Diputado Jairo “Bolota” Salazár y alcalde Alex Lee, ambos del PRD en Colón, defendiendo el poder de políticos para subir sus salarios, que también es parte del intento constitucional de la asamblea.
El mando y la competencia del Tribunal Constitucional que contempla la asamblea
[Nota de redacción: En su último borrador de cambios constitucionales, la Asamblea Nacional hace otro intento de anular el derecho internacional, y también bloquea otros intentos de enmendar o reemplazar su constitución, a través de la competencia que forjarían para un nuevo Tribunal Constitucional. Lo que sigue está tomado del borrador de la reforma constitucional de los legisladores a partir del 28 de octubre de 2019. Predicen que habrá más cambios en 2020.]
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19th century jurist, diplomat, writer, activist and statesman.
Governor of the federal state of Panama within Colombia, he was forced out under the pressure of the US-owned Panama Railroad Company, which wanted special tax favors to which he objected.
Would any of today’s grasping legislators belong in the same room with him?
Constitutional convention time
by Miguel Antonio Bernal
What happened in the National Assembly during the last two weeks confirms that professional politicians are discredited, and every more so as the days go by.
Political patronage and neopopulist personality cults are today more rejected. The demagogy and the fallacies of the legislators are rejected and repudiated despite the effort made by the so-called “independents” in the Assembly to make ua believe that THEY are not more of the same.
Hijacked by corruption with impunity, our country refuses to sink. We begin to react, without haste but without pause, to the impositions of authoritarian structures and authorities who are distinguished by their level of mediocrity.
During recent administrations those who have been in positions of command and jurisdiction have been concerned about and dedicated to the task of making the Law benefit them and serve their petty personal interests. The prevailing inequality is increasing and most citizens suffer more and more.
The people, therefore, should not allow the political parties to restart their traditional money dance. They would aggravate the unreasonable state in which we live, as a result of the unforgivable absence of citizen controls. We need what they won’t allow to have a democratic, constitutional rule of law. Only with such a new order can we meaningfully talk about citizen participation.
The “reforms” designed to prevent any change were stillborn but the political caste and its backers still want to impose them. To do this, they would seek to set up a rigged referendum to get a Yes vote.
But the time has come for a Constitutional Convention, through real and effective citizen participation. A Constitutional Convention that emanates from the original constituent power that the people inherently have, an exercise in civic action to end the increasing personalization and concentration of power, to control the increaseinglyi irrational exercise of power.
Those who today promote the counter-proposal of parallel process – which the current deputies and magistrates and president and ministers can and will shape and control – unmask themselves when they slander and insult those of us who argue for a Constitutional Convntion. They avoiding the real debate. They stutter in the service of democracy’s enemies, to avoid citizen participation.
The hour of he Constitutional Convention can’t be put off any longer.
Clara González de Behringer
20th century jurist, educator, activist and stateswoman.
The first Panamanian woman to graduate from law school and practice law, she was a delegate to the 1946 Constitutional Convention that replaced Arnulfo Arias’s racist 1941 constitution. She taught economics and civics at the Instituto Nacional. A tireless campaigner for women’s suffrage, she ran for office on the Feminist Party ticket. She was the founding judge of Panama’s first juvenile court.
Would any of today’s grasping legislators belong in the same room with her?
Instead, his administration continues to house them in overcrowded detention camps on the southern border.
United States congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemned the Trump administration for running “concentration camps” earlier this year.
Though she was by no means the first to describe migrant detention centres as concentration camps — disgraced Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio boasted his “tent city” in the Sonora Desert was just that — her comments ignited a firestorm of controversy.
Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney complained concentration camp comparisons “demeaned the memory” of six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust and she urged AOC to learn some “actual history.”
The US Holocaust Museum also issued a statement rejecting analogies between the Holocaust and other events, prompting more than 500 historians to petition the museum to reverse its “radical” and “ahistorical” position: “Similarities across time and space” were essential to learning lessons from the past, they argued.
An American Holocaust survivor even recently compared her childhood in a concentration camp in German-occupied Poland to the separation of migrant families in the southern United States.
And so looking back on a summer of heated and often misleading debate, two important points bear repeating.
British work camps
First: Concentration camps are by no means only synonymous with Nazi terror or totalitarianism. In fact, concentration camps have deep roots within the culture and politics of Anglo-Saxon liberal democracies.
In Victorian India, for example, Britain concentrated millions of “migratory people” fleeing drought and famine in a system of work camps designed to prevent unwanted populations from entering colonial towns.
And the term “concentration camp” itself dates back to the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), when Britain detained a quarter million civilians, mostly women and children, displaced by scorched-earth warfare.
A Boer War concentration camp.
Heeding advice from a young Winston Churchill, the United States soon established its own camps during the Philippine War (1899-1902), contributing to an American tradition — already prevailing in the form of guarded Indigenous encampments — of concentrating unwanted groups behind barbed wire.
Some decades later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt revived this well-established practice when he ordered Japanese immigrants and their descendants into what he called “concentration camps” (like the one at Fort Sill, recently proposed as a migrant detention facility).
The Anglo-Saxon world therefore has a long history of concentrating “undesirables” in facilities historically known as “concentration camps.”
Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric denigrating asylum seekers as “criminals,” “rapists” and “disease carriers” may well resemble Nazi statements directed at Jews, but it also revives a longer discourse of colonial racism in Britain and the United States.
South African refugees, British officers maintained, were a“dirty, careless, lazy lot” who spread disease, crime and poverty.
Stemming from racist tropes rooted in Euro-American settler expansion, meanwhile, concentration camps during the Second World War were aimed at preventing Japanese newcomers from“taking over” American jobs.
The crisis mentality in the United States following Pearl Harbor facilitated longstanding ideas about racial cleansing. In this context, it’s hardly surprising that Trump’s White House has used militarized language to present migrant flows as an “invasion” and “national crisis.” It revives an Anglo-American practice of suspending civil rights and constitutional protections under the guise of a declared emergency.
Trump routinely violates democratic norms, but his statements and policies sit within an established continuum — an “American way” — of establishing concentration camps.
Parallels and lessons
History provides both parallels and lessons.
A portrait of Horatio Herbert Kitchener, circa 1914-1916.
Like today’s migrant shelters, British concentration camps in South Africa were hastily improvised, often with impermanent canvas tents, and administrators struggled to cope with a mass influx of inmates amid limited resources.
Statements from leaders like Lord Kitchener lambasting refugees as “savages with only a thin white veneer” framed official attitudes. Private letters deprecating the homes inmates left behind as “fit only for pigs” further served to justify appalling conditions.
South Africa, according to the British at the time, was a “shithole country” (to use Trump’s modern-day lexicon) and its residents deserved only the most basic facilities.
As with US migrant camps, British concentration camps did not provide soap or sanitary facilities, and they were hopelessly overcrowded.
Worse still, inhuman conditions resulted in the outbreak of epidemic diseases — measles and typhoid in particular — that killed thousands of inmates. With modern vaccinations, America is unlikely to see similar death rates, yet Britain’s crowded camps are ominous portents as mortality rates rise at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s standing-room-only cells.
What not to do
Britain’s concentration camps demonstrate what not to do. But they also offer lessons in the virtues of engaged journalism and open democracy.
As images of detained and suffering children infiltrated London newspapers, humanitarian activists like Emily Hobhouse, who travelled to South Africa to personally visit the camps, and opposition politicians like Liberal Party leader Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who condemned the camps as “methods of barbarism,” mobilized civil society.
After months of complaints about“hysterical women” meddling in politics — Hobhouse was no more popular than Ocasio-Cortez — daily revelations about “prison camps” surrounded by “barbed-wire fences” eventually forced action.
Emily Hobhouse was as controversial as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for her efforts to raise awareness about the brutality of detention camps.
In doing so, the government drastically reduced camp mortality and silenced its critics. More importantly, High Commissioner Alfred Milner conceded the camps had been a tragic mistake — the “one black spot of the war” — and rapidly disbanded them as soon as inmates could viably return home.
Britain went on to develop future camps — most controversially in Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion. But in the immediate future, lessons from South Africa helped prevent Britain from interning German women and childrenduring the First World War, a policy lauded as a moral and political success
If Trump wishes to mitigate further fallout from migrant detention, he might forsake his fantasies of terrorizing migrants as they attempt to enter the U.S. and listen instead to activists, journalists and lawyers.
Far from peddling “fake news,” their oversight, historically, has offered an important check on detention camps.
What? Some burnout forgot to buy booze YESTERDAY?
Photo from a Colombian voter’s Twitter feed.
Argentines, Uruguayans and Colombians go to the polls today
by Eric Jackson
There is this backdrop of political, social and economic unrest across much of Latin America. Leave it to some wag from afar to write about a “Latin American Spring” and miss all of the nuances of different countries with different histories and economic lives. A real common factor is a weak global economy that affects different places in different ways. In many instance the unrest has in common external forces — the World Bank and International Monetary Fund demanding austerity and Washington trying to overthrow leftist governments are the biggies there. And then there are the common maladies of the region’s political castes — personalism expressed in leaders’ “sure knowledge” that a country can’t get along without its caudillo, family political dynasties, jaded political parties that stand for nothing much more than jobs and government contracts for their members. Ah, well — the time has come to vote and South Americans are doing that.
Argentina: a likely end to an interregnum that went badly
Argentine front runner Alberto Fernández barnstorming for the student vote. Photo by UniRio TV / Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto.
Acclaimed as capitalism’s model answer to Latin America’s turn-of-the-century “Pink Tide,” Mauricio Macri came to power in an Argentina tired of the scandals and banality that are the usual ruts of Peronist governments that have been in power too long. Since the middle of the 20th century the political tradition of General Juan Perón — populist, corrupt, nationalistic, all over the map with respect to economic and social policies — has been Argentina’s default choice.
After a period of failed rightist economic policies under the Justicialist Party (Peronist) president Eduardo Duhalde, the more democratic socialist oriented governor of Santa Cruz province, Néstor Carlos Kirchner hijo, came into office in 2003 along with his then senator spouse, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The Kirchners’ administration paid off the debt to the International Monetary Fund, with which it made a debt swap deal, and defaulted on a bunch of other debts. The austerity policies and currency peg to the US dollar — IMF ideas, by and large — were abandoned and a collapsing economy was more or less revived. They had to officially lie about the inflation rate to get away with some of this. Néstor Kirchner didn’t seek a second term, but instead first lady Cristina Kirchner — known to Argentines as CFK — ran and was elected president in her own right in 2007. She was re-elected in 2011, but Argentine exports stagnated and real scandals about graft and money laundering by administration figures and allegations that are probably exaggerated about covering up Iranian involvement in a 1994 terrorist bombing of the main Jewish community center in Buenos Aires dogged CFK’s government.
She didn’t run again in 2015, and her preferred candidate was defeated by the rightist mayor of Buenos Aires, Mauricio Macri.
Macri embarked on a series of prosecutions of CFK and people in her administrations, and embraced the IMF economic policies that the Kirchners had left behind. There were a bunch of convictions, including of a Ministry of Public Works official in her administration hiding bags with millions in cash in a monastery. But CFK had immunity as a senator and investigations of improper dealings with Iran and money laundering through Kirchner family hotels were and are stalled.
Also stalled has been the Argentine economy under Mauricio Macri. That’s the big problem for him and the likely lesson that will be taken across the region. Austerity politics that enhance social inequality are toxic to political careers.
All the polls have it that he is set to be crushed in his bid for re-election by the Peronist ticket of Alberto Fernández, the former presidential chief of staff, with CFK as the vice presidential running mate.
Uruguay: generational change and maybe the end of a leftist period
Luis Lacalle Pou and Beatriz Argimón are likely to finish in second place in today’s voting in Uruguay, but they are slight favorites to be the next president and vice president respectively after a November 24 runoff. This would end a 15-year leftist hold on the country’s presidency. Lacalle, the son of a president, is promising that there won’t be wrenching social changes. He is, however, promising economic shock therapy to deal with the national debt. Wikimedia photo by Fadesga.
What happens when an older generation starts to die off, and there is a demograhic bulge of adolescents and young adults?
One thing is a crime wave, of offenses that young men commit, generally against one another, until they tend to grow out of that phase or get removed to prisons or graveyards. Fluctuations in crime rates are a favorite subject of demagogues, but usually they have to do with one or both of two things: at the end of a war there veterans who can’t turn off the violence to which they had been conditioned, and a simple population change that has more adolescent boys and young men in the mix.
Uruguay did have a vicious 11-year dictatorship, with urban guerrilla warfare during and preceding that, but it hasn’t been the place of returning veterans in a long time. But there are demographic changes that have expressed themselves in record homicide and armed robbery rates. There is a package of “get tough on crime” measures in a referendum on today’s Uruguayan ballot and that’s expected to generate interest and turnout on the right wing of the spectrum. But the candidates of the incumbent Broad Front (Daniel Martínez) and the center-right National Party (Luis Lacalle) both say that they will vote against it.
Another thing that happens with generational change is that new electorates with new concerns emerges. The ghosts of the dictatorship and the people it disappeared, and the later fond memories of leftist elder statesmen who are still living and who ran credible democratic administrations are not all that impressive to voters who remember nothing else. Polls show that a lot of Uruguayans are ready for change after 15 years of the left.
The left is going to win the first presidential round today. The biggest questions are about what happens in local, regional races and with the composition of the national legislature.
Will predictions for the November 24 runoff hold through then? Maybe not. First of all, there will be no crime referendum then. Second, people may look at today’s down-ballot results and seek to balance them out. Uruguay, the historic buffer zone between Brazil and Argentina with its jaded skepticism about both and its highly educated population, has historically been big on political balances.
So, with several countries in the region having ongoing or recent turmoil sparked by austerity measures, will the runoff issue shift from crime to bread and butter? And how will that play across the fertile pampas of Uruguay? Stay tuned.
Colombia’s local transitions from civil war to the next thing
One of the concentrations of election violence has been along Colombia’s Atlantic Coast, where former paramilitary and guerrilla forces that are reincarnated as criminal gangs get hired as hit men by local power brokers – often “legitimate” wealthy families but with drug lords in the mix — who use violence to control local politics. It’s a problem in other regions of Colombia’s hinterland as well – this is the centrifugal aspect of the country’s political life, where defiant local forces resist norms coming down from Bogota. In past centuries such forces led to Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama breaking off from Simón Bolívar’s Gran Colombia. Photo by the International Crisis Group.
About two dozen candidates have been slain in the campaigning for today’s local and regional elections in Colombia. That’s an increase from other elections since the 2016 peace accord. It’s not, however, a systematic national campaign by any one side. It’s Colombia’s hinterland warlord tradition, in a period without any particularly strong warlords on the scene.
Colombia’s local elections are staggered so as not to happen when the country elects presidents. The norm is that traditional parties and politicians do well in these rounds of voting. Some fraud, and some violence, are also traditions. Some of the city council members, mayors and governors elected today are sure to be challenged in courts over allegations like these.
What’s new and perhaps interesting is what’s going on at the fringes. Will the Greens regroup and resume their stalled growth? Or will they lose supporters to new formations? Will the FARC guerrillas, now an electoral force that calls itself the Common Alternative Revolutionary Force and is running hundreds of candidates, elect any charismatic newcomers to the political scene? Will former Bogota mayor Gustavo Petro’s new party take off? Will identity politics, in the form of indigenous and Afro-Colombian parties, become important phenomena in rural areas?
President Iván Duque’s right-wing government may or may not consolidate itself in the municipalities or regions, but whatever happens it’s unlikely that today’s voting would diminish or much increase his power. Today is important to the shape of what comes after — new faces, new parties, different paradigms.
Now THAT’S a good way for deputies’ votes to be anonymous and for the chair to arbitrarily rule things up or down. In the Robert’s Rules system there are voice votes that work sort of like this, but in Panama’s National Assembly they slap their hands on their desks and no record is kept of which way any particular person voted. And so the legislature moves to change Panama’s constitution, while its members can avoid blame. Photo by the National Assembly.
How constitutions are made?
by Eric Jackson
On Monday, October 28, the National Assembly will vote for a third time on a package of dozens of changes to Panama’s constitution, the whole thing having been voted on second reading but the document so far unpublished. The process got into international notorious demagoguery and prompted a university invasion of a legislative palace that the deputies had thought they had securely locked. President Cortizo, via Vice President Carrizo, warned that if a palatable proposal does not come from the legislature there will be a call for a constitutional convention.
A ban on same-sex marriages? In then out, then in again.
An override on all international law? In, then out.
The stripping of Panamanian citizenship from those born in Panama to foreign parents? In, then out again.
Legislators’ power to raise their pay from year to year, without any delay until after the next election as now provided? In.
Legislators’ enhanced impunity for the crimes they commit by way of appointing a special prosecutor to prosecute any prosecutor who brings charges against them? In.
New gag rules on the press? In, then out.
And on and on, with the citizens having no record about how the people who represent their circuits voted on any of these things.
The thing will pass on third reading, then early next year pass on three more readings and be submitted to voters in a referendum within six months after that. Battle lines are already being drawn.
Her shrieking diatribes against foreigners, Panamanian children of foreigners, those holding dual citizenships, queers, 12-year-olds who she wants to try as adults, and all international human rights conventions carried the day for the first votes. And then it became apparent how many people are deeply offended. So the ban on same-sex marriage was withdrawn but revived but otherwise Zulay Rodríguez’s most incendiary stuff was omitted, such that now she says she is against the whole package and for an originating constitutional convention that strips all present branches of government of their powers while it sits. Will this lead to a neofascist splinter party emerging out of the PRD? Perhaps. In any case the word is more or less out that the president’s party does not want her as the front person for its agenda. Photo by the National Assembly.
Not addressed
The subject of weapons, neither what civilians might keep and carry — a big issue for some foreigners and for a business that wants to import Israeli small arms — nor any real approach to how Panama might defend itself. Constitutionally, we have no military forces. In reality, our law enforcement includes military units. Under the present constitution in the event of a war all citizens are required to take up arms in a militia to be commanded by the police. However, there is no training, nor are there arsenals or facilities to make such a militia a reality. All just as well, many folks will figure, given the experience with General Noriega’s Dignity Battalions (CODEPADI) militia. But as a practical matter it leaves Panama with covert US forces operating here and the chance that this reality will come to play in Chinese and American rivalries to play out on the isthmus.
Any moves toward democracy, government transparency or greater citizen participation in public affairs.
Any adjustment for a long period of political kleptocracy in which great fortunes have been amassed by bribery, kickbacks and theft, and in which there has been rampant grabbing of both public and private lands by well connected families. In fact, the proposed changes include provisions that there is no recourse to the government if the proceeds of public corruption are spent on a principal residence or are passed on to family members.
Anything that might touch on Panama’s glaring economic inequalities or prevent their aggravation.
The Yes campaign’s hooks
The package of proposals makes many mentions of indigenous and afro-descended people. Anything real is unspecified.
Climate change and the environment are also mentioned. There is little of substance about any changes in the ways we live and do things.
There is a guarantee of six percent of the national budget for education — but private schools get some, perhaps most, of it. And the future performance of the economy and of demographic trends are so uncertain as to always make budget percentages or absolute dollar values in constitutions foolhardy.
Sports, for example in the schools, are mentioned a lot. But we have seen that many of the legislators who voted for these things have stolen public funds destined to sports programs and object when people demand an accounting.
Look for, sometime next year, slick and expensive advertising campaigns touting these things.
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We Panama Democrats pay our respects to the late US Representative from Baltimore. Photo by Lorie Shaull.
Dem voices
Bernie Sanders in New York
I want you all to look around and find someone you don’t know. Maybe somebody who doesn’t look kind of like you, maybe somebody who may be of a different religion than you, maybe they come from a different country.
My question now to you is are you willing to fight for that person who you don’t even know as much as you’re willing to fight for yourself?
Are you willing to stand together and fight for those people who are struggling economically in this country? Are you willing to fight for young people drowning in student debt even if you’re not? Are you willing to fight to ensure that every American has health care even if you have good health care? Are you willing to fight for frightened immigrant neighbors even if you are native born? Are you willing to fight for a future for generations of people that have not even been born but are entitled to live on a planet that is healthy and habitable?
Because if you are willing to do that, if you are willing to love, if you are willing to fight for a government of compassion and justice and decency, if you are willing to stand up to Trump’s desire to divide us up, if you are prepared to stand up to the greed and corruption of the corporate elite, if you and millions of others are prepared to do that, then there is no doubt in my mind not that only we will win this election but together we will transform this country.
Elizabeth Warren in New York
Washington works great for the wealthy and the well-connected, but it isn’t working for anyone else. Companies and wealthy individuals spend billions every year to influence Congress and federal agencies to put their interests ahead of the public interest. This is deliberate, and we need to call this what it is – corruption, plain and simple.
We will start by ending lobbying as we know it by closing loopholes so everyone who lobbies must register, shining sunlight on their activities, banning foreign governments from hiring Washington lobbyists, and shutting down the ability of lobbyists to move freely in and out of government jobs.
We will also shut the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington and permanently ban Senators and Congressmen from trading stocks in office and from becoming lobbyists when they retire – not for one year or two years, but for life. We will make the justices of the Supreme Court follow a code of ethics and strengthen the code of conduct for all judges to make sure everyone gets a fair shake in our courts. And we will force every candidate for federal office to put their tax returns online.
Together, these sweeping, structural changes will end the dominance of money in Washington, taking power away from the rich and powerful and putting it back where it belongs – with the American people themselves.
The essence of it, refined from a National Assembly video.
It’s over for them. But now WE…
We have seen a display of the most base motives and behaviors in the guise of constitutional reform. Appeals to primitive hatreds. “Heads we win, tails you lose” economic proposals from kleptocrats who belong in prison. Tawdry power grabs. The utmost concern for self protection from the consequences of the crimes they commit.
Ain’t no lipstick that can disguise this pig. Ain’t no inspector’s stamp that can certify away the rot and the stench enough to make the pork edible. Whatever sweeteners, reforms to the reforms or backtracking, this constitutional process is going to be voted down.
But Panama does need a new constitution and to get a worthy one there is this herculean task of public civics education to be done. Talking about some magical procedural bullet like an originating constituent assembly will not suffice. We need to talk about essential aims and principles, and practical ways to secure them. We need to recognize, and teach others to recognize, the varieties of fatal lures that will be dangled in front of us by hustlers who do not wish us or Panama well.
An early order of business needs to be the drafting of a ballot proposal that takes the rules of electing an assembly to write a new constitution away from the current powers that be — the Electoral Tribunal, the National Assembly, the Supreme Court and the Presidency.
How to do that? No way should we tolerate the current legislative circuits, neither the single-member ones nor the cockamamy multi-member ones. No way should we tolerate any of those people drawing new political boundaries for the occasion. No way should we tolerate discrimination against independents, the “plancha,” the quotient / half quotient / residue scam.
It would seem that, for the drafting of a new constitution, an assembly apportioned among the provinces and comarcas by population with at-large members within those boundaries and enough convention delegates to make representation meaningful, should be the general approach.
Say, 101 delegates. Partisan slates? Then treat the independents as if they were a party. Primaries? Those would probably be in order, but the Electoral Tribunal is the political parties’ arm and it should not be allowed to determine who the independents on the ballot will be. A province with nine delegates, elected with each party and the independents running up to nine people apiece, and then — first past the post or proportional by party with independent and party shares filled according to which individuals got the most votes?
And STILL there will be the usual thugs buying votes, and the usual authorities condoning that criminal activity.
Voting down THEIR thing is the easy part. Building PANAMA’S thing is the hard task ahead.
#VoteNo #NOesNO #NoALasReformas #NoMasParches
The nation gets all that. But now’s the time to be thinking of the positive alternatives.
White House photo. The particular infamy that was discussed unspecified as to this call.
So he got on the phone…
And approved the immediate dispossession and death of those who were fighting by America’s side when the phone call began.
And tried to blackmail another head of a foreign state into setting up one of his domestic political opponents.
What a complete disgrace. What a threat to both domestic order and world peace. Remove this corrupt public official, and scatter his supporters to the irrelevant fringes.
The library dedicated to universal education is the most powerful of our armies.
José de San Martín
Bear in mind…
Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
James 4:7
The infirmities of genius are often mistaken for its privileges.
