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PERU: Mobilising to Hold President to His Promises

Milagros Salazar

LIMA, Oct 2 2008 (IPS) - Social movements, trade unions, peasant farmer and indigenous organisations are holding strikes and demonstrations to demand that Peruvian President Alan García fulfil the social commitments he has made, in writing and at negotiating tables.

“We are organising throughout the length and breadth of the country to plan a day of repudiation and condemnation of a political programme that lacks credibility, because the government does not keep its word and is ignoring our social demands,” the vice president of the General Confederation of Peruvian Workers (CGTP), Olmedo Auris, told IPS.

The CGTP is preparing for a nationwide day of demonstrations against the government’s economic, political and social measures on Oct. 7, because in its view the administration is failing to respect 34 agreements signed by the authorities over the past two years, nearly all of them as a means of temporarily halting protests.

Public school teachers, construction workers, farmers, miners and regional associations will join the strike action begun Sept. 15 by public sector medical personnel, who are demanding salary increases and a larger budget for the health sector.

Doctors signed an agreement with the government in January, in which the administration promised to address 15 demands. But the executive branch offered a “humiliating solution” when it proposed to spend only 3.4 million dollars on meeting them, since at least 103 million dollars are needed, the president of the Peruvian Medical Federation (FMP), Julio Vargas, told IPS.

When the government failed to come up with a satisfactory response, the FMP radicalised its protest and announced that it would empty five hospitals of medical personnel and hand them over to the authorities, after stabilising patients and sending them home, and transferring the chronically ill to other hospitals.


“The government will ask the Attorney General’s Office to prosecute any doctor who abandons his or her patients, for the crime of endangering people’s lives,” Prime Minister Jorge del Castillo replied.

Tighter budget constraints, which will intensify next year in order to curb inflation in the context of the international financial crisis, have exacerbated public discontent and triggered a number of protests.

In addition to the demonstrations against the increased cost of living and the government’s economic policies, regional demands have resurfaced, such as those of the southern provinces of Moquegua and Tacna.

On Wednesday, protests broke out in both provinces over the distribution of the “canon minero”, the portion of the mining company taxes that is transferred to the provinces. The “canon” represents half of the total taxes paid by mining companies to the state.

The economy of both provinces depends on the mining tax transfers they receive for social spending, public works and infrastructure, in compensation for the activities in their territories of the Southern Peru Copper Corporation, controlled by Mexican capital.

Since 2001 the two provinces have received over one billion dollars from the mining company’s activities in two places, Cuajone in Moquegua, and Toquepala in Tacna.

In the last three years, however, a distortion has occurred, because the criterion for distributing the transferred taxes according to the volume of earth moved for copper extraction has led to Tacna receiving close to 80 percent of the funds.

In June the province of Moquegua went on an indefinite strike that immobilised the south of the country, after giving the government several warnings about the distribution of the transferred taxes, and demanding that they be distributed in proportion to the company’s net income from its operations.

To defuse the conflict, Prime Minister del Castillo signed an agreement with provincial authorities and leaders, committing himself to draw up separate accounts for Southern Peru tax transfers to the provinces within 30 days, but without specifying what criteria would be used to ensure equitable distribution.

More than three months later, on Sept. 25, the government sent a draft law to parliament proposing that the tax transfers be distributed based on the value of the copper concentrate extracted from the mines.

This would entail a reduction of over 120 million dollars in Tacna’s receipts, the provincial authorities told IPS, saying they would hold demonstrations against the initiative on Thursday and Friday.

Moquegua, in turn, is unhappy about the delay and went on strike Wednesday and Thursday.

“The executive branch has sent the ball into parliament’s court, without honouring its word, and the only result is delay,” the head of the Moquegua Defence Front, Zenón Cuevas, told IPS.

The García administration has adopted two misguided strategies in handling social conflicts, Carlos Reyna, a sociologist at the Catholic University, told IPS. “On the one hand, it is postponing problems and signing agreements that it does not fulfil, instead of resolving the disputes. On the other, it has encouraged polarisation by attacking representatives of social sectors.”

Del Castillo said on Tuesday that the protests in the south are due to manipulation by people with links to the radical leftwing party Patria Roja (Red Homeland), and declared that “going on strike is irrational.”

“Every social sector has a satchel full of agreements that are very unlikely to be fulfilled, because the government insists on maintaining a neoliberal (free market) economic model that will not permit this to happen,” said Reyna.

Juan Manuel Figueroa, coordinating secretary for the presidency of the Council of Ministers, said that the agreements have not been fulfilled 100 percent because certain commitments undertaken by the provincial governments, such as the construction of roads, irrigation ditches and other investments, have not been completed.

Discussion of the 2009 budget has fuelled competition between different sectors that want to negotiate to obtain more resources for their demands, Reyna said.

According to the analyst, another new development is the attempt by social organisations to centralise conflicts through the CGTP, in order to exert nationwide pressure. Therefore, several provincial opposition groups are trying to persuade their members of the need to support the union-led demonstrations on Oct. 7.

The head of the Cuzco Regional Assembly, Efraín Yépez, told IPS that 16 provincial umbrella groups have confirmed they will take part in the strike, many of them from the south of the country and the jungle areas, where the centre-right García did not win a majority of votes in the 2006 elections.

Indigenous and peasant organisations in the Amazon jungle, which are demanding the repeal of dozens of decrees they regard as violating their collective rights, will begin an indefinite strike on Nov. 10.

“Our position is consistent, because we have never backed García,” said Yépez, who also said that the CGTP’s Political and Social Coordinating Committee, to which the provincial opposition groups belong, is promoting a proposal to hold a referendum to remove the president from office.

The decisions by their support bases on whether or not to call for a referendum, and on the legal and constitutional means to achieve it, will be taken at a Peoples’ Assembly on Nov. 4, to be held in parallel with the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, which Peru is hosting.

“Social organisations should also assess whether a proposal to remove the president from power will help the legitimacy of their demands. They must be careful,” said Reyna.

 
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