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Proceso 1150
June 22, 2005
ISSN 0259-9864
Editorial: A justification for incompetence
Politics: The victims of the State’s authoritarian attitude
Economy: Once again the Salvadoran pockets are assaulted
A justification for incompetence
The Salvadoran authorities are anxiously looking for a
pretext to justify the meager results of their efforts to guarantee an
acceptable level of security. The most questionable aspect of all this is the
increasing level of homicides. The director of the police is hiding behind a
shield saying that the kidnaps are over, an important fact according to him,
because the business elite was concerned about it, and it is important to please
it. He adds that the gangs are a problem in the whole continent, as if this
thought were to liberate him from his immediate duties, and as if a general
situation were the same thing as a normal situation, and therefore, it were
something that we had to learn to live with because the government is not
efficient enough. The interest that the FBI could have in the gangs is not much
for the country, unless some people think that this American agency will be
taking over the duties of the director of the Salvadoran police. What is normal
is not the existence of the gangs –an irrefutable signal of the social crisis
and social exclusion-, but the possibility of not having this problem, the
possibility of keeping the homicide levels inside the average levels. The
director of the police indicated that politics promote murder, since the country
is in the middle of an electoral campaign. But the increasing level of homicides
is not something new, and he has no evidence to prove what he is saying. Even
President Saca does not agree with this perspective because there is not enough
evidence to sustain it.
The director of the police is overwhelmed by the increasing level of homicides,
but that does not mean that he does not have any goals or plans. He reacts on a
daily basis, without prevention, without planning, without evaluating any
results. His attitude is very similar to the one of the administration he works
for. They expect the economic crisis to automatically take a turn for the best.
None of these attitudes seems to be odd, because President Saca himself does not
know how to handle the increasing levels of violence and the challenge brought
by the gangs and the increasing level of homicides. To admit the existence of
the problem (and the fact that it is growing worse), and say that they are
working hard to solve it, is not improving the situation. Instead of decreasing,
the homicide rates are growing. Therefore, how to explain that so much work,
measured by thousands of operations and thousands of people arrested, is not
efficient enough to improve the security levels?
When arriving to this point, this explanation about the gangs is not good
enough, because it does not help us to understand why the number of murders keep
increasing (as well as why other types of crimes keep increasing: domestic
violence against children and women, a problem that is overlooked when it comes
to see the high homicide levels. If just like President Saca says, “it is
important to keep the dangerous gang members in jail, the ones that are hired by
the mafia to kill people”, why does not he try harder to chase those mafias that
hire gang members? According to his analysis of violence, there would be an
improved level of control if he paid attention to the roots of the homicides and
not to the apparent reasons. It is impossible to understand why the ARENA
administration is not adopting obvious measures, and why, instead, it is trying
to keep a repressive model of laws and actions that have failed. Corruption
grows stronger along with the homicide level, the police’s abuse of authority,
the security companies, the guns’ trade market, and the power of certain
institutions. It is impossible to understand that a government that intends to
control the crime level tries to reelect an incompetent Attorney General. It
would be normal then if this problem turns even more critical. So much
irrationality can only be explained by the governmental incompetence to face one
of the most serious challenges of all times.
The analysis made by the ARENA administration, and particularly by the Ministry
of Governance, overlooks the incapacity of the police to investigate crime. The
police lacks the basic skills, the staff is not motivated, and they do not have
enough resources. They have too much independence to investigate; often enough
the people that occupy the most important positions decide how to conduct an
investigation in order to protect certain delinquents. That is why the most
important features of the Attorney General is to be as obedient as possible. The
authorities have not understood that there are crimes that have no witnesses at
all, or the police and the Attorney General’s Office cannot find one, or the
judge believes that the evidence is not good enough. The resources of criminal
science, just like the things that can identify a criminal, ballistics, blood
tests, DNA tests; the physical, the mathematical, or the medical evidences are
out of the reach of these authorities. It seems that these resources are just
too complex for authorities that do not have much of a scientific knowledge.
Instead of paying attention to their shortcomings, the government now intends to
put homicides next to terrorist actions, theoretically speaking to intensify the
punishments; but actually they are just running away from the basic
responsibilities that are necessary to control the levels of violence. Such
perspective can only be explained with the mental confusion of the authorities
responsible for the people’s safety.
The ignorance of the ARENA administration disapproves of the actions of the
judges, as if the main obstacle to control crime were the judge’s decisions or
their alleged lack of sense to follow the law. This administration presents the
Ministry of Governance as an institution that knows how to identify the needs of
the people. Therefore, the judges should follow their indications in order to
avoid making any mistakes, and this way they would be subjected to the orders of
the Executive Power, the only one allegedly capable to know the right direction.
The judges can make mistakes. But the way in which the Ministry of Governance
intends to justify its direct intervention in the administration of justice is
not a legitimate action. The government of ARENA is extremely concerned about
the way in which the judges can decide to liberate the allegedly dangerous
interns. The idea of President Saca is that the people arrested by the police
should be sent to jail by the judges without any considerations at all. This
concept responds to a very particular vision of the administration of justice,
according to which the important thing is to keep a synchronized chain of
actions to produce prisoners. The police chooses and arrest the candidates and
the judge sends them to jail. The judicial evidence and even the performance of
the Attorney General’s Office would not be necessary. It seems as if under this
perspective the judgment of the police is enough to find the arrested people
guilty, therefore the judges have to obey, and their duties would just be a
bureaucratic procedure. This model is a typical pattern of a police’s State.
The victims of the State’s authoritarian attitude
The public administration of El Salvador seems to work as a
gigantic apparatus where nepotism, the abuse of authority, and institutional
inefficiency are the rules. It was expected that the democratization process
that began back in 1992 would create a new relation between the people and the
government, and that such a change would be reflected in the institutional
performance. However, to this day, the authoritarian actions have won the
battle. Among the problems that the public administration faces, this comment
will focus on the designation and the control of the public officials. This
issue is connected with the hunger strike that people that were fired from the
Ministry of Governance are now following.
The good performance of the State, understood as an institution, would be
possible through a balance between the legitimate wish of the politicians to be
able to control those who apply their decisions, and a certain continuity of the
public officials. About this aspect, the Constitution of El Salvador, in Article
218, recalls that “the public officials and the public employees are at the
service of the State and not at the service of just one specific political
fraction. They should not be able to take advantage of their positions to work
with the political propaganda. Those who do that will be sanctioned according to
the law”. That is why their administrative career is connected with the
administration’s income, the promotions, the transferences, among other things.
These dispositions intend to neutralize the authorities’ despotic behavior. The
Law of Civil Service recalls that the constitution “establishes the
administrative career, admits the presence of the officials and the employees
included in it, and establishes that a special law will regulate the civil
service”. Without mentioning it, the legislator intends to protect the
subordinate public officials from any authoritarian behavior of their superiors.
About the governmental need to control those who apply their decisions, the
Constitution does not agree with granting to certain categories of officials the
right to the administrative career. Article 219 indicates that “the officials or
the employees that have political positions will not be included in the
administrative career”. All of the same, those who do not belong to this
category will not be able to appeal before a civil service court, and those that
have political duties can get rid of these officials. In other words, the
necessary famous balance for the good performance of the country is present in
the laws of the Republic.
However, technically, nothing much has been done to actually apply the laws
connected with the balance. Since 1992, in the context of the recommendations of
the financial areas of the Congress of Washington, which speak about a reduction
of the State’s apparatus, the executives of ARENA literally work in a regime of
terror that favors the party. The staff is constantly changed from salary
regimes to contract regimes. It is easier to manipulate and control those that
are not part of the administrative career, it is also easier to control their
political affiliation.
Contrary to what the law establishes, the public administration has turned into
a tool in the hands of the official party. This is how they are sure that the
party will keep its power through a political clientele. The officials who do
not reach their goals or fulfill the whims of those who run the institutions,
under the euphemism of the ending contracts, are simply fired, and they are not
compensated at the end of the year.
This is how ARENA can be sure of the loyalty or the silence of the middle-rank
public officials. In addition, that is why they are using a disposition of the
constitution that seems to forbid the presence of the unions in the public
administration. Article 47, which enumerates those that have the right to become
associated, is playing along with the controlling task of ARENA over the State.
“The employers and the private workers (…) and whatever their position might be
or the nature of their job, have the right to freely associate themselves to
defend their own interests by forming professional associations or unions. The
workers of the independent official institutions will have the same right”. That
is how, if the unions are not present and if the protection of the civil service
court is not effective, the politicians from ARENA can do whatever they want.
For over a month already, several employees of the Ministry of Governance are in
a hunger strike. They consider that they were fired under unfair circumstances.
Before the declaration of the politicians from ARENA, which just say that their
contract is over, in order to refuse to accept any kind of negotiations about
this matter, the Procurator for the Defense of the Human Rights, Beatrice
Carrillo, has a different interpretation of the subject.
In the first place, she considers that the people on strike “came to work under
the salary law, but when both the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of
Internal Affairs became a single institution in order to create the Ministry of
Governance, the personnel became part of a system of personal services”, along
with losing their rights as a consequence of this system. Due to this, the
public official indicated that “this decision to fire certain members of the
staff is a violation of the fundamental rights of the workers, to the stability
of their positions, to the right process, and to the right to become past of an
union (against the affected staff)”. In other words, Carrillo refers to the easy
exits taken by certain politicians to intimidate the public employees. That is
why she recommends to the Legislative Assembly “to discuss and approve the
necessary regulations in order to administrate the transferences of the regime
of the Law of Salaries and Contracts, to give the personnel the constitutional
guarantee of a labor stability.
Until now, President Saca has overlooked the vindications of the workers on
strike. The arrogance and the lack of sensibility of the President when it comes
to deal with this issue has to be interpreted in the light of the silence kept
by the most important news media about this issue. In the context of the Saca
administration, there are no problems as long as they do not appear in the
press. Only when the most important news media reveal a problem and make it
their own, this problem is noticed by the Presidential House. That is how they
start moving all their strings revolving around the kindness of “a government
with human sense”.
The indifference to handle the case of these workers that are on strike
considerably shows the little commitment of the President with the cause of
democracy and human dignity. The scandal about the allegedly reprehensible
behavior of the former Minister of Tourism has created a discussion about the
demands of probity of the most important public officials. In this same extent,
the case of these workers should create a discussion with the intention to
suppress the anomalies and the abuses of the public administration. If these
changes do not take place it means that Saca is definitively not interested in
the improvement of the professional performance and the credibility of the
public service. Just like his predecessors from ARENA, he keeps seeing the
organization of the workers as a threat for his party to gain the total control
of the State’s institutions.
Once again the Salvadoran pockets are assaulted
This week, the National Coordinator of Transportation (CNT,
in Spanish) announced that the bus fare would increase due to the increasing
prices of diesel. The union that, according to its leaders, gathers around 99%
of the businessmen that own the buses, has decided to increase the bus fare from
$0.20 to $0.30 cents. For those who own buses, the public transportation units
have not obtained profitable results as a consequence of the increasing prices
of the petroleum products, which have affected the economy since last year.
To reduce the action of this arbitrary position, the Minister of Public Works
held a meeting with the businessmen that own the public transportation units to
look for an alternative. To this day, these meetings have not been effective
enough to resolve the problem, and by next Thursday the owners of the buses have
threatened with implementing their measure. In fact, Genaro Ramírez, one of the
most important transportation businessmen of the country, said that if the scale
of prices is too strong, the new bus fare could be $0.35 cents.
Last year, the government and the owners of the buses established a new
transportation fare of $0.20 cents. In this occasion, the fare increased by 17%.
The expenses of the families did increase considerably. Back then, the minimum
amount spent by a person with an average salary represented something close to
7% of his or her salary. With this increase, the people that earn the minimum
wage had to destine 12% of their salary to transportation fares. In this
opportunity, the increase affected the economy of the Salvadoran population,
since the increase represented over 10% of their income.
For this year, if the bus fare is increased, the consequences would be more
critical. To increase it from $0.20 to $0.30 –50%- would be a low blow for the
economy of the Salvadoran families. The people would be spending approximately
15% of the minimum salary. As it can be noticed, this means that in about a year
the expenses on public transportation for a person that earns the minimum wage
would increase by almost 50%, that is, form 7% to 15%.
This problem shapes itself into more of a real dimension when it is considered
that the approximate amounts do not include the following contemplations: that a
person travels by bus at least twice during the day, and that this person might
be also paying for the bus fare of his or her spouse and children, and does not
count with a complete salary due to the fact that the Social Security and the
AFP (the fund of pensions) do take a percentage of that salary. If these
considerations were to be made, a more critical reality would be revealed.
The increasing prices of the basic products
The increasing bus fares are just one of the many aspects that affect the
family’s economy. A glance at the behavior of the prices of many basic products
shows that its prices have rapidly increased during the first months of the
year. This is confirmed by the evolution of the general index of prices, the
increasing price of the basic food basket, and the announcement that the General
Superintendence of Electricity and Telecommunications (SIGET, in Spanish)
recently made about the increase on the price of electric energy. This creates a
somber perspective for the consumers, it confirms that as time goes by the real
salaries keep decreasing.
According to the information provided by the General Direction of Census and
Statistics of the Ministry of Economy (IGESTYC, in Spanish), the Consumer’s
General Index of Prices (IPC, in Spanish) indicates that, between December of
the last year and May of the present year, the prices have increased by 2.8%.
This is quite a high variation, and it means that if by the end of the nineties
it was necessary to fundamentally deal with the lack of economic growth –since
the authorities had controlled inflation-, at present, the country has to face a
couple of problems: the inflation and the economic stagnation.
By observing the variation of the index of prices of several groups of goods and
services, it is important to see that four of them are the ones that have
increased the most in this year. In the first place, alcoholic beverages have
increased by 21.51%. this is because the prices of these products have been
affected since the government implemented the FOSALUD. The expenses on a family
car have increased by 8.83% because of the increasing prices of fuel. The
expenses on maintenance and reparation of housing have increased by 5.61%. and
last but not least the prices of food have increased by 4.83%.
As it can be noticed, the increasing prices of the products in the market is
going against the budget of the families. In relation to the most important
needs of the family, it can be said food and bus fares are the most critical
problem. When this happens, people have to make a tremendous effort to get new
incomes in order to be able to satisfy their needs.
However, the increasing prices in transportation and the increasing prices of
food do follow the same line of the increasing prices of electric energy. During
the second week of June, the price of electricity increased by 5.5%. according
to several public officials, the increasing prices of electric energy are also
due to the increasing prices of petroleum. Such increase represents an
additional $1.60 for the Salvadoran family. This figure might be laughable for
some people, but not for the poorest families.
The government can be partially blamed for the increasing prices of fuel and for
the 5.5% increase on the electric energy bill. In the first case, the Executive
Power could have created regulations to improve the control of the fuel market
in the country. In the second case, a better way to calculate the electric
energy bill would have been favorable for all Salvadorans. According to the
experts, the electric energy prices increase also because there is an incorrect
manner of calculating the prices of electricity. In both cases, the government
has not played an active role in these matters, and that passiveness has turned
into a problem for the Salvadoran population.
Hopefully, in the future, the government will pay more attention to the demands
of most Salvadorans since it has to remember, just like the public opinion polls
reveal, that the economic subject is the weak spot of the Saca administration.
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