[News] Scenarios and forecasts for 2022: Pending agenda and urgent goals

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2021 leaves us a Parliament quite far from the steep aspiration of being the executor of the great reforms, the reactivator of the economy, the unlocking of the paralyzed works ... the bicentennial Congress. Doing a very brief review of its elementary functions, we can see that there are more pending than achievements.

With 972 bills presented (49 approved), 19 have become laws aimed at sectors such as Education, Agriculture and the Economy. However, only 129 opinions have been produced. It is a considerably lower figure than that of the last Congress (2016-2021), which achieved 432 out of a universe of 844 bills in the same period.

The effective work of Parliament should be measured not by the number of laws passed, but rather by the number of opinions produced on legislative initiatives. These constitute in practice the written document that brings together the conclusions reached, after the technical opinions of the sectors involved and the citizens themselves, and the debate in committee. It is what legitimizes the work done.

The coming legislature should demand more proactive commissions and parliamentary groups, a better evaluation and development of the legislative agenda within, with the purpose of achieving majority or bloc positions, in order to reduce the high political and economic cost that it produces. uncertainty, in addition to avoiding the presentation and approval of declarative laws and seeking to put issues on the agenda. To date, there are more than 160 bills that are declarative or that aim to prioritize the creation of districts or the execution of works, for example.

Regarding political control, nine motions to interpellate ministers were registered; three reached the plenary session and one ended in censorship. That, without stopping counting the more than 150 occasions in which Congress received different authorities and officials. However, several constitutional accusations inherited from the previous Congress are pending, which should be addressed before, due to the passage of time, the prerogative to accuse expires.

In the same sense, based on the new obligation of parliamentarians to present their sworn declaration of conflicts of interest to the comptroller, the Board of Directors and the Ethics Commission, within the scope of their own functions, have the challenge of devising some mechanism for the timely identification and assessment of risks due to conflicts of interest, promoting the greatest possible transparency from the portal itself.

Finally, the main pending issues have to do with the structural reforms that have not yet been reviewed. The economic reactivation, the return to classes, the stoppage of works and the problems of institutional management in regional and local governments have been topics mentioned in almost all parliamentary debates because they are urgent, but there are also others of longer duration such as reform. politics (preferential voting, financing, congressional reelection, etc.) and the health reform itself that are still awaiting.

The straitjacket and the fainthearted
Ruben Vargas

Former Minister of the Interior, former executive president of Devida

The most efficient state action that allowed us to prevent the coca leaf from turning into cocaine is, by far, eradication. In total, 25 thousand hectares of eradicated coca were equivalent to 245 fewer tons of cocaine.

From the current management of the National Commission for Development and Life without Drugs (Devida), they are acting with suspicious naivety. They announced that, to avoid the ‘vicious circle of replanting’ they will propose solemn “citizen social pacts”. This pact is supposed to provoke a kind of liberating exorcism that will immunize the peasant from narcococa. I have the impression that we are dealing with a misunderstood copy of the so-called ‘social control’ that was applied in Bolivia.

Empirical evidence tells us that only sustained eradication, accompanied by alternative development and investment in road infrastructure, could break the economic matrix of illegal coca. This was done in Alto Huallaga. Result: the rule of law was recovered, terrorism was defeated and drug trafficking was significantly reduced.

In the valley of the Apurímac, Ene and Mantaro (Vraem) rivers it was never eradicated. An important part of their economy is drugged with the 500 tons of cocaine that they process annually. What is the Government's proposal? Defend and legalize that coca. There are three bills for this purpose.

Unfortunately, in Devida they put a straitjacket on the fight against drugs, reducing eradication only to some areas without major importance for drug trafficking. We do not need to do much analysis to foresee that in the next two years we will exceed 100,000 hectares of coca, which in turn will produce more than 1,000 tons of cocaine.

https://elcomercio.pe/politica/actualidad/escenarios-y-pronosticos-para-el-2022-agenda-pendiente-y-metas-urgentes-noticia/