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Food assistance and demagoguery in Panama City’s richest corregimiento

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Junta Comunal
August 27: the local council refers citizen complaints about no food assistance to the national government. Or WAS IT the junta comunal? False messages played on into this story. Anonymous photo from Twitter.

San Francisco – an atypical backdrop to a microcosm

by Eric Jackson

San Francisco is the capital’s wealthiest corregimiento. It’s main drag is Calle 50. At its southwestern corner you find Punta Paitilla. Toward its southeastern edge you find ATLAPA and Jimmy’s. Punta Pacifica and Parque Omar are there.

The millionaires, however, remain a minority in San Francisco. A lot of the upscale residents just have well-paid jobs, on which they live paycheck to paycheck. Or did until the epidemic hit and put them out of work.

Then there are modest, middle class neighborhoods there, with plenty of retirees getting by on pensions, families that can only maintain themselves there with multiple incomes, people living on the informal economy when they are allowed to work.

There are people who mop the floors and trim the gardens of San Francisco who actually live in the neighborhood, too. And there are foreign citizens, legal residents or otherwise, getting by on a thousand different income streams, national or international, many of which have dried up in the economic crisis that strikes well beyond Panama and into their countries of origin.

Lots of PRD voters there, some the relatives of the political caste on juicy government salaries during this five-year sinecure cycle, some of them civil servants on more modest salaries. It’s generally not the sort of neighborhood where you get elected representante by passing out bags of food, but those astute enough to get elected tend to know and cultivate the votes of the folks who really do need a bag of groceries.

A few years back the electric company (before it changed into the present hands) complained that Paitilla was the very worst city neighborhood for electricity theft. Upscale sticky fingers? Those who are not all that upscale and count that among their hustles to hold out in the neighborhood? Dishonest landlords and business owners? Probably bits of all of those things.

So come the virus, the stereotype was that food aid would be essential in Santa Ana but there would be little need in San Francisco. The hard-nosed realist would know that there might be more needy people in one coregimiento than the other, but that food assistance would be necessary in both. Also, that fraud would be an issue.

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A crowd gathers for bonos solidarios – food assistance vouchers – at the junta comunal in San Francisco. The national government says that they were summoned their by fake news spread via the social media. Also spread on the social media were claims that this crowd was composed of foreigners, also mostly false. Photo from social media.

So on September 3 the crowd assembled, was told that there was nothing to be had, and did not disperse.

Word spread online that immigration cops had been called. Perhaps a few people left because of this, and a delegation from Migracion did in fact come. Along with another delegation from the food assistance program. Panamanian citizens in need dealt with the regular folks, foreigners with an assistance program that La Migra runs. A sincere one that has been ongoing since day one of the epidemic, that division of the Ministry of Government insists, not a scam to round up and deport foreigners.

The national government has said that there were some malicious false messages, but what’s really happening is that San Francisco’s food assistance is changing – again. It started out with door-to-door distribution. Then it moved to the Junta Comunal, but was cut off without notice or explanation from the Cortizo administration. Now the national government says that the plan is to distribute the assistance at two schools in the large corregimiento.

In the commentary below the newspaper stories about the situation at the junta comunal there was a steady stream of xenophobic bile. Was that PRD legislator Zulay Rodríguez’s call center? San Francisco is not in her legislative circuit but in any case she was shrieking about foreigners on Twitter rather immediately. Thing is, Zulay has this habit of calling those Panamanian citizens she rails against foreigners. That sort of racism has played into the bono solidario distribution in several parts of the country.

A microcosm of what? We might infer a lot of things. Clunky government functions and a deteriorated relationship between the president and the political caste are the more readily apparent things.

The epidemic is easing off in Panama, at least for the moment. Some of the controls are loosening and the economy may nudge up a bit. However, these are hard times and will continue to be. Not a good time for food assistance to break down. Nor to have government officials pointing fingers at one another.

Zulay Rodríguez’s response to Panamanian citizens in somebody else’s legislative circuit who were hungry and could not get the food assistance they expected.

 

 

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Not JUST the Panama Canal’s growing Arctic competition

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Greenland
At its current rate, the sea level rise will be “enough to double the frequency of storm-surge flooding in many of the world’s largest coastal cities” by the end of the century.

‘Worst-case scenario’ of melting ice and sea level rise coming to pass, warn researchers

by Julia ConleyCommon Dreams

The lives and homes of sixteen million people living in coastal areas around the world could be threatened by the current rate of ice-melt in Antarctica and Greenland, which tracks with the “worst-case scenario” put forward by global scientists.

Researchers at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom and the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study this week showing that the scenario the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned about is coming true as the melting of ice has accelerated in recent years, with sea levels rising 1.8 centimeters or 0.7 inches since the 1990s.

Over the last five years, the study shows, melting ice has overtaken thermal expansion—in which the volume of sea water grows as it gets warmer—as the primary driver of sea level rise.

The alarming findings of the study, published Monday in Nature Climate Change, follows research published by Ohio State University last month, which showed that Greenland’s ice melt has passed the “point of no return,” and even redoubled efforts to stop the warming of the globe by ending fossil fuel extraction will not be enough to stem looming catastrophe.

If Greenland’s ice sheet were to disintegrate entirely, the study published this week said, sea levels would rise more than 22 feet.

The loss of Antarctica would cause sea levels to rise 190 feet.

The complete loss of the two ice masses is not currently anticipated by scientists, but the current melting rate could add 17 centimeters, or more than six inches, to sea levels by the end of the century.

“Although we anticipated the ice sheets would lose increasing amounts of ice in response to the warming of the oceans and atmosphere, the rate at which they are melting has accelerated faster than we could have imagined,” said Dr. Tom Slater, lead author of the study.

The expected sea level rise has significant implications for coastal cities and towns around the world, the authors said, and humanity is currently “in danger of being unprepared” for the impacts.

The effects of the current rate of ice-melt could be “calamitous” even in the next two decades, tweeted climate campaigner Ben See in response to the study.

The melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica “is overtaking the climate models we use to guide us, and we are in danger of being unprepared for the risks posed by sea level rise.”

There’s a risk of calamitous sea level rise of 0.5m by the 2040s. https://t.co/nsigFrQbSq

— Ben See (@ClimateBen) August 31, 2020

The expected change in sea levels by the end of the century would be “enough to double the frequency of storm-surge flooding in many of the world’s largest coastal cities,” said Dr. Anna Hogg, co-author of the study.

 

 

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Jazz: Bird centennial

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bird
Charlie Parker at the Three Deuces New York, 1947. Photo by William P Gottlieb.

Charlie Parker: a century of the genius who changed jazz forever

by Emile Wennekes, Utrecht University

His audience knew him as “Yardbird”, or more usually, just “Bird”. The variety of sobriquets given to jazz alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, who would have turned 100 on 29 August 2020, is indicative of his different personae – most important, of course, his musical personalities.

Parker was a legendary soloist, inspiring bandleader, daring composer, ingenious innovator and a source of inspiration for many generations still. A jazz idol, full stop. But his off-stage personality revealed a more tragic figure: a drug addict and alcoholic.

Bird lived hard and lost his performance licence, several jobs and attempted suicide twice. All in all, his physical and mental health were already waning at an early age. That he died young then, at just 34 years old, was not really a shock. He passed away a week after his last public performance, on 12 March 1955. This last concert took place in the famous New York nightclub Birdland – aptly named in his honour.

Charlie Parker is considered “one of the most striking performers in the entire history of jazz, and one of the most influential”, according to the Rough Guide to Jazz. The more authoritative encyclopedia in academic circles, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, qualifies him in comparable terms and characterises Bird as a “supremely creative improviser”.

Early Bird

Parker was born and raised in a musical family in Kansas City, Missouri, which was known for its vibrant music scene. He started to play the saxophone when he was 11 years old, taking lessons at a local music school and joining high school bands.

But he chiefly developed as a musician by carefully studying his older peers. Inspired by the big bands of Bennie Moten and Count Basie, Parker embarked on the blues and swing tradition of his time. Yet he felt something was missing.

His aural vision was to strut out to the quarter-note pulse of swing. But the adventurous Parker sought distractions from this predictable performance convention by making off-beat accents, syncopations and beats against the metric grain. At the same time, he also deemed the melodies of the standards musicians played in his era rather passé.

While leaving the original harmonies of songs basically intact, he took off to replace their melodies with creations of his own. These new lines and their subsequent improvisations generally included formulas like the “ya-ba-daba bebop” transcribed in onomatopoeic “scat singing”.

Bird and Bebop

Through Parker, complexity in jazz grew considerably. He aimed – and flew – higher, literally, by performing melodic lines that jumped to the next octave, overtly appropriating notes from a higher register. Like an alto riding piggyback on a soprano, and vice versa. This progressive musical concept required alterations in the supporting chords too. It enriched the accompanying harmonies with additional notes from these very same higher octaves.

To summarise Parker’s innovations in jazz is to describe the genre of bebop, of which he was one of the founding fathers and main protagonists. Bebop became the dominant style in jazz from the mid-1940s to the late 1950s, when it was subsequently overshadowed by new directions including free jazz and jazz-rock.

Bebop was then rediscovered in the 1970s, to ultimately become accepted as the “classic” style of jazz. And Bird is the epitome. He not only influenced his own generation and inspired his fellow saxophonists up to the present day. Every self-respecting jazz musician – no matter what their instrument – must study Parker’s unique playing style that essentially boils down to about a hundred different formulaic lines, which he sewed into his improvisations like a patchwork quilt.

Bird and Beethoven

Parker’s modernisation of jazz affected every single parameter of music, including instrumentation. With Parker and his associates, the big band era made legendary by the orchestras of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and the like, drew to a close.

The smaller ensemble, or combo, with a modest rhythm section of drums, bass, piano (or guitar or vibraphone, for that matter) and a few wind instruments, became the new milestone of jazz. Parker’s own quintet – which included, among others, Miles Davis on trumpet and Max Roach on drums – was, once again, trendsetting.

Given Bird’s far-reaching influence on the evolution of jazz, it’s no surprise that many aficionados consider Parker on a par with classical composers like Mozart and Beethoven. Such qualifications consider jazz as equal to classical music, and are testament to it being taken seriously as a mature musical genre. Jazz can be regarded as America’s original contribution to music history – and, by consequence, an important topic of academic study.

Parker’s centennial is currently being celebrated worldwide with new (re)releases, radio and television documentaries, and tribute concerts. And rightly so. Once you’ve been seduced by the Bird, you will never stop listening to classics like Confirmation, Scrapple from the Apple, Billie’s Bounce, or the one with the most amusing, yet appropriate title: Ornithology.The Conversation

 

Emile Wennekes, Chair Professor of Musicology: Music and Media, Utrecht University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

 

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Fined for a kiss / Multadas por un beso

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amor prohibida
This lesbian couple kissed in their car, in the capital’s San Francisco corregimiento, when a police officer took notice. He told them that their kiss was an offense against public morals, arrested them and ultimately took them to the justice of the peace not in San Francisco, but in Bella Vista. There the two women were fined. They told their story on social media.
Esta pareja de lesbianas se besó en su auto, en el corregimiento capitalino de San Francisco, cuando un policía se dio cuenta. Les dijo que su beso era una ofensa a la moral pública, los arrestó y finalmente los llevó ante el juez de paz no en San Francisco, sino en Bella Vista. Allí las dos mujeres fueron multadas. Contaron su historia en las redes sociales.

¿Amor prohibido o error policial?
Prohibited love or police error?

 

A la luz del incidente y la denuncia pública, la Policía Nacional emitió el comunicado público anterior.

In light of the incident and the public complaint, the National Police issued the above public statement:

“The National Police wish to state that we regret the incident with the couple in the Paitilla sector, that we apologize and announce that we are undertaking an investigation of this regrettable act.

We state our profound rejection of  all actions, conduct and attitudes that carry with them the exclusion or or discrimination against people.

Respect for human rights is fundamental in our mission to protect and serve, and this includes the commitment to respect human integrity and dignity at all times, promoting a society of tolerance, inclusion and justice for all.”

 

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Para defendernos de los piratas informáticos, los trolls organizados y otros actos de vandalismo en línea, la función de comentarios de nuestro sitio web está desactivada. En cambio, ven a nuestra página de Facebook para unirte a la discusión.  

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Dinero

Hightower & Bendib, Down to just him and those who would fall with him

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Mr. T -- not THAT one, the wimpish white one
The Republican platform — and the Republican Party itself — has been reduced to one word: Trump.
Cartoon by Khalil Bendib.

Where did the GOP go?

by Jim Hightower — OtherWords

With our national election looming, someone should put up “lost dog” signs in every neighborhood saying, “Missing: Republican Party Platform.”

Voters won’t find one though, for this so-called major political party has decided not to produce a specific statement of what it stands for this year, nor will it offer to voters an itemized set of policies its public officials would try to enact if elected.

Indeed, the GOP hierarchy is so disdainful of the electorate that it says the party will not present a platform until 2024 — four years after the election!

They even imposed their policy silence on their own grassroots delegates, decreeing that any attempt by them to adopt new platform proposals at the Republican National Convention would “be ruled out of order.”

Instead of a political party, the GOP of 2020 has become a pathetic puppet show of weakling officials and sycophantic subordinates being jerked around by the maniacal whims of a bloated ego with despotic fantasies. The once respectable Republican National Committee has meekly ceded its authority, duty, respect, and relevance to a single unhinged authoritarian.

In essence, they’re saying that the platform — and the party itself — is one word: Trump.

Whatever poppycock the Glorious Leader utters today, whomever he attacks tomorrow, whichever fantastical conspiracy he embraces next week, the GOP will applaud, bow, and in unison reply “Amen.” Sad.

Republican senators, governors, captains of industry, elders, and others who once had power, prominence, some prestige, and maybe even a little pride now meekly wear Trump’s collar and kowtow to his conceits, leaving an entire party with a sole operating principle: “What he said” — even when they can’t figure out what he’s actually saying, or why, or what it means for the United States and its people.

That’s not a party, it’s a national embarrassment.

 

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Democrats abroad survey on state primary voting experiences

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DA

Did you vote in your US state’s primary? If yes, Democrats Abroad wants to hear from you about any voting issues or difficulties that you experienced.

Please go to this short survey to tell us about your primary voting experience. The survey does not require that you add personal details beyond your US voting state and country of residence.

The Democrats Abroad Voter Protection team is gathering this information to help prepare for issues this fall. Your help is very much appreciated and could help protect thousands of votes this year.

Interested in other steps you can do to protect your vote? Please go to this article to learn more.

Many thanks and happy voting!

DA Voter Protection
Democrats Abroad
voterprotection@democratsabroad.org
Democrats Abroad
http://www.democratsabroad.org/

Falwell: The Lord’s Watchman

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watch man and con man
Summit of the disgraced: 2017 at Liberty University. White House photo by Shealah Craighead.

Resarch: Christian sex websites reveal an
adventurous side to evangelical culture

by Kelsy Burke, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Many headlines in the past week have speculated publicly on the sex lives of Jerry Falwell Jr. and his wife Becki Falwell.

While both Falwells have told the press that the scandal is, more or less, all Becki’s fault an investigative report in Reuters alleges that Falwell Jr. was a complicit voyeur in his wife’s affair with a former pool attendant and business partner. Falwell has denied these allegations.

Falwell resigned as president of Liberty University, the ultra-conservative evangelical college founded by his father on Aug. 25.

As as a sociologist who has spent years studying the world of online Christian sex advice message boards and blogs, I have read stories from evangelical Christians who turn to the web to talk openly about their sexual activities and desires.

Based on this research, I argue that the Falwell’s scandal fits into a broader story about gender dynamics within part of an evangelical sexual culture.

Conservative Christians and sex

Over the course of my research, I read many stories of evangelical men interested in what some would describe as unconventional sex. Unusual sexual interests – foot fetishes, bondage practices, anal sex and sex toys – were discussed openly by many users of online Christian sex forums, which at the same time made clear their commitment to conservative evangelical beliefs. For evangelicals the Bible is the literal word of God; they also believe that salvation comes through Jesus Christ alone, and there is sanctity only in heterosexual marriages.

I found that most users of Christian sex advice websites shared the Falwells’ conservative beliefs that sex is intended for straight, monogamous matrimony. But at the same time, many were accepting of others’ unusual sexual interests, so long as they involved husband and wife as consenting participants.

Though not representative of evangelical Christians nationally, I surveyed nearly 800 website users of Christian sex advice websites and the vast majority supported a wide range of sex acts – from using sex toys to anal sex – within heterosexual marriage.

One litmus test of whether the Christian online community would support a users’ interest in unconventional sex practices was whether his wife was on board.

As one blogger advised a follower of the blog who commented on his interest in wearing his wife’s underwear, “Either talk to your wife about it, or let it go. But don’t indulge in it in secret.”

This was true even for sexual interests that appear to be off limits from an evangelical perspective, including gender-subversive acts like erotic cross-dressing and sex acts where women penetrate men.

The sanctity of marriage

Evangelicals tend to believe in gender complementarianism, or that God created men and women to fulfill distinct and complementing roles. This applies in all areas of life, including the bedroom. Godly sex is sex where married men and women follow typical gender roles.

The Falwells too have been outspoken opponents of sex outside marriage as well as of LGBTQ people and their rights. As such, some commentators have called out the hypocrisy exposed in this scandal.

Interestingly, despite their evangelical beliefs, the website users I studied did not universally condemn an interest in unconventional sex, although some expressed skepticism and even outright hostility.

The moral line has to do with the sacred status of marriage itself. This attitude is everywhere in bestselling Christian sex advice, like author Kevin Leman who writes, “The Bible is amazingly free in what it allows and even encourages a married couple to do in bed.” According to Leman, “A fulfilling sex life is one of the most powerful marital glues a couple can have.”

Following this logic, one evangelical woman writes on a Christian sex advice message board, “My DH (dear husband) enjoys wearing my underwear from time to time. I don’t have a problem with it. It is an intimate act, drawing us together in another way.”

Another member of this message board shared his first experience with kinky sex: “My wife said it was not as bad as she thought because she really enjoyed pleasing me.” This quote illustrates the leverage husbands have over their wives when it comes to their sex lives. This website user had to work to convince his wife to engage in the sex he desires. He told the message board that she didn’t think it was “so bad” – not exactly a ringing endorsement.

The desires of men

The issue is that evangelicals who value men’s headship and women’s submission may implicitly or explicitly pressure women to perform sexually in a way that pleases their husbands, even if not themselves.

On the online Christian sex forums I studied, I observed time and again men who explored their deepest sexual fantasies and desires. Women, on the other hand, often joined the sites trying to figure out a basic form of sexual pleasure: how to have an orgasm.

This is not to say that evangelical women don’t have expansive sexual thoughts and feelings, but that online Christian communities were not a space for them to express them. Almost all of the unconventional sex I read about was being initiated by men within their Christian marriages.

Based on what we know about evangelical sexual attitudes and beliefs, most would likely describe the scandal as sinful since the affair itself, regardless of Falwell Jr.‘s alleged involvement, clearly violates monogamous matrimony. Both Falwells have denied the accusation that Falwell Jr. was a voyeur.

That denial, though, further hurts Becki Falwell’s image as a spouse, who cheated, but it may not make much of a difference when it comes to Falwell Jr.’s standing in the evangelical community. Since evangelical culture protects and prioritizes men’s sexual interests more than women’s, he’ll have the upper hand, voyeur or not.The Conversation

Kelsy Burke, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

 

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Editorials: Eyra; and He’s not picking on a country of wimps

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Dr. Eyra Ruiz
Dr. Eyra Ruíz, from her Twitter feed.

What Nito ought to tell Eyra

Dr. Eyra Ruíz, the obstetrician and gynecologist who is President Cortizo’s minister without administrative portfolio and special health adviser, has a lot of people calling for her scalp today. There are a lot of unsaid reasons, some scurrilous and some not, that apply to mainly to other people and ought to be unsaid. The two things that we should consider are her attendance at the Santa Ana funeral of a fellow PRD member and her announcement the day before that not only politically connected people who attend illegal gatherings but also those who come out to protest or document those events will be penalized.

Dr. Ruíz, the Catholic Church and those who went inside the Santa Ana parish church for the funeral didn’t violate the health decrees then in effect. After so many people died with health regulations barring church funerals in effect, the number of infections began to go down and the president eased the restrictions on houses of worship. No full houses as before, but with social distancing restrictions the churches, temples, synagogues and mosques can now reopen.

After the service in the church, there was a big crowd the slain activist’s friends, family, neighbors and fellow PRD members that carried the coffin in a pedestrian funeral procession. THAT violated the decree against public gatherings.

The president should not tell Ruíz that she’s fired. Strictly speaking, she hasn’t broken the rules. However, he should talk to her and other key members of his team and talk about what’s happening to his administration. Perhaps it would be a good idea to invite the new national ombudsman, who pleads that curfew and quarantine violations should be treated as civil infractions rather than crimes. The discussion should be about how toxic the reality and appearance of double standards for PRD members and the rest of Panamanians look

A warning and admonishment about the funeral procession? A good idea. The same should go out to protesters and journalists who flock to the scene when the connected flaunt their privileges. The wise use of discretion to restore calm, order, and solidarity against the epidemic is a better approach that the hard hand or strict legality. We are not going to end this crisis by throwing away all the health restrictions, but we also can’t punish our way out of it.

  

  

One of the more than 600 fully functioning high speed mail sorting machines that Donald Trump had destroyed as part of his election theft scheme. Photo by an anonymous union worker near Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Not just murder 1

For the first time in living memory a president of the United States has lent his political support to someone charged with first degree murder before a US court. The killer was one of the goons who have taken up neofascist calls to arms on Donald Trump’s behalf. There is no distancing here, only an argument that the militias are needed to defend property.

But of course Donald Trump is the biggest vandal of them all. He has destroyed millions of dollars worth of US Postal Service equipment in order to prevent people from voting. If people now die because the medicines that have been coming to them by mail no longer arrive on time, it’s not a problem for Donald Trump. Those would be somebodies else, just like the more than 180,000 who have died of COVID-19 on Trump’s shift. They aren’t him, and to him anyone who is not him doesn’t matter.

Do not let armed criminals silence you, or prevent you from voting.

We’re dealing with a deranged wimp who has levers of power, but he’s messing with The Home of the Brave.

  

  

Kurosawa

               In a mad world only the mad are sane.

Akira Kurosawa               

  

Bear in mind…

Happiness arises in a state of peace, not of tumult.

Ann Radcliffe

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

Anais Nin

 

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PRD activist’s gangland-style murder and funeral raise many questions

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Wendy del Carmen Rodríguez
Wendy Del Carmen Rodríguez. Unattributed photo from social media.

So what’s THAT — and THAT — all about?

by Eric Jackson

First word, on Twitter, was a video, taken  perhaps from an upstairs residence across the street, of an audacious gangland-style hit on the Corredor Sur. The word was that one person was killed and two wounded.

Then we saw PRD legislators Héctor Brands and Crispiano Adames show up at the Policlínica JJ Vallarino in Juan Díaz, where the most seriously wounded in the shooting incident was taken and died. Then urgent police calls on social media for other possible citizen videos of the shooting. Then an online report with few details, claiming that the shooters’ car and a MiniUzi submachine gun were recovered, with no arrests made.

 

 

It turns out that the deceased and apparent target of the attack was 42-year-old Wendy Del Carmen Rodríguez, a locally prominent PRD activist in Santa Ana. Two minors, Rodríguez’s kids, who were in the car with her were also wounded by the hail of bullets, neither in a directly life-threatening way, so it seemed. A third minor in the car that Rodríguez drove was not wounded by bullets.

A gangland hit of a PRD activist? Not at all unheard-of over the years. Let’s not get into stereotypes about how the political party that has the most members and regularly gets the votes of one-third or more of the Panamanian electorate is all a bunch of gangsters. We do know, however, that in places where there is a strong gang presence the local politicians will generally know and interact with them, and that there have been many allegations over the years of gangsters expanding their operations into becoming political organizations on their turf..

But what of THIS woman?

Wendy Rodríguez was named in mid-June, and was apparently a person of interest, in a so far inconclusive prosecutors’ investigation of corruption in the “solidarity bond” food assistance program in Santa Ana. The corregimiento’s Cambio Democratico representante, Jair Basilio Martinez Vega, had complained that distribution of the vouchers was being mishandled by PRD apparatchiki. It was found that a number of vouchers had been stolen, and one government official was found in possession of 19 of them without any proper explanation of why.

In other areas with PRD representantes the program was run by those elected officials, but not where opposition party members won. The PRD representantes have often been partisan, and and sometimes racist or otherwise socially prejudiced, in who does or does not get food assistance.  The abuses are part of the backdrop to street protests and road blockages in various parts of  Panama. The program has been taken out of the PRD representantes’ hands in many areas.

There were never any specific charges, let alone any convictions, against Rodríguez.

2
Forensics investigators for the police and prosecutors work the crime scene. Public Ministry photo.

Whatever else she may have been Wendy Rodríguez was an important PRD organizer in Santa Ana and the larger legislative circuit 8-7, and also a leading activist in the PRD Women’s Front. It was to be expected that the party faithful would display their grief and their solidarity with her family in the wake of her murder.

Problems arise in these plague times, though. Until some recent changes, the churches were closed. Most of the families of those who died of COVID-19 were unable to hold funerals for that reason. But with the loosening as the second wave of COVID-19 deaths subsides, houses of worship have been allowed to open and hold events at one-quarter their capacity.

The health decrees ban  on crowds gathering on the streets remains, selectively enforced if it is enforced.

On August 30 the funeral was held at the Catholic parish church in Santa Ana. Proper crowd limitation and social distancing were observed inside. In attendance were a number of party and government notables, along with members of the slain woman’s family.

Most controversially, as we shall see, special presidential health advisor and cabinet minister without administrative portfolio Eyra Ruíz was there. Under later criticism she noted that the gathering inside the church was legal and that she did not stay and mingle with the crowd outside the church. Very uncomfortable for her has been her statement from the day before the funeral that the protesters and journalists who gathered outside an illegal gathering at the La Fragata bar would be fined for breaking the decree against public gatherings. 

So will that now be applied against the PRD faithful and Wendy Rodríguez’s family and friends, given that the coffin was carried out of the church to the music of a mariachi band, then taken to the cemetery in a pedestrian procession where social distancing was not especially observed?

 

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El alcalde de Colón y su call center

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bus
El alcalde Alex Lee llamó la atención sobre sí mismo en Decameron al tomar un vehículo municipal lleno de gente y estacionarlo a la vista del público. La Policía Nacional no ha respondido y probablemente no lo hará, sobre dejar que el bus atraviese múltiples puntos de control. Se dice que Lee tenía un salvoconducto que alegaba, falsamente, que era dueño de una propiedad en Decameron. El lugar fue prestado por otra persona. ¿Un bus lleno de afrodescendientes desconocidos apareciendo en Decameron Villas? Habría gente que se quejaría. ¿Un bus MUNICIPAL? Hay quienes acudirían a la prensa, pero los dueños de la prensa rabiblanco les gustan los privilegios sociales y no lo tratarían como noticias. Pero los medios son plurales, un hecho que a gran parte del PRD le gustaría cambiar.

El fin de semana de Alex Lee

sacado de medios sociales

 

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Yo no tengo ninguna casa en Decameron, la casa me la prestaron y comparto con mi familia, pero aquí no hay ninguna fiesta, deja la mentira Valenzuela, porque no es de Dios y tú no vas hacerme sentir mal, los hijos de Dios nadie los avergüenza y estas tocando a mi familia y Dios se encargará de ti…

Alcalde de Colón Alex Lee
amenazando a Mauricio Valenzuela

 

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Mientras en Colón, la policía hace cumplir las restricciones de viaje que el alcalde reconoce efectivamente que violó. Foto por la Policía Nacional.

 

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