1 Peruvian Perfect Storm: State Fragility, Corruption and Organized

Peruvian Perfect Storm: State Fragility, Corruption and Organized Crime1 Lucía Dammert2 Introduction The presence of organized crime has become the main threat for the Peruvian State’s security. The weakness of state’s capacity at regional and local levels of government is indisputable and has not changed much in recent years. On the contrary, the process of decentralization is barely linked to strengthen their capabilities to fully respond to the countries many challenges. However, it opened up a process of check and balances that showed the multiple difficulties of the presence of the state in the territory. These processes go hand in hand with a crisis of legitimacy in the political arena, consolidated during the Fujimori government, whose principal elements are political party crisis, creation of multiple local movements with limited self-governing mechanisms, obscure financial strategies and high impunity surrounding major political corruption scandals. Thus, the main threat to the Peruvian state is not linked with its destruction or an external intervention but rather to an internal deterioration that weakens its own structure. There is a clear difficulty to deal with this issue: lack of information. In fact most evidence raises from journalists and media investigations that often became the only whistleblower the illegal acts. This chapter assumes a pending conceptual debate about organized crime and the diverse ways it could be understood. But beyond these challenges, it will intend to find clear signs of the complex relationship established between organized crime and a continuous process of institutional weakening in Peru. The chapter is divided into four sections. The first one 1 A review version of this paper will be publish as a chapter in En Kassab, H. & J. Rosen (edits) Fragile States in the Americas. Lexington Books, Washington DC 2 Associate Proffesor, Universidad de Santiago de Chile. 1 emphasizes the characteristics of the institutional organization of the Peruvian State in all levels of government. The second section discusses organized crime in Peru, focusing in three illegal markets: drug trafficking, illegal mining, and human trafficking. It is only part of the problem, but they surely are the most representatives of the processes of consolidation of illegal networks and markets in Peru. The third section focuses on the clear and no so evident policy weaknesses and their links between political actors and illegal markets. Although much of the existence evidence is no conclusive, there are too many signs that depict an important protection of the political world by illegal actors. Finally, the search for strategies to tackle this situation that could be labeled as the “Perfect Storm” that is developing in Peru will be emphasized. Strategies that need political will, citizen involvement and institutional strength in order to be developed and implemented in a successful way. The presence of these elements has yet to be verified. I. The Peruvian Institutional Context The Peruvian State has gone through profound transformation processes in the last decades (Gootenberg, 2013). The available information indicates the presence of significant positive results, which less than fifty years ago were considered to be even impossible. Health and education coverage have been the main policies developed that highlights state presence in many Peruvian regions. Most of which wee used to having the military or the police force as only representatives of the state. While Peru is inherently centralized country, with a capital city such as Lima that holds more of 50% of the national population as well as economic and financial activities; it has a decentralized structure. In the last two decades the presence of democratically elected regional governments has consolidated, including a new local political actor in the regional map. New laws gave their regional governments key functions to develop and 2 implement policies as well as administrative management roles of their territories. Furthermore, they have important resources allocated from the national budget that allows them to develop an economic and social policy agenda. Unfortunately, the real capacities of the regional and local governments are still very limited, mainly due to the low professionalization of human capital as well as the constant change of personnel. Not to mention that the decentralization process occurred during a period of economic boom that translated in a huge influx of money into regional governments. In Peru, regions receive 50% share of the income tax paid by mining and oil companies. That situation consolidated a new public investment panorama in which more than 2/3 of the national budget is carried out by subnational governments. The same institutions that, as mentioned before, lack professional structures and human capacities to tackle most managerial shores and duties describe as their regular missions. This is not only a problem for regional governments but rather it reflects what occurs at national levels. The crisis of legitimacy and representation faced by political parties has been exacerbated since the mid-90s during the government of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) but it does not comment solely from this period. Nevertheless, in the last decades the weakening of political action has been accompanied by the birth of smaller political parties with only electoral purposes, with few life spans, small number of militants with little commitment, and generally gathered through unclear mechanisms. In this context two parallel processes developed, which tend to generate a vicious cycle where transparency, effectiveness of politics and strengthening of the public apparatus are not in the center of the agenda. However, the state is not weak in all areas. On the contrary, in the last decades we have seen important achievements linked to the Peruvian state, mainly, in its 3 macroeconomics policies that have affected the achievements of relevant developmental objectives (UUNN, 2015). For example, It has reduced the number of Peruvians living below the poverty line, increased the levels of educational coverage, reduced the infant mortality rate and increased the coverage of basic services around the country (CEPAL, 2015). The so-called first generation reforms managed to improve economic indicators and consolidate a more stable economy, but have undoubtedly shown their limitations. The importance of an agenda of second generation reforms in urgent, connected to institutional efforts to strengthening public administration and justice also improve quality of public education and health to name a few. In fact, the World Economic Forum, in its last report ranked Peru 135 of 140 in police services, 133 in high presence of organized crime, 130 in trust of the police force and quality of education systems, and 133 in labor rigidness (WEF, 2016). Moreover regarding corruption Peru faces many challenges and during 2015 dropped seven slots relative to the previous years (WEF, 2016). It is clear that a pro-institutional strengthening agenda is the principal challenge that the current as well as the forthcoming government have to deal with. However, the challenging agenda is not solely the governments’ responsibility. Broad political consensus is the key in order to advance through long periods of complex reform that require executive action as well as legislative power. For instance, the criminal justice system (police force, justice system and prison system) have been abandoned for decades due to limited or bad investments that have empowered the development of internal circles of powers, whose objectives are linked to self-enrichment more than for the strengthening of institutions. The changes required at the institutional level are manifold, however the goal of the present chapter is to describe the connection between increasing levels of the vulnerabilities of the State, organized crime threats, and corruption practices. In this exercise, criminal justice system 4 institutions are the center of the agenda due to their ability to monopolize the use of force; the delivery of justice and the use of punishment mechanisms and rehabilitation for those who violate the laws. The scenario is quite dramatic. The National Police of Peru (PNP for its Spanish name) is a centralized institution that has suffered many attempts at reforms during the last decades; most of them have been unsuccessful (Costa y Basombrio 2008). The limited professionalism of their forces, the inefficient civil controls related to its actions and even the use of punitive populism discourses in vogue in Peru and the precarious salary conditions and social protection of the police officers are different elements used to built an ineffective institution with low citizens trust. In fact, the Peruvians have a profound negative perception of the institution in charge of the control and prevention of delinquency due to inefficiencies, corruption, and excessive use of force. The justice system has not gone through a better path. On the contrary, it is the worse evaluated institution in Peru and multiple cases involving political corruption such as organized crime have continued eroding its legitimacy. The sentiment in Peru is that the law is not applied equally to all and that money appears to be the only way to buy or gain inside influence over the internal justice system. The effort to reform the procedural penal process that was designed to increase effectiveness of judicial procedures as well

Load more