GARCIA RE-CENTRALIZES DECENTRALIZATION

UNCLAS LIMA 000309

SIPDIS

SENSITIVE
SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: N/A
TAGS: PGOV KDEM PE
SUBJECT: GARCIA RE-CENTRALIZES DECENTRALIZATION

REF: 06 LIMA 4519 (AND PREVIOUS)

Sensitive But Unclassified. Please handle accordingly.


1. (SBU) Summary: The Garcia government in late January
formally placed the bureaucratic entity responsible for
decentralization into the Council of Ministers structure.
Some observers emphasize the irony that the central
government has reasserted control over a mechanism intended
to distribute authority to regions and municipalities, others
believe decentralization will now have the high-level
political attention it needs, while many see the government's
move as politically heavy-handed whatever its longer term
effects. End Summary.


2. (U) The GOP on 1/25 merged the previously independent
National Decentralization Council (CND) into the Council of
Ministers (PCM),the cabinet structure presided over by
President Garcia. (The CND was created in 2002 to guide the
political, economic, and administrative decentralization
process; the Executive Board included local and regional
leaders.) This move increases the President's control over
the faltering decentralization process and, according to
critics, eliminates an "autonomous" forum for regional and
local governments to discuss decentralization policy among
themselves and with the central government. Some observers
have highlighted the irony that decentralization appears to
have been "recentralized," and questioned the legality of the
executive decree given that the CND was created by an organic
law in Congress.


3. (U) The President, Prime Minister, and other APRA
politicians have defended the move. The Prime Minister said
the "fusion by absorption" of the CND would eliminate
duplication and promote decentralization by giving the Prime
Minister policy oversight. More hopeful observers noted that
the PCM might provide the political will needed to jumpstart
the government's high priority decentralization process,
which was increasingly seen as adrift. In this connection,
many also agree that something needed to be done to improve
the effectiveness of the weakly-led CND.


4. (SBU) Comment: Garcia announced the restructuring without
consulting the CND, regional presidents, local authorities,
or Congress, all of whom seemed blindsided by the decision.
Regional and local leaders, the presumed central actors in
any authentic decentralization process, now wonder what their
role in decentralization will be and whether the central
government's decision will slow the concrete transfer of
functions and resources. This has raised broader questions
about the President's willingness to subject policy questions
to the political give-and-take necessary to build consensus,
and generated accusations of political clumsiness and
heavy-handedness that could undermine the country's long-term
interests in successfully decentralizing state functions,
structures and resources. End Comment.
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