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This Wednesday, the Comptroller General of the Republic was right, with scope, of the new decree that the Government had to send on Tuesday, and where finally the Executive backtracks its intention to grant more powers to the municipal security forces to support in the control of compliance with quarantines and curfews in the framework of the state of emergency that governs the country due to the Covid-19 crisis.
The new decree No. 203 prepared by the Government establishes that the Chiefs of Defense may give instructions to the mayors, without having to go through the order of the President of the Republic. However, from the Comptroller’s Office they emphasize that this is “with the exception of surveillance and control tasks.”
Likewise, in the reasoning, the comptroller established two limits: “that the non-intervention of the President in the delivery of instructions does not hinder the control and responsibility of the civil authorities”, that is, that the military power remains subordinate to power civil.
In addition, the document signed by the comptroller Jorge Bermúdez is explicit in that “in no case, the heads of the defense can alter the attributions of the organs of the State, since a modification of that nature must be carried out by means of a law processed in the National Congress”.
That is, the instructions must be within the framework of the Constitution, and if the Government intends to modify the municipal security functions, it must do so via a reform to the Organic Law of Municipalities, that is, in Congress.
In short, the decree only establishes that the heads of national defense in their respective jurisdictions can “directly issue instructions to all the officials of the State, their companies or the municipalities that are in the area, with the sole purpose of correcting the effects of the public calamity and in particular for an adequate implementation of the sanitary measures adopted ”.
The new resolution was valued by PPD Senator Felipe Harboe, who objected to the decree initially entered by the Executive. In his Twitter account, the parliamentarian for the Ñuble stressed that “finally the Government did not re-enter a decree that gave municipal guards security powers. Modified catastrophe decree to coordinate with municipalities, but guards within the powers of the Municipalities Law (…) Good Comptroller. ”
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