Without spending Q540 million under a state of Calamity for damages from storm Julia

A month ago, the Congress of the Republic ratified the state of calamity decreed by the Executive for tropical cyclone Julia. But to date, the execution of the resources that were assigned to the ministries to attend to the emergency and reconstruction work is null.

The state of calamity placed at the disposal of the Emerging Fund Q540 million that were assigned to the Ministry of Communications, Infrastructure and Housing (Civ) as part of the resources of the Strategic Infrastructure Maintenance Law.

With this money, the government seeks to mitigate the damage caused to bridges, highways and other public infrastructure after the rainy season, and for this purpose budget items were created in six ministries. The one that concentrates the most budget is the Civ, with 434 million 500 thousand. It is followed by the Ministry of Public Health and Social Assistance (MSPAS), with Q4 million 722 thousand 258 and the Ministry of Defense (Mindef), with Q2 million 909 thousand 790.

None of the portfolios has executed a penny of the resources, as stated in the Integrated Accounting System of the Ministry of Finance (Minfin). In the case of the Ministries of Social Development, Education and Agriculture, Livestock and Food, not even a budget has been disbursed.

The Civ just on Friday launched 119 contests on the Guatecompras portal on the Guatecompras portal, but none of these has been awarded.

When consulted in this regard, Finance Minister Edwin Martínez said that he is currently working on two government agreements that are necessary to disburse the resources.

“You have to make two government agreements. The resources that were removed from the Strategic Infrastructure Law were sent to the Emerging Fund. From there, they have to be sent to Communications. The Civ has the most resources. They are Q434 million for operations and Q170 for investment”, he explained.

Prior to this, Martínez said, the Civ had to identify the damage and quantify it. This was a coordinated effort and “the data is already available,” he assured.

An attempt was also made to consult the Civ to find out its position, but at the end of this note there was no response.

technical deficiencies

Ricardo Barrientos, from the Central American Institute for Fiscal Studies (Icefi), commented that decree 40-2022 by means of which Congress ratified the state of calamity is riddled with various anomalies and the lack of execution demonstrates an administrative incapacity in government entities. .

“What it shows is a manifest and confirmed inability to execute the emergency funds. The origin of the resources is, mainly, the budget expansion of the Civ, which has been unable to execute them. There are documents and legislative texts of poor quality riddled with errors and prevailing corruption. These are the difficulties that there are to execute these projects, despite the fact that they have been exempted from the controls of the State Procurement Law”, considers Barrientos.

When the state of calamity was ratified, the Icefi also questioned the decision to empower the Mindef to make available the unexecuted balances of its current 2022 budget that had been assigned to attend to the state of calamity declared by the Executive and ratified by the Congress of the Republic with decree number 35-2022.

“This provision confirms the criticism that the entities of the Executive, in this case the Mindef, lack the capacity to execute the budgets assigned in the states of exception, or that these budget allocations are not really relevant or necessary,” they manifested

Pedro Prado, from the Association for Research and Social Studies (Asies), believes that the approval of a state of calamity is contradictory, if in the same way the resources will not be executed quickly.

“I believe that the bottlenecks in the processes must be identified and eliminated in order to improve management and achieve the main objective, which is to serve the population affected by the passage of storm Julia. Most of the time they are administrative delays”, says Prado.

Given the date, the interviewee anticipates that a large part of the resources allocated, mainly to the Civ, will not be executed at the end of the fiscal year. Or in any case, the percentage of execution will be low and will not contribute to the purposes of the decree. What is not executed, he says, should return to the common fund and should be reassigned.

“These procedural obstacles must be solved to speed up the procedures. This is an important issue and I believe that if this were improved, citizens could see good results sooner. Unfortunately, Guatemala is vulnerable to the effects of climate change and these are events that will surely continue to occur”, she explained.

According to economic estimates from Maga, there were Q957 million losses in the 147 thousand 234.67 hectares of agricultural coverage in the 268 municipalities after the passage of tropical depression Julia, although the real monetary quantification of the losses is still difficult to calculate.