29/07/2013
Researcher of the Navarra Center for International Development Navarra University and member of the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of Spain
Peruvians celebrate our independence engaged in improving government performance. State-building has been, from the inception of the Republic, an essential part of what Jorge Basadre called "the promise of Peruvian life." The process of state-building, tumultuous by definition, has aroused deep disagreements between an expanding entrepreneurial society and an institutional policy that is absent, artificial and ineffective. The divorce between the real country and the formal country, glossed by Peruvians of the beginning of the 20th century in the image and likeness of Spanish Regenerationism, has grown over the past two centuries and is even today, despite Peru's spectacular growth, the major challenge faced by the actors aspiring to reform.
Building an effective and efficient State means making a political gamble for control. And control is directly linked to the principle of independence. Only the person who is free can control. The reform of the Peruvian State requires the implementation of independence in high-impact agencies. In order to reject the political interference, patronage and clientelism that characterise a patrimonial state--a legacy of the populist left and of the autocracies of the right--the independence of the supervisory bodies should materialise in effective acts of legal enforcement. The law, a sophisticated structure of incentives, can only be impartially met and enforced when the bodies responsible of materialising it are protected by a structural independence ensuring the institutional balance that characterises an open society.
This is the great challenge of Peru before the anniversary of their political freedom. Making formal and external independence become as well a functional and internal independence. Democracy is not a disjointed set of utopian principles sentenced to the diversion of populism. Democracy can and must be realised in efficient control models which guarantee freedom. If the "price of freedom is eternal vigilance" as Thomas Jefferson said, we need an effective independence rooted in the Rule of Law to prevent the transformation of the republican control in an authoritarian domination. This is the great challenge of the Peruvian State: a management of independence that ensures control. Modernising the State involves ensuring the independence of its supervisory agencies. Hence, Humala's failure in public administration reform. The proposed inclusion is an elusive goal if its practise is subject to hyper-presidentialism. The problem is compounded, unfortunately, if the President's wife co-directs the country.
(Peruvian independence was declared on 28th July 1821)