Recent events in Venezuela ran like a shock wave through the hemisphere, especially among the Bolivarian countries, of which Panama is one. The accusations and counter-accusations, and the proofs and the lies, are all flying about Caracas and the world, and we may never know the whole story.

Here in Panama, however, the reactions of local politicians may tell us more about their own attitudes toward Panamanian society than about what really happened in Venezuela.

Martín Torrijos, who is the leader and presumptive presidential candidate of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), is what he is because on October 11, 1968, his daddy and a group of fellow officers overthrew the democratically elected government of Dr. Arnulfo Arias. But that was then, and now the younger Torrijos spoke out quickly and emphatically against the coup that briefly overthrew Hugo Chávez, citing democratic principles.

One gets the sense that Martín's idea of democracy is not just that the person who gets the most votes wins the presidency and the right to govern until the next elections. Hugo Chávez, like Omar Torrijos, supplanted an entrenched set of inbred kleptocratic elites who had treated their nation's wealth as their birthright. Chávez's Bolivarian Revolution, like Torrijos's Revolutionary Process, was carried out in the name of those who were not of the right surname or complexion to count under the old regime, and can be called a democratic force in that sense.

Moreover, Omar Torrijos started out his political career as a CIA informant and ended up as the man who set in motion the end of the American occupation of part of Panama and the departure of US military bases. The classic Torrijista version of democracy includes the notion that even little Latin American countries have the right to run their own affairs. More and more evidence points to the probability that the Venezuelan coup attempt was made in the USA, and that surely must have offended Martín Torrijos.

Ricardo Arias Calderón, the founder and president of the PRD's ally in the legislature, the former Christian Democratic Party that now calls itself the Partido Popular, was, unlike Martín Torrijos, a supporter of the Venezuelan military coup. Yet at one point in Panamanian history, Arias Calderón was one of the strongest critics of our own militarism.

The apparent conversion is not all that odd, when one looks at Arias Calderón's history and international political ties.

First of all, in Panama Arias Calderón's faction has always been the "third force," in its early years between the Liberals and Arnulfo Arias's Panameñistas, then later between the PRD and the Arnulfistas. To play this role effectively over the long term, one must be ready to switch alliances and perform all sorts of strange maneuvers in the shifting winds of different political seasons. Thus the embrace of militarism should be no more surprising than the alliance with his old foes in the PRD.

Second, Arias Calderón was the head of the Christian Democratic International, a group of political parties made in the image of the old Italian Christian Democratic Party, which had its origins in a CIA-sponsored Cold War alliance of politicians aligned with the Catholic Church and others aligned with the Mafia. Decades later the Cold War ended and the scandals caught up with the Italian Christian Dems, who were obliged to change their name and retreat to minor party status. Still, there's this global network of Christian Democratic parties, and its Venezuelan affiliate, COPEI, was the right wing of the civilian component of the coup attempt in Caracas.

Moreover, to the extent that anything remains of the Christian Democratic labor
movement, its affiliated unions are members (along with the AFL-CIO in the United States) of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. That relatively conservative labor alliance supported a trucker's strike that helped bring down the Allende government in Chile, a dock strike that helped topple a leftist government in Guyana, and backed the oil workers' protest against the firing of several executives that was used as a cover for the Venezuelan coup attempt.

Meanwhile, President Moscoso sent mixed signals. She deplored the attempt to oust an elected but somewhat unpopular president, but her administration quickly announced that Panama would not allow Chávez to live in exile here.

If coups against unpopular elected presidents become the name of the game in Latin America, then even Panama's lack of an army wouldn't likely save Mireya Moscoso's corrupt and inept administration. It was thus a matter of self-interest for the president to deplore the coup against Chávez.

On the other hand, Mireya talks nationalistic and then does what the United States tells her to do. She has denounced Plan Colombia, but allowed the US Southern Command's "civilian contractors" to conduct mercenary combat support operations out of Tocumen Airport. She says that she's against insurgents of both sides, but on several levels --- refugee policies, laxity about gun running, public statements about the nature of our neighbors' political violence, "Drug War" agreements that permit US military activities in Panamanian territory, to name a few --- her government clearly tilts toward the Colombian Army and its AUC paramilitary auxiliaries. Thus it was no wonder that when it seemed as if a US-backed coup had Chávez down, Mireya would take a gratuitous kick to impress the White House.

In Panama's media, including in The Panama News, there were mixed messages for other reasons.

First, most of the media are aligned with either the PRD-Partido Popular alliance or the Arnulfistas, and they reflect the ambiguities coming from those sectors. Second, most of the media use a lot of material from international corporations like AP, AIPE, Reuters, Time/Warner/AOL/CNN and The New York Times, which have marked anti-Chávez editorial slants; but at the same time the Panamanians who read, listen or watch tend to look askance at the Venezuelan coup.

More importantly for advocates of freedom of the press, Chávez is not the most friendly guy. He has a habit of taking over Venezuela's radio and TV networks for long political speeches, with gestures and inflections that seem to be cribbed from Saturday morning cartoon villains. He complains about bad press, as is his right, but his supporters rough up journalists, as is not their right.

On the other hand, Panama has many fewer journalists than Venezuela does, and yet far more of us have politically motivated criminal charges hanging over our heads. In Caracas Chávez can be irritating with his demands for "truthful news," but here one-third of all journalists are facing prison terms. So if a coup against Hugo Chávez was justified by his anti-press actions, what does it say about Mireya Moscoso?

The question of Chávez's relationship with the press is likely to come front and center before the world of journalism in short order. Univision owner Gustavo Cisneros and leading lights in several of Venezuela's mainstream news corporations were central players in the plot to depose Chávez. Let's see how the Panamanian press reacts if and when Cisneros and friends face criminal charges or other retaliatory measures for trying to overthrow their country's elected president.

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