Adriano Miguel Tejada, executive editor of Diario Libre, called the 27 February 2017 Annual Report by President Danilo Medina “a rhetorical speech,” and focused on Medina’s announcement that the government would continue working with Odebrecht on the Punta Catalina power plants.
Tejada wrote:
“No one in their right mind can explain why the government insists on continuing to do business with a confessed criminal. It is as if you, our reader friend, hire a bricklayer for a job in your house, and in the middle of the work you not only discover that the guy is stealing from you, but he confesses this, and you say: “Pay what you say you stole and keep working.”
Tejada writes that the prudent thing to do would have been to appoint experts, in collaboration with the Attorney General’s Office, to investigate the amount of the robbery, not a “commission of notables,” mentioning the conflict of interests of several of the members. He concludes: “President Medina made a wonderful use of rhetoric in his speech. The question is whether it will have achieved the intended effect.”
Contributing editor Nelson Espinal Báez, who is an Associate MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program, observes in his comments on the 27 February speech that politics has many similarities to soap operas and that the government is buying time. “They know that a good strategy is not based on a single reality, but on the flow of realities. This speech will have a second part and new episodes.”
An article in Diario Libre by Tania Molina lists several past corruption cases in which the “sacred cows” have not yet been identified, including those of the State Sugar Council (CEA), State Enterprises Corporation (Corde), Super Tucano Brazilian aircraft, among others.
In another article in Diario Libre, opposition deputy Wellington Arnaud says in January-February 2017 the government made payments of US$171 million to Odebrecht for past works carried out. This coincided with the agreement the Attorney General’s Office announced that Odebrecht would compensate the government for US$184 million, that is double to the confessed US$92 million in bribes paid for government contract work.
Judge Alejandro Vargas will decide today, 1 March 2017, to validate or not the bribes compensation agreement.
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Danilo Medina speech / Acento
1 March 2017
