"Do not ill-treat captives." So said Chairman Mao, and it's an appropriate starting point
to ponder a couple of recent incidents at the University of Panama.
A vacationing (he says) US Army major and an off-duty transito
cop were beaten up on campus. The major says that several assailants
kicked him when he was down, and busted a rib. The cop says he
was visiting his wife, who works on campus, when the hue and cry
"sapo" went out, and shortly he was being chased and punched by several
young people.
The major apparently speaks little Spanish, and thus could not
have done the sensible thing, that is, politely ask the student
groups whose offices in the economics building he was capturing
on videotape beforehand. The young radicals took him for a spy.
The usual suspects were blocking the Transistmica when the cop
was on campus, and when he was seen talking on a cell phone, the
young radicals took him for a spy.
The People's Revolution? Hooliganism? A little bit of both?
The way I see it:
Panama just rejected a proposed Visiting Forces Agreement with
the United States, largely based upon the principle that American
military people who are passing through here or taking their vacations
from Plan Colombia should be subject to Panamanian laws and jurisdiction
for things they may do here. That's a reasonable principle. And
since visiting American soldiers should be subject to the penalties
of our laws, they also should have the protection of the same
laws.
If the major was kicked when he was on the ground, whether he
was a spy or not he was the victim of a crime, whether under Panamanian
law or according to Mao's rules of discipline. It was really uncalled
for, and it's not unreasonable to hold those who did it accountable.
If Panama is to have a competent, honest and satisfied police
force, one of the things we should do is to subsidize the higher
education of police officers. That implies having a significant
number of off-duty police officers on campus for classes at any
given time. The alternatives, educating officers exclusively at
police or military academies, or in programs that carefully segregate
them from other students on the campus, are unwise in a democratic
society. There should be more, not fewer, off-duty cops at the
University of Panama.
The University of Panama is a beautiful campus, which should attract
foreign tourists of all sorts to take pictures of the public art
there. It's bad for the entire tourist economy if Panama gets
to be known as a place where tourists taking pictures get assaulted.
One of the factors behind the student leftists' too-sensitive
trigger is a fear that Plan Colombia will bring with it all sorts
of black bag operations and nasty tricks against the left in countries
bordering Colombia. That fear may or may not be justified, but
it's there.
The student militants' heightened fears are realistically based
on their small numbers during the school vacation and the great
irritation that they cause to so many drivers. If the game is
accepted with the understanding that since the University of Panama
does not have American football or ice hockey, it has these staged
street battles instead, still there are a lot of drivers who long
for a winning team, a riot squad the runs the university squad
off the field. The kids are alert for repression, reasonably enough.
