Arequipa and Puno did not spend even 50% of their budget

Arequipa is the second region of the country that received the most resources this year to carry out works, but its regional government is one of the most inefficient. A little over a month after the end of the year, it did not execute even half of its budget, according to the Friendly Consultation of the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF).

The MEF portal reveals that the special project Copasa (Cooperation for the Sustainable Self-development process of Arequipa) only executed 815 thousand soles and still has pending almost half of the assigned amount. The Majes Siguas project spent only 16% of the almost 249 million for investment in 11 months. Another sector with poor execution is health. They only spent 8.8% of the more than nine and a half million they have. The most worrying cases are that of the Southern Neoplastic Diseases Institute and the Honorio Delgado regional hospital, which did not spend anything.

Despite the millions assigned to Arequipa, Chala, Cotahuasi and Camaná hospitals remain paralyzed. Recently, the construction of Vía 4 lanes in the Northern Cone was paralyzed and will harm more than 200 thousand inhabitants due to non-compliance by the regional government.

The rector of the San Pablo Catholic University, Germán Chávez, believes that one of the causes for inefficiency is the lack of qualified professional cadres in the regional government. Public management must be in the hands of highly trained personnel.

For Chávez, another factor is the presumed corruption that the regional government would have captured. Currently, Governor Elmer Cáceres Llica faces a request for 36 months of preventive detention for leading the criminal organization ´The children of the Condor´.

In Puno, the budget execution for works is even more deficient. The regional government in which it invested the least is health. Hospital projects such as the construction of the Maternal and Child Hospital in the southern cone of Juliaca, improvement of the Manuel Núñez Butrón hospital and the Ilave support hospital were postponed this year.

The explanation for what is happening in Puno could be the ungovernability that has been unleashed in recent years. This region already has three governors in a single administration. Germán Alejo assumed the leadership of the regional government in replacement of Agustín Luque, who is in preventive detention for allegedly directing the criminal organization “Los Supremos del Altiplano” that would direct works to companies without experience. Luque arrived at the regional chair after the suspension of Walter Aduviri, who was initially sentenced to 6 years and 8 months of imprisonment for the “Aymarazo”, A violent protest that he led in 2011. In December of last year he was released, but he still has a suspended sentence.

Best execution

The other side of the coin is also in the south of the country. The regional governments of Moquegua and Cusco occupy the first and third places in budget execution at the national level. The imperial region is shown to be the most efficient, in addition to being one of the regions of Peru that received the most resources this year. The regional authority, Jean Paul Benavente, pointed out that the advancement of the Antonio Lorena hospital, which already has an executing company, could further optimize investments in Cusco. The unlocking of the Vía Expresa this year was one of the reasons that accelerated budget execution.

In the case of Tacna and Apurímac, both regions executed about half of their allocated budgets. The second suffers from worrying indicators of poverty and malnutrition.

The CBC specialist, Esteban Valle Riestra, these indicators should be aimed at identifying the reasons for inefficiency.

Canon budgets are not lost

The Citizen Proposal specialist, Esteban Valle Riestra, clarified that the resources not executed in one year are not lost, they are accumulated for the next. He said that this year and the next they are encouraging in terms of the contributions that the mining activity will transfer.

Valle Riestra stated that the evaluation of the performance of regional governments should serve to specialize the capacities of technical areas in the regions, unblock some processes and optimize anti-corruption filters. “These evaluations should not be used to think about putting the money elsewhere,” he said. For the specialist, decentralization is a process that must be protected.