By Rodrigo Uprimny, ELESPECTADOR, September 22, 2024
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
The list of those eligible to serve as the next Inspector General (and I used the masculine noun because all three are men) turned out to be a really bad one. But we can’t just lament that fact; rather, we should learn from it. I will show why it’s a terrible list and suggest three reflections.
The list consists of three politicians tied to the parties and to the Congress. This is bad because the agencies of control and the Attorney General’s Office should be directed by people, not just of the highest quality, but also independent of political forces and of the administration, specifically, so that they will be able to exercise their function, which is control, impartially. They should not be shield-bearers for the administration, nor for its opponents. We can’t repeat experiences like the ones with Attorney General Barbosa, or Inspector General Cabello who handled everything having to do with their friends (Duque and his allies) with kid gloves, and then later turned into Petro’s ferocious opponents.
Things started out wrong when the Council of State selected Luís Felipe Henao; a politician whose closeness to Vargas Lleras had allowed him to occupy Ministry positions; he also ran the campaign for Federico Gutierréz. The Supreme Court wasn’t far behind, and named another politician from the Radical Change party: Germán Varón, an electoral baron who has been a Member of Congress for twenty-some years. So of course President Petro couldn’t let them get the best of him, so he chose Gregorio Elijach, who has been the Secretary of the Senate for years, a powerful position that connects him to all the political forces.
Could anybody reasonably think that one of these three politicians will be an independent Inspector General? Can anybody doubt that any one of these politicians will make the patronage system of these control agencies worse?
This unfortunate process shows, first of all, that it’s necessary to rethink the control agencies in Colombia. We have many, and they are enormous, but they give poor results. To make things worse, the bureaucracy in these entities has grown in recent years, propelled by their bosses, soon after their selection by the Congress. Felipe Córdoba did it in the Controller’s Office, and Margarita Cabello in the Inspector General’s Office, both having given absurd justifications.
We should have fewer control agencies, smaller, and having officials with specialized careers. It would be cheaper and it would work better. And especially, we should return to the debate in which some have talked about the suppression of the Inspector General’s Office, or at least that it be made radically smaller, less bureaucratic, and more functional.
Second, we need to redesign the election procedures for the directors of these agencies. The Constitution introduced the participation of the courts for the purpose of improving the process and the quality of those selected. The result has been disastrous, as this case demonstrates; it did not perfect the selection and instead it politicized the courts. These electoral functions of the court should be removed. True, it’s not easy to design an alternative mechanism, but we have to try to find one.
Third, the courts ought to examine their consciences. In spite of having excellent applicants who could have been independent Inspector Generals, (and I used the feminine nouns, because the best candidates in general were women), they opted for the politicians. That worsens the courts’ crisis of credibility that feeds the possible authoritarian restructuring of the judicial system, as we see in Mexico, where AMLO has achieved a terribly dangerous reform that seriously weakens judicial independence. The principal responsibility for that serious attack on the Rule of Law is on AMLO and his allies. But the courts and the Mexican judges helped create the setting for that reform by defending their unacceptable corporate privileges and making politicized decisions. Our courts should take note.