Desde que dejó la presidencia, Ricardo Martinelli, a través de los medios de comunicación que controla, ha estado atacando a todos en la sociedad que insisten en que no debe disfrutar de la impunidad por sus delitos en cargos públicos.
¿Qué es impropio aquí?
notas por la redacción y otros
Hay informes en La Estrella, escritos por Adelita Saltiel de Coriat, que cuentan cómo el presidente Varela contrató abogados para investigar las irregularidades de las administraciones anteriores y cómo el líder de ese esfuerzo, Rogelio Saltarín, compartió información con la Procuradora Kenia Porcell. Muchos abogados y algunos de sus gremios objetan o cuestionan la legitimidad de esto por motivos de procedimiento judicial. Los martinelistas se oponen a estas investigaciones presidenciales porque son delincuentes que quieren quedar impunes. La reportera y el periódico en cuestión fuerton los primeros en informar sobre muchas de las historias sobre los delitos de Martinelli. Nadie dice que los informes sobre Saltarín son falsos. El argumento es sobre su significado. Porque Castillo no ha denunciado la situación como una trampa contra Martinelli y sus seguidores, de ahí los ataques.
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Annie Lennox – BBC One Sessions Live https://youtu.be/xUruA0Zrpg4
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Omar Torrijos, seated in front of the microphones, announcing the October 11, 1968 coup d’etat.
50 years ago Panama made an acute turn
by Eric Jackson
On October 11, 1968, with a recently inaugurated President Arnulfo Arias taking in a movie, Guardia Nacional officers led by Colonel Boris Martínez and Colonel Omar Torrijos politely and unofficially 0shoved aside their superior, General Bólivar Vallarino, and announced the overthrow – once again – of Dr. Arias.
This was not any particularly ideological coup, but it was an event set in a period of world history and a peculiarly Panamanian context. The precipitating reason was the announcement by Arias, who had been sworn in that October 1, that he would reshuffle the promotion schedule for the Guardia Nacional, at the time Panama’s combined military and police forces.
Vallarino was the last of a breed, the product of a former policy that reserved the Guardia’s upper ranks for members of Panama’s aristocratic white families. But he was also successor to and bearer of the torch of José A. Remón, the Guardia commander behind many a coup – particularly several against Arias – and progenitor of a strange social reforming militarism that was previously politically aligned with fragmented remnants of Panama’s Liberal tradition.
Remón’s nemesis, however, was the faction led by the two Arias brothers who became presidents, Harmdio and Arnulfo, was also one of the Liberal fragments. The ancestor of what is today’s Panameñista Party was born in the late 20s as the Accion Comunal movement, a racist formation of young middle class white men who sometimes dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes and advocated the expulsion of West Indian blacks, Sephardic Jews, and in general anyone tracing roots to Asia or the Middle East from Panama. When they put on their suits and played moderate politician – or in Harmodio Arias’s case, attorney member of the Canal Zone Bar – they said that they didn’t have anything against anyone of another race or religion but had to defend Panama’s Spanish language and culture.
The first big run-in between the Guardia and Arnulfo Arias happened in 1941, the year in which a new constitution that stripped West Indian blacks except those from Spanish-speaking lands, the Chinese, the Hindus, the Arabs and the Sephardic Jews of their Panamanian citizenship, even if they, their parents and their grandparents had all been born here. Arias was also playing balance of power games between the USA of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Arias’s personal friend from his years as a diplomat in Europe, Adolf Hitler. The US Embassy and Remón connived to remove Arias from office when the latter took a trip to Havana for various appointments in October of that year. Thus the United States got what it saw as a dangerous annoyance out of the way as it slid ever closer to war with the Axis powers.
If Arnulfo Arias had a friend in Der Führer, Remón had one in Ike. After World War I Dwight D. Eisenhower was stationed in Panama, where it is said that he began his education in earnest as an administrator. He also got to know all segments of isthmian society, including the Guardia officers. Ultimately Remón emerged from the barracks to put on a suit and ran for president. He was elected, by most accounts fair and square. Assassins cut short his presidency but before that happened he made the Remón-Eisenhower Treaty that began a long process of transformation that ended the old Canal Zone.
The traditions and factions survived the crime – still officially unsolved, as to its intellectual author – and by early the Panameñnistas gained the upper hand in the National Assembly to impeach Liberal Marcos Robles, only to have the Guardia step in and overrule the legislature. Arias won that year’s election but lasted only about a week and a half in office.
So, October 11, 1968 – just another Panamanian coup? What would be so special about that?
It led to a generation of dictatorship that only ended with the December 1989 US invasion, a period that brought great changes to Panama’s relationship with the United States and positions in world politics, a time when the solid grip of a few families over Panama’s economy and politics was shattered if not destroyed.
There were intra-military power struggles at first, wherein Boris Martínez was put on a plane to the United States, the G2 intelligence chief whom Omar Torrijos called “my gangster” – Manuel Antonio Noriega – fended off an uprising and Torrijos became supreme leader of Panama from 1969 until his death in a 1981 plane crash. In those years Panama got the constitution that we have today, albeit with a few amendments. We got the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaties that ended the Canal Zone and, after a long phaseout, the complex of American military bases there. We were left with one of our major political parties, the one that Torrijos founded the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD).
The arguments over the nature of the regime created by the October 11, 1968 coup continue. There were the slain and disappeared, a body count of more than 100 dissidents. There were the busted up monopolies. There was and is a political patronage systezm as a matter of constitutional law. The Colon Free Zone grew and thrived, and great fortunes both licit and illicit were made.
The arguments have been left less informed than they ought to be for two main reasons.
The first, the internal one, is that the Guardia closed and censored the media, purged academia and replaced it with a tawdry political patronage system and fostered a culture of fear. What ought to be the public record was censored and falsified by the military regime.
The second, the external reason, was that in the 1989 invasion the US forces took all the Panamanian government records and with exceptions like the vital statistics and voter registration data at the Electoral Tribunal and the Social Security Fund’s medical and pension records carted the public archives off to United States where they have been kept locked away to this day. Those records would have told us, for example, about post-invasion public figures who had quietly collaborated with the Noriega regime.
Especially guarded by the United States are the full stories of US dealings with Omar Torrijos and Manuel Antonio Noriega, two complementary partners but very different sorts of men. In common they were both CIA informants on their way up. In common they both had their moments of saying no to Uncle Sam. Torrijos was the hard-drinking, gregarious man who very much wanted to be in control but wanted to be loved and cared about how he would be seen in the historical record. Noriega was the much darker character, the spymaster and psychological warfare expert – something he learned from US Army instructors – a man without much of an internal capacity for self-control but who until close to the end had an older brother, the first out gay diplomat in Latin America, whose advice would perform that function for him. The created a generation with certain civic values that just didn’t function, which is why Panamanians in the end let American troops end the dictatorship and never since then got around to some of the necessary corrections that a functional democracy would need.
So the arguments continue, often with more heat than light, as the very real if seldom advertised consequences of the October 11, 1968 coup still surround us.
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You’d hardly know it from the news, but we’ve been continuously at war in Afghanistan since 2001. The war quietly turned 17 on October 7.
Unfortunately, America’s amnesia didn’t prevent Command Sergeant Major Tim Bolyard from being killed in Afghanistan in early September during his eighth combat tour and 13th deployment.
Eight combat tours — which should be illegal — sent Bolyard down-range repeatedly in a war President Obama purportedly ended over three years ago. A war this country forgot long before that.
A nation that doesn’t remember the men and women sent to fight on its behalf has no business whatsoever sending more. And a democracy that spends more time debating kneeling before the flag than the justification for issuing folded ones desperately needs to get re-acquainted with the Constitution — and its moral compass.
Our loved ones didn’t sign up to serve a president. They signed up to serve the American people, most of whom have no idea what they’re fighting for.
I don’t know, either. Nor do any of the other 4,000-plus members of Military Families Speak Out (MFSO).
We all have spouses, parents, partners, siblings, and children who’ve served in the post-9/11 era. Founded in 2002 by two military families to oppose the invasion of Iraq, our loved ones are still serving there and in Afghanistan.
We’ve spent more than a decade and a half burying children, grieving parents, mourning spouses and siblings, and caring for wounded warriors. We have no more loved ones left to give.
Shame on a country that continues to take our troops to wars long declared done, squandering their service and absolving the collective conscience with two words: “They volunteered.”
The fact that soldiers wear the uniform by choice shouldn’t permit “the American people and their elected representatives to be indifferent about the war in Afghanistan,” retired Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry told the New York Times.
The former commander of US troops in Afghanistan added: “We continue to fight simply because we are there.”
That “we” is a miniscule 1 percent of the population that’s paying the human cost of this country’s check for war — the democratic equivalent of a dine-and-dash. The body count for US troops in Afghanistan is 2,414, plus more than 20,000 injured. Those figures rise into the hundreds of thousands for Afghan soldiers and civilians.
Then there’s the financial cost: Over $1 trillion, according to TheBalance.com.
Even so, Congress has repeatedly cut taxes, especially for the rich, since the wars began. Our fiscal policy is one of kicking the can down the road to future generations, who are paying enough already for fossil-fueled climate change.
Sixteen of the 17 hottest years on record have occurred since 2001. The massive carbon footprint generated by armed forces in combat zones, a primary institutional driver of global warming, ensures that these endless wars will end up costing everyone.
Our troops and families of veterans pay the price every day. Before our loved ones returned from their first tours, we were told “Combat is a one-way door: Once you walk through it, you can never go back.”
I used to think that only applied to veterans. I know better now.
“It is time for this war in Afghanistan to end,” said General John W. Nicholson recently, as he was preparing to leave the country for the last time. Nicholson had spent a total of 31 months — four tours — in Afghanistan as the commander in charge of a shape-shifting mission.
Support the troops, America: Bring them home now. Enough folded flags.
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Ni putas ni santas, solo mujeres — Neither whores nor saints, just women. October 25, 2011, a large women’s protest against sexual assault. For a larger version of this photo click here.
This project called “Street 2010-2013” represents a period of my photography that I did either for my own publications or for The Panama News. At that time the language of my photography was black and white. Please understand that I never clicked the shutter button without respect or empathy for those I photographed.
Este proyecto, llamado “Street 2010-2013” representa un periodo de mi fotografía que hice para mis propias publicaciones o The Panama News. En ese momento el idioma de mi fotografía era en blanco y negro. Por favor, comprenda que nunca he pulsado el botón del obturador sin respeto ni empatía por aquellos que fotografié.
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The US Embassy and consulate in Panama. State Department graphic.
The American Citizens Services Unit commits to a one business day e-mail response-time
by the US Embassy – Panama Consular Section
In order to improve our customer service to our US Citizens in Panama, starting October 9, the American Citizens Services (ACS) Unit is happy to announce it will respond to all email inquiries in one business day. If you have a routine question related to an ACS service, please email panama-acs@state.gov. All routine questions will be routed through the one business day response time e-mail address. If you have a life or death emergency, please call 317-5000 and follow the instructions for emergency calls.
The Federal Benefits Unit (FBU) will continue receiving external calls from 10:30-11:30am on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. The Embassy phone number is (507) 317-5000. For automated information, please call (507) 317-5030. For Federal Benefits questions, we continue to encourage writing to FBU (panama-fbu@state.gov) by e-mail.
Additionally, we would like to remind our customers that ACS and FBU operate on an appointment-only system for all services except emergency ACS cases and adult passport renewals.
American Citizen Services
To schedule an appointment, please see the Embassy’s ACS page, which can be found here.
La Unidad de Servicios para Ciudadanos Estadounidenses se compromete a un tiempo de respuesta de correo electrónico de un día hábil
En miras de mejorar nuestro servicio al cliente a nuestros Ciudadanos Estadounidenses en Panamá, a partir del 9 de octubre, la Unidad de Servicios para Ciudadanos Americanos (ACS) se complace en anunciar que responderá a todas las consultas por correo electrónico en un día hábil. Si tiene una pregunta de rutina relacionada con un servicio de ACS, por favor envíe un correo electrónico a panama-acs@state.gov. Todas las preguntas de rutina enviadas a través de correo electrónico se manejarán por medio de nuestro tiempo de respuesta de un día hábil. Si tiene una emergencia de vida o muerte, por favor sírvase llamar al 317-5000 y siga las instrucciones para llamadas de emergencia.
La Unidad de Beneficios Federales (FBU) continuará recibiendo llamadas externas de 10:30 – 11: 30 am los lunes, martes, jueves y viernes. El número de teléfono de la Embajada es (507) 317-5000. Para obtener información automatizada, llame al (507) 317-5030. Para preguntas sobre Beneficios Federales, seguimos recomendando que se escriba a FBU (panama-fbu@state.gov) por correo electrónico.
Adicional, nos gustaría recordar a nuestros clientes que ACS y FBU operanúnicamente por citas para todos los servicios, excepto los casos de emergencia de ACS y las renovaciones de pasaportes de adultos.
Servicios a Ciudadanos Americanos
Para programar una cita, consulte la página de la Embajada bajo ACS, la cual puede encontrar aqui.
Hurricane Michael, up to Category 4 intensity, about to slam into Florida. US Air Force radar image.
Our hearts go out to Floridians
Lets not blame it on God. Let’s set aside questions of blame for a few days. Florida is in harm’s way and humanity stands with the people and other living things about to be battered. Whatever we can do for Floridians, we should. We are all neighbors on this planet.
Imploding political caste
It was a bad post-primary for Alfredo “Fello” Pérez, the PRD legislator for Chepo. First he got charged before the Supreme Court for writing large bounced checks, then he was on a list of people whose PRD primary wins were challenged, mainly for vote buying. Then we heard that nearly 300 candidates from that primary are being fined $3,000 each for failing to report their campaign donations and expenditures.
This comes amidst a scandal engulfing all parties in the National Assembly, most of whose members refuse to divulge their “Planilla 80” payrolls for “personal services.” The less than one-quarter of members whose Planilla 80 information has come out have told partly concealed tales of relatives, people working for their private companies and people who don’t actually work on these payrolls, and some of those listed say that they did not know and were not paid. That’s the old botella scheme, of phantom employees whose paychecks the deputies pocket. We were reassured, however, that it’s not just the legislature, that the people who run the Social Security Fund that’s said to be headed toward insolvency also have Planilla 80 schemes.
The members of President Varela’s party are running away from his record. The ugliest part of it, Odebrecht contracts, touch the Panama City administration and may cost Mayor Blandón the Panameñista nomination for president. Odebrecht also touches the Metro and the Panama Canal Authority board.
So, what to do? The squabbling parties in the legislature demanded more money to spend on their constituencies during campaign season, and Varela demanded more money to cut more ribbons between now and when he leaves office at the end of next June. So they compromised on legislation to raise the deficit limit by $300 million. That may not seem like much in the grand scheme of things, but our national debt is already high and the Panamanian economy is down and apparently heading lower.
The point is not that we need austerity — that’s the wrong policy during hard times — but that we need to stop the looting. Otherwise there arises a great reaction among people who can’t see beyond the problems on the surface and whose educational level leads them to act upon simplistic stereotypes rather than address fundamental problems.
This time next year most of this crowd will be out of office, but with what and whom we replace them really does matter.
America’s decline
Along its long slide into the past tense, ancient Rome also got into sneering public assertions of rape culture and great spectacles of cruelty before cheering crowds. When that slide into barbarism began there were the trappings of a republic and wiser minds in play, but bread and circuses usually sufficed to buy the continuation of the unsustainable. Until, in an empire with troops at war across much of the then-known world, the troops began to go unpaid. Then there was Hell to pay.
Mussolini’s “Risorgimento” has its even louder echo in Trump’s “MAGA.” But peace, shared prosperity and a systemic justice that keeps the peace is eternally a better program than a return to some exaggerated imperial grandeur.
Americans will soon go to the polls. If basic decency prevails over bluster, and people go for progress more than nostalgia, the country will start to head out of its woes. If the United States comes out of it as a solid and decent country rather than a wannabe superpower, Americans will have reason for satisfaction.
Bear in mind…
I think it’s too bad that everybody’s decided to turn on drugs, I don’t think drugs are the problem. Crime is the problem. Cops are the problem. Money’s the problem. But drugs are just drugs.
Jerry Garcia
Men make the moral code and they expect women to accept it. They have decided that it is entirely right and proper for men to fight for their liberties and their rights, but that it is not right and proper for women to fight for theirs.
Emmeline Pankhurst
Morals and enlightenment are the poles of a republic, morals and enlightenment are our first needs.
Simón Bolívar
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“But it was MY company!” Perhaps a court will hear it. Not Arraijan voters.
So far in the primaries: more volatility than at first glance
by Eric Jackson
Some smaller parties like the Alianza and FAD are into their candidate selection processes and one of the nation’s historic major parties, the Panameñistas, have their primary in a week’s time. Initial primary election returns and commentary based upon them made it seem that everything is set to go on as it has been, that the movement to reject all incumbents is stillborn. A second look at the primaries so far tells a more complicated picture.
The indigenous vote in the PRD
The tradition for many years has been the indigenous voters are the big swing element in Panamanian political life. But look at what happened in the comarcas in the PRD primary. In the Ngabe-Bugle Comarca it was apparent on election night that incumbent legislator Crescencia Prado had been defeated by a relatively small margin in a relatively high turnout. It was also initially reported that in Guna Yala incumbent deputy Aibán Velarde was trailing. That latter was quite the understatement. The guy came in dead last in a crowded field, with only 35 votes (7%).
The comarca is not included in Chiriqui’s circuit 4-2, encompassing the district of Baru. In that province, however, there are plenty of indigenous voters who live outside of the comarca. Were they a factor in PRD primary, wherein party members ousted incumbent Carlos Motta? That race was decided by a narrow margin and not definitively reported on primary night. Anything that may have been a factor probably was.
Martinelli’s people in CD
Primary night news from Cambio Democratico concentrated on Sergio Gálvez winning the party nomination to seek another term in the legislature. He was the top primary vote-getter, with 3,930 votes in circuit 8-7. Next door in circuit 8-8 the only CD incumbent in that multi-member constituency is Fernando Carrillo and he was given a bye for an automatic nomination. That saved a contest with jailed ex-president Ricardo Martinelli, who got the most votes there, 2,548 votos of the 5,870 who showed up for the primary.
Gálvez is a likely general election winner as far as we can see right now, barring further scandals. It is not at all clear whether Martinelli would muster the votes to get a seat in the legislature, and moreover he may well be barred from holding public office in the event of a criminal conviction.
Martinelli’s spokesman, Luis Eduardo Camacho, came in third for three spots on the ballot in play in San Miguelito, with 1,161 votes. Much might change but it looks far short of the base needed to propel him into the National Assembly.
Recycles, retreads and dynasts
The big reject of the Cambio Democratico primary was legislator Marilyn Vallarino’s bid to be nominated for mayor of Arraijan. She gets a bye for legislator so will be on the ballot for that, but lost the mayoral primary to a newcomer, attorney Belkis Saavedra. Vallarino, sister of former vice president Arturo Vallarino and aunt of jailed former Panama City mayor Bosco Vallarino, may not get to hold any public office. That’s because the comptroller general has lodged a complaint with the Supreme Court about her paying her private company employees out of the legislature’s budget. That she doesn’t deny, but she maintains that it’s improper because it’s her company. A previous mayor of Arraijan is in prison for doing much the same, putting private company employees on the city budget.
In Arraijan, Ricardo Valencia Arias, once the youngest legislator, is back for a try to get back in the Assembly. In 2014, with notoriety for going around Arraijan with his friends and beating up queers, the voters threw him out. He got 1,800 votes to win one of two spots up for grabs but it seems thain the multi-member Arraijan circuit he will not get his old job back if the courts to not bar Marilyn Vallarino from running. Valencia’s return would restore a seat in the legislature as family property, given that his mother Argentina Arias used to hold a seat from there.
In Colon’s urban circuit the PRD incumbent deputy Maria Del Carmen Delgado Blandón (Chelita) came in fourth, which could get her on the general election ballot but it is expected that the nomination for that spot may be given to a smaller party if an alliance can be made. On the CD side we see old name Leopoldo Benedetti winning one of that party’s spots but scant chances of a Martinelista winning a seat from that city.
In La Chorrera in and out of jail former Martinelli minister Federico Suárez got eliminated from consideration for the legislature by Yuzaida Marín.
Cambio Democratico gave most of their deputies free passes around the primaries, allowing them to conserve resources. But some rejected that in favor of an extra season of campaigning.
Same old, same old? Something seems to be shifting beneath the surface, and the May elections are a long time from now.
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