Keiko Fujimori will not be able to fulfill his main promises if he does not rebuild the State’s capacity to execute works and provide efficient services. This must start from day one with the transfer teams, who should not limit themselves to making a diagnosis of each sector to see where to start. They must be more ambitious: identify expenses and programs that are useless or redundant or that do not correspond to a subsidiary State, in order to generate savings that will be needed to finance urgent and very expensive needs such as El Niño prevention work, the purchase of equipment and technology for the PNP, flagrante delicto units, the immediate construction of prisons, the formalization of informal miners so as not to have to renew the Reinfo and the 100-day plan for southern Peru.
Produce, for example, allocates a lot of budget and consulting to programs and subsidies to “promote” companies, when the best way to promote them is to eliminate regulations and obstacles. There is a lot of spending that could be eliminated or reduced. If we do not start from the beginning with that perspective, we will be left with a pachydermic and useless State.
The signs have to be clear from the beginning. Announce, for example, that you will only enter the State by merit, or by competition, and that carding is prohibited. Absolute discipline in that. What happened cannot happen – speaking of El Niño – with the Authority for Reconstruction with Changes (ARCC), created in 2017, which developed a prevention plan financed by the IDB to condition the basins of 13 regions so that the rivers did not bring excessive flow: forestation in the upper parts and reservoirs in the middle parts to retain and infiltrate water. And storm drains in cities. We finally learned our lesson. But nothing was done. Just a few riverine defenses in the lower parts, which collapsed when the rivers first flooded in 2024.
What happened? The aforementioned authority was attacked by politicians and those close to Pedro Castillo. It became another budget loot. It would be good for the new Congress to investigate this case and see what lessons to draw, because in 2023 the ARCC was replaced by the National Infrastructure Authority (ANIN), which has not carried out the underlying works either.
Now all that remains is to clear and castle critical points at full speed, spread hydroponic crops and grasses grown in the southern mountains against drought, and pray to God. Sisyphus must be exhausted by now.
Therefore, meritocracy in the State at all levels must be an obsession of the new government. That and deep deregulation are the only way to fight corruption. The works begin and do not end, the Health budget has multiplied by eight in real terms in the last 25 years and the service does not improve… Theft has become normalized.
With this State there will be little he can do. Keiko Fujimori has to clearly explain the need for second-generation reforms so that public opinion supports them because here the only thing that matters is that public services serve the people well.
