The University of Panama's history department played host to the region's historians recently, at the VI Central American History Congress that was held from July 22 through 26 at the Hotel El Panama. The gathering attracted not only Panamanian and Central American historians, but those from farther afield who specialize in Meso-American history, and also archivists, museum curators, computer database builders, biologists, professors of literature, archaeologists, women's studies professors and other intellectuals who are interested in the vast subject.

This reporter caught one of the congress's last workshops, wherein three University of Panama history profs, in a panel moderated by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor Aims McGuinness, spoke about subjects concerning Panama.

Dr. Marta Chiari spoke about municipalities, their legal and political origins and their evolution in Panama. The institution that the Spaniards brought to the New World was, according to Chiari, of mixed Roman and Germanic origins as modified for the long campaign to expel the Arabs from Spain. The Christian kingdoms of Spain set up several sorts of municipalities in areas they conquered from the Arabs, royal ones under direct crown rule and seignoral ones typically run by allied lesser nobles or by the Catholic Church.

In Panama, Vasco Núñez de Balboa set up the first municipality, Santa Maria la Antigua, while the man who ordered Balboa's execution, Pedrarias the Cruel, founded the biggest and oldest existing one, Panama City. Our capital and other early colonial municipalities were in large part set up as bases for the conquest of the rest of the isthmus. There were also indigenous municipalities, which were used to integrate conquered peoples into the Spanish Empire within the context of languages and cultures they understood.

Originally, Chiari noted, there were no mayors or city councils. Municipalities were headed by military commanders and when a decision in which a consensus of the local resident Spaniards was desired a cablido abierto, more or less a town meeting, was held for that purpose. Over time, military commanders were replaced by appointed civilian mayors, and representantes elected from neighborhoods or corregimientos replaced the cabildo abierto with the cabildo cerrado, the forerunner of the modern city council.

In the wake of the 1989 US invasion, municipalities gained more autonomy when legislation was passed to provide for elected mayors beginning with the 1994 elections. Chiari considers that an important improvement, and considers the movement for greater municipal autonomy a postitive trend that has yet to run its course.

The next speaker was Dr. Eldicia X. Agudo A., who compared and noted the links between the Liberal traditions of Panama and Ecuador in the late 19th century.

Though there were a number of participants from the United States, this was not a US-oriented gathering, and thus Agudo didn't get into the distinction between what "liberal" means in the States and its connotations in Latin America. However, she outlined what it meant in the 19th century Bolivarian countries, and the distinctions would be easy to make for one who knows North American politics. (And of course, in Canada the Liberal Party is "liberal" more in the European, Japanese or Latin American sense than according to the US usage of the word.)

In its orgins, our region's liberalism stood for a capitalist free market economy rather than a semi-feudal order based on a landed aristocracy; for separation of church and state rather than an official Catholic theocracy; for democratic institutions rather than powerful caudillos; and for the abolition of capital punishment and prison reform rather than government by harsh repression. Agudo traced the origins of this region's liberalism to the influences of the French Revolution and English utilitarianism.

Owing, she said, to the expansion of US and European economic ties in Latin America, Agudo noted that in the middle of the 19th century the liberal tradition in Latin America split, between an oligarchic tradition that prized laissez faire economics above all else and a more radical social reforming tradition.

One of the examples of the radical liberal tradition in Panama Agudo cited was that of the black liberals, whose best known leader was the Colon legislator and martyred rebel Pedro Prestán. She noted the isthmian connections of Ecuador's great 19th century radical liberal leader, Eloy Alfaro, who for a time lived and did business in Panama and married a Panamanian, and who picked up diverse international influences here.

Agudo also noted the patriotic and Pan-Latin American trends in both Ecuadoran and Panamanian liberalism, citing Panama's greatest 19th century statesman, Justo Arosemena, and Ecuador's Eloy Alfaro as examples of that sort of "Americanism" that's not about a hemisphere under US domination but rather a Latin America united to assert and protect its own interests.

Finally, Agudo explained that the radical branch of liberalism stood for economic modernization, while the oligarchic branch didn't necessarily. As it turned out, the commercial classes became the leading liberal force on the Panamanian isthmus. After the period that the professor discussed, liberals backed the movement for separation from Colombia more than anything else to allow that great economic modernization, the construction of the Panama Canal, to proceed.

The panel's final speaker was Professor Enrique Rosas Ledezma, who spoke about Simón Bolívar and the Monroe Doctrine. This was a scholarly but highly charged presentation, given that in this region the left, including Colombia's guerrillas and President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, lay claim to the Bolivarian tradition and tend to present this history in ways that support this claim.

But Rosas blasted "anti-scientific" texts used in some university history courses, and particularly railed against the assertion that Bolívar was an opponent of US and British imperialism, and was thus offended by the Monroe Doctrine.

Rosas noted that in 1823, when US President James Monroe sent his celebrated message to the Congress, the United States was not an imperial power. You might get an argument to the contrary from historians of the Seminole, Cherokee or other North American indigenous nations, but the Monroe Doctrine was a response to a Russian suggestion of European intervention to impose order in chaotic parts of the Americas, with Monroe taking that opportunity to state that any European attempt to reassert control over parts of the Western Hemisphere that had gained their independence would be seen as an unfriendly act by the United States.

(Years after Bolívar's and Monroe's time, of course, the Monroe Doctrine was interpreted by US politicians as an implicit mandate for US intervention throughout the hemisphere, as, for example, when in the wake of the 1855 Watermelon Slice Incident American marines landed and occupied Panama until a large ransom was paid for their departure.)

A general anti-imperialism in the modern sense of the concept was not part of Bolívar's thinking, Rosas argued. The British, he pointed out, were the world's imperial superpower in Bolívar's time, and the Great Liberator made repeated attempts to get British aid for his wars of liberation against Spain. Rosas made that case by way of things that Bolívar said and wrote while in exile in Jamaica, then a British colony. In particular, he offered free trade for British mercantile interests in the lands that he intended to free from Spanish rule. In the end Great Britain did not support Bolívar, who instead went back to Venezuela with arms provided by the independent black republic of Haiti in exchange for a promise to end slavery wherever he gained power.

The modern-day notion that Bolívar was anti-American is also a distortion, according to Rosas. "He was a great admirer of American society and government," who took the US Consitution as a model for the ephemeral Venezuelan government that was set up in 1810.

Rosas then delved into US history to set the context for the Monroe Doctrine. Pointing to Henry Clay's 1820 congressional resolution favoring Latin America's emancipation from Iberian rule and Monroe's 1821 statement that Spain wasn't capable of holding its American possessions, Rosas argued that as originally enunciated the Monroe Doctrine was a statement of anti-colonial solidarity from a country that had only a few decades earlier freed itself from European domination.

Finally, Rosas noted US opposition to France's intentions to re-take Haiti and Bolívar's serious consideration of asking for US aid when a French fleet threatened to land in Venezuela. The Great Liberator liked Monroe's 1823 message to Congress, Rosas concluded, rejecting what he considers anachronistic interpretations expounded in today's Latin American academia.

After the panel discussion moderator Aims McGuinness, one of only a few US professors who specializes in Panama, said that he is impressed with the development of Panamanian historical scholarship over the past few years. Two important positive developments he cited were the renovation of the Biblioteca Nacional and the establishment of the Museo del Canal Interoceanico.

The University of Michigan-educated PhD said he hadn't heard of some of the odd historical "orthodoxy" that IPAT and the Moscoso administration are imposing on tour guides --- such as the notion that the French were busy working on the canal right up to the time that the Americans came in; the assertion that there were two flagpoles in front of Balboa High on January 9, 1964; and the elimination of West Indians from "politically correct" accounts of how the canal was built. However, he said that with the universities leading Panama toward a more sophisticated understanding of its history, that sort of nonsense will tend to disappear.

McGuinness, who has published some of the results of his research into social and political trends in Panama City during the mid-19th century, plans to be back here during next year's centennial.

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