People in ordinarily sedate Bejuco began to raise their voices on Monday.
Let’s raise our voice
by Miguel Antonio Bernal
The silence of the good people is more dangerous than the brutality of the bad people.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
The decomposition of Panamanian society advances, at a redoubled pace, without obstacles or restraints. No part of the social fabric avoids the uneasiness, dissatisfaction, discontent, repudiation and disgust generated by the daily actions of the joint criminal enterprise that claims to be the government.
The latest revelations of what happened in the shelters, where mistreatment, abuse, torture and rape of children are commonplace, have corroborated that we do not deal with just any government. The cover-up reaction and the extreme politicking is so that impunity takes the lead from the inept prosecutor’s hands and reconfirms the serious danger that threatens not only human rights and democratic freedoms, but public safety in all areas.
Once again the ineptocratic government, thanks to the exclusion of all civic participation or action, is debased to seeking by all means to continue doing what they want, at all costs. For examples the nearly 6,000 deaths from COVID.19, nor the more than 300,000 unemployed, the more than $15 billion in debt in just under two years, the growing and anti-national remilitarization by the new sepoys of the outdated Torrijismo. They need more fear, more repression, more confinements, more quarantine measures that really aren’t, more media manipulation, more spending on hack journalists and “influencers” scream against the needs of the people. And people still mostly shut up.
During the last two administraions, the “orgy of Odebrecht corruption,” as the Brazilian prosecutors well described it at the time, strutted and dominated over all branches of the Panamanian government. That death lunge ending up striking down the weaker institutions. The joint criminal enterprise led by Cortizo and Carrizo has now managed to produce disbelief and distrust, both of the governed towards the governors, and of the governed among themselves. It thus helps to leave the damage wrought by their predecessors unfixed.
What credibility can the Public Ministry or the Comptroller General of the Republic – to name just two control mechanisms – have today? Their controls must be exercised, but the chain of failures in the prosecution of crimes has no parallel throughout the history of this republic. They have become the womb and cradle of corruption and the sponsors of impunity – thanks, of course, to the local sultans, Cortizo and Carrizo.
They, and only they, are responsible for Panama falling back into the hands of the new criminal organizations of all kinds which, under the protection of political power, have kidnapped the country and its good people, who are silent. Or are we? Do we raise our voices once and for all, join forces against the new crowd and their criminal joint venture? Or do we just prepare as best we can for whatever befalls us?
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