also in this section Transparency International Those who would be president

Tito

by Rafael Mezquita

I take this opportunity given to me by the untimely death of our brother Tito Chandler to confide some of my most intimate reflections on what I believe to be happening at the Cancer Institute, the hospital in which my friend passed away due to an overdose of radiation, which has also placed other Panamanians on the brink of death. I enjoyed Tito’s friendship as a noted black professional, a politician, proud of his race and origin, a social fighter, and most of all a noble friend, who in hard times never hesitated to shed solidarity upon all of us who at one time or another needed it. May his soul rest in peace.

Now the Cancer Hospital. This hospital is quite familiar to me, since my father passed away there, and at which my mother was also a patient, very well cared for. Together along with the Santo Tomas Hospital and the Children’s Hospital, they all provide an area of health care and recovery, primarily for the poorer class of our country. Cancer is our leading cause of death since two thousand Panamanians of the twelve thousand annual death rate die of this disease, and the Cancer Institute is the only specialized institution to care for our cancer stricken patients. This is the place they go and we the poor will go or whoever sees in this institution a badge of courage in the struggle against cancer.

On the other hand there are no options for the poor; they either go to the Cancer Institute or they go no place since for them not even death offers an alternative. That is the reason why an attitude of such poor solidarity drew my attention: an assumed position of “nothing matters” by members of our governing body, who have done very little, (as not to say done nothing), in this case to identify options that our poor may have.

Had this been the case, our president, personally, our minister of health, and our principal heads of government would have been on the scene at the Cancer Institute, if only in an act of solidarity, visiting along with family members the other 20 patients now dying of an overdose of radiation. Now I only wait with little hope, the outcome of this investigation to become public and that never again will there be a repetition of such carelessness. Nevertheless, that is not what really hurts.

What really bothers me is the thought of other Panamanians at the Cancer Institute, aware of the fact that they may die of an overdose of radiation, have no other choice but to submit to this atomic gush, which may well be a blessing from above as well as it could be an acceleration of their fate. That is the truth of the poor and that is why there must come a government with feelings and vibrations to exonerate Tito’s memory and to solidify itself through his pain and hope.