The Chilean Navy's tall ship, the Esmeralda, came to Rodman the other day.
Due to the treaty guaranteeing the permanent neutrality of the Panama Canal, it had every legal right to pass through here on its 10-month training cruise for Chilean naval cadets. By all of the norms of diplomacy, it would be hard to criticize the Chilean Embassy for using the occasion for an open house for Chilean residents of Panama.
But why did Panama's Centennial Commission have to make it an official Panamanian centennial event? What weird processes took place behind the blue eyes of centennial commission chair and Arnulfista presidential candidate José Miguel Alemán to make him think that this would be an appropriate symbol for the celebration of our existence as a republic?
In the wake of the 1973 Chilean coup, a US-backed affair in which the elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, was assassinated and hundreds of his supporters were made to disappear, the Esmeralda was used to imprison several dozen political prisoners.
"In the case of the training ship Esmeralda the investigations carried out by this Commission enabled us to confirm that a special unit of the Navy set itself up in its interior for the purpose of interrogating those who had been arrested and were being held on that ship and those who had been brought there from other naval places of detention. Those interrogations, for the most part, involved torture and ill-treatment," said the official Chilean Truth and Reconciliation Commission's 1991 report.
Maria Eliana Comené, at the time of the coup a student of the Catholic University of Valparaiso, said "we were subjected to the most cruel treatment by more than a dozen young men whose faces were painted black and hooded. They obliged us to take off all our clothes and they searched us violently, humiliating us with insults and sexual abuse.... I was there for four weeks, they took me out every night to interrogate me, they hit me on the ears with their hands, they applied electric current to my tongue and my vagina. They took us out to amuse themselves, to abuse us sexually. They raped us on a massive scale."
The elected mayor of Valparaiso was bound to one of the Esmeralda's four masts and tortured with electric shocks for several days. Michael Woodward, a Chilean-British dual citizen and Roman Catholic priest, was tortured to death on the Esmeralda.
Such is the symbol with which Mr. Alemán associates the Republic of Panama.
It's not an isolated gaffe. As this centennial year rang in, Alemán set the tone by withdrawing commission funds from a concert involving some of Panama's outstanding musicians because the most celebrated of them all, Rubén Blades, is a political adversary of his party. That political censorship of the arts continued into the commission-sponsored Panama City Carnival celebrations, which had as their headline acts musicians from the Dominican Republic instead of Panama. Then the commission released a calendar of centennial events that omitted the traditional celebration of the surrender of the Colombian garrison in Colon. The snub to that black-majority city jibes with the Moscoso administration's official caricature of the history of the Panama Canal, which conveniently forgets to mention that the great majority of those who actually built the waterway were black men from the West Indies.
Arnulfismo has a long history, with diverse good and bad things that can be said about it. The Arias Madrid brothers gave women the vote and in large part created the University of Panama and the Social Security Fund. Arnulfo Arias was repeatedly elected president and was repeatedly denied his mandate by coups or fraud. But the movement got its start in the 1920s as Accion Comunal, a group that dressed up in KKK robes and preached anti-black, anti-Asian and anti-Semitic racism. As ambassador to Mussolini's Italy during his brother's administration, Arnulfo Arias was deeply impressed with European fascism and became a good buddy of Adolf Hitler's. First chance he got, Arnulfo stripped all Panamanians of West Indian, Middle Eastern or Asian descent of their citizenship.
So what does Arnulfismo stand for today? (Other than nepotism and corruption, which Mireya's administration has taken to amazing depths but over which it holds nothing remotely close to a monopoly.) You can know much of that story just by looking at the performance of this government's Centennial Commission, at which things they emphasize and which things they ignore, at the parts of Panama's legacy they honor and the parts they denigrate, at their choice of foreign influences to include in the festivities.
The bottom line? By including the Torture Ship's visit among this country's official centennial celebrations, José Miguel Alemán has shown just about all thge voters need to know about his qualifications to wear the presidential sash.
Also in this section:
ISCA, Proposed Mining Code changes
Girvan, US-Central America free trade talks
RSF, Freedom of the press in Panama
Jackson, Alemán and the torture ship
Hartmann, Never-ending "War on Terrorism"
SUNTRACS, Mayday message
