link between the Peruvian government at the time and the OAS General Secretary was the former president himself. Castillo betrayed Almagro and all the countries that wanted to help him. The OAS has once again wanted to propose that a new mission be sent to Peru, but I believe that the OAS is disqualified from proposing a dialogue because it did not do the right things at the time and did not propose a balanced methodology. I think the OAS has been left out of the game. So, what that resolution proposed was support for Peru to advance the elections, but unfortunately we are seeing that Congress has not been able to reach an agreement and, rather, there is a consensus for the congressmen to stay until 2026.

KEEP IN MIND

• Jiménez Mayor was Minister of Justice and President of the Council of Ministers during the government of Ollanta Humala.
• In December 2013, he became the ambassador of Peru to the Organization of American States (OAS).

RECOMMENDED VIDEOS: