With less than one month to go before the current government reaches its two years milestone, key problems ranging from healthcare to education, from public transport to the high cost of living, are showing no sign of improvement.
Far from accomplishing his stated electoral goals, the administration of President Juan Carlos Varela has been plagued by ineffectiveness across the board.
Faced with an increase in violence even in areas which had not previously registered murders or armed robberies, President Varela has been forced to take responsibility and recognize that work needs to be done, publicly at admitting that “it is 100% the responsibility of the government” to fight organized crime.
The president has also had to admit to failures in the government’s public transport policy, announcing the purchase of new mobile units that will act as feeders to the metro system. For the meantime, however, commuters keep complaining about of the scarcity of buses.
According to experts, most problems boil down to the ineffective cabinet that the president has assembled. Without effective government, the right to healthcare, education and decent housing, which the constitution encapsulates, is unlikely to materialize.
Former vice-minister for government Alejandro Perez points the finger to the country’s presidential system, which does not allow for government renewal as would be the case under a parliamentary system. “We're stuck with a president who is not going to be unable to solve the problems facing the country”, Mr. Perez declared, adding that "Varela could start by putting fresh new faces keen to get down to work at the head of a number of non-performing ministries".
According to human rights activist Roberto Troncoso, “the state has an obligation to provide basic services, subject to public resources being available”. Mr. Troncoso singled out turnkey projects such as Lines 2 and 3 of the metro system as a significant future drain on resources because of the way they are accounted for by in state budgets.
“The state is likely to be left facing a lot of future obligations to service providers”, he warned. Servicing such obligations could turn out to be problematic in the event of a shortfall in tax revenues stemming from the current economic slowdown.
While President Varela has defended the slowness of the government machine, justifying it by arguing that it is preferable to do things in a pondered manner rather than hurriedly, others are less accepting of the administration's apparent ineptitude.
According to former vice-president Arturo Vallarino, "the government has arbitrarily halted public construction works, incurring potential penalties from public contractors, on the one hand; and on the other, how it has abused the mechanism of direct procurement instead of open public tenders".
Mr. Vallarino went on to denounce “the lack of effective social policies of the current government", saying that "two years is a long enough time to start evaluating the performance of the administration, and the bottom line is that it is far from positive".
The former vice-president predicts that President Varela will reach the halfway milestone of his mandate having accomplished barely a quarter of its electoral manifesto.
