information and civil society monitoring in Peru. Access to public information was enshrined in law in August 2002, but many institutions seem not to understand the contents of the law or lack the resources necessary to implement it.5 Implementation is also hindered by ‘attitudes of mistrust and reticence to provide information when it is requested … attitudes [that] were associated in many cases with the disinformation of public officials with regard to norms and procedures’, the civil society monitoring network Vigila Perú found.6 According to Vigila Perú’s survey of 12 regional governments, the barriers to accessing information related to the budget have lessened since 2003. The same is true for political and normative information produced by the Regional Council, the highest regional government body, and the Council for Regional Coordination. Transparency of information about purchases and acquisitions has also improved. While these improvements are important, it is equally important to note that regional governments are moving towards minimal compliance with the law, and not beyond. At the level of municipal government the problems are much worse: they are notorious for disorganised information systems and for having ‘difficulty’ locating relevant documents, particularly from the past. The lack of civil society participation is also critical. In almost all sub-national
arenas there is a political component that strains relations between the government and civil society, as the political opposition can abuse monitoring functions by using audits as a weapon against the authorities. Hence officials tend to reject attempts by civil society to monitor government, even when they are provided for in legislation. By law, the Council for Regional Coordination must include provincial mayors and representatives of civil society elected by member organisations, but in practice, according to ongoing research by TI’s chapter in Peru, Proética, sub-national governments have found ways to keep institutions that do not support them out of the council. In addition, two public hearings must be held each year to monitor the budget. In past hearings, however, only those institutions that support the administration were invited, or invitations were poorly distributed. In other cases, public hearings were not carried out at all. This situation provides the backdrop to the high level of corruption in decentralised administrative bodies in Peru, where authorities have very low approval ratings among the population.7 As a result, the process of decentralisation has been called into question. A tragic indictment of this state of affairs occurred in April 2004 when part of the population in Ilave, Puno, outraged by allegations of corruption made by the political opposition, lynched their mayor. Samuel Rotta Castilla (Proética, Peru)
Further reading Apoyo Opinión y Mercado, Proética, II encuesta nacional sobre corrupción (Second national survey on corruption) (Lima: Proética, 2004), www.proetica.org.pe Ciudadanos al Día, Transparencia en las municipalidades: El caso de las licencias de funcionamiento (Transparency in municipalities: the case of operating licences) (Lima: CAD, 2004), www. ciudadanosaldia.org Lorena Alcázar, José López-Calix and Eric Wachtenheim, Las pérdidas en el camino. Fugas en el gasto público: Transferencias municipales, vaso de leche y educación (Losses on the way. Public spending links: municipal transfers, state milk programme and education) (Lima: Instituto Apoyo, 2003)
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