On May 15 an informally dressed Guillermo Endara spoke informally with several dozen of his supporters at Excedra Books. The event, advertised by email, was billed as the former and possible future president’s discussion of culture. Mostly, however, the broad ranging talk responded to questions that didn’t concentrate on the arts and letters, but on the larger ambit of political culture.
The ex-president and Solidaridad nominee drew a crowd with a slight female majority, mostly middle-aged with quite a few young adults and a few senior citizens, a group that included significant representations of blacks and whites amidst its cholo majority. It was mainly not a suit-and-tie crowd. There were some lawyers and professors there, but no elected officials and only a couple of public figures. I was the only journalist in attendance.
Endara, who sat throughout the session, was given a lengthy introduction by a cousin. It was an interesting presentation in its own right. The former president is not of the inbred Creole aristocracy. One of his grandfathers came from Ecuador, the other from Catalonia. His maternal grandpa was the composer of many of the patriotic marches that will be played in the November parades (unless, of course, our education minister issues another of her edicts, a worse one than her ban on baton tosses and pirouettes by majorettes). His father was Panama’s first radio newsman. His primary and secondary education took place at Catholic schools in Panama and Argentina and a military academy in California. He graduated first in his class at the University of Panama law school and got an LLM at New York University.
Beginning in the early 60s Endara was one of Arnulfo Arias’s close collaborators. After Arnulfo was deposed 11 days after his inauguration in 1968, Endara went underground, was caught, and survived prison and exile with his political will intact. He was one of the organizers of the massive reception that Arias was given when he returned to Panama in 1978, represented Arnulfo’s faction on the committee that drafted the 1983 constitutional changes, and was a key campaign operative in the 1984 election that Manuel Antonio Noriega (with US backing) stole from Arias.
One of the founders of the Civilista alliance that attempted to overthrow the military dictatorship, Endara was surprised to find himself named to head the opposition ticket in 1989. “I wasn’t seeking the presidency,” he said.
The voters, however, including a large portion of the military, were tired and disgusted with the way things were, and voted for Endara by a huge majority. Noriega tried to annul the election and his militia caught up with the president-elect and beat him severely. Endara spent 10 days in the hospital. “But I have a hard head,” he told the crowd.
Seven months later the US military invaded, Endara was inaugurated in an odd little ceremony at Fort Clayton, and when the smoke cleared and the looting had run its course, he found himself at the head of the Panamanian government. His elderly father “didn’t believe it,” Endara said. “Panama was never worse than after the invasion and the looting,” he added.
Now the elections are a little less than a year away and Guillermo Endara is running hard as the Solidaridad nominee, showing a strong second place in the polls. The Arnulfista Party that he founded has expelled him and its probable nominee is launching desperate and absurd accusations as the possibility looms of the two main parties in the Mireyista alliance, the Arnulfistas and MOLIRENA, losing their ballot status in a crushing defeat next year.
But Endara said that he hadn’t planned on running for president this time either. “I was set to support Alberto Vallarino, who dropped out, leaving a vacuum.”
“I was trying to rescue the Arnulfista Party,” he claimed, “but you can’t recover a party that’s gone into the trash.”
The discussion became more narrowly cultural when Endara was asked what he’s reading these days. His habit is to read more than one book at a time, and he hesitates to name a favorite writer.
He said that at the moment he’s reading several books about the Cuban missile crisis, pointing out that a lot of inside accounts of the affair from the Soviet side have been published in recent years. “I find this process of decision-making very interesting,” he said, both on the US and Soviet sides.
“The Republic of Panama won’t have a nuclear crisis, but a president faces many crises,” he explained. “My presidency was very hard,” with a constant stream of unexpected emergencies. He compared the immediate aftermath of Panama’s dictatorship to Spain right after Franco’s death, “when repression was lifted and licentiousness boiled over.”
People wanted to know Endara’s plans for a second presidency, if he gets the chance. The discussion repeatedly turned to variations on this theme.
“You have to have plans,” he admitted, noting that he’s in the process of talking to a lot of people, including experts in a number of fields, to get their ideas and opinons about what can and must be done to confront Panama’s current woes. “But you can’t carry out your plans exactly, point-by-point,” he said, arguing that in a democracy there are other forces at work, and in a global economy a lot of important decisions have been taken away from nations.
“We’re not a great power,” he noted. “We need to have good relationships with the United States, of course, and with the Europeans and some Asian countries.” (Was it intentional that he didn’t mention Central America or the Andean countries? Endara has refused to assume a seat in the Central American Parliament that’s reserved for all ex-presidents, and has been critical of Mireya Moscoso’s handling of relations with Colombia.)
“I don’t want to make big promises” about economic issues, the candidate said. He did, however, says that the current dominant model of economic globalization “has caused big problems,” not all of which can be quickly fixed.
Endara lamented the casual monopolistic policies and assumptions that dominate the business scene here, recounting his frustration when he tried to limit the damage of price fixing by medicine importers by taking duties off of insulin when he was president. The prices to patients remained high when the importers kept all of the benefits of the tax cut to themselves, until he imposed price controls. He also argued that both ranchers and consumers are wronged by intermediaries who take advantage and control prices at both ends of the market chain.
“Panama can’t function with free supply and demand, because we’re too small a society,” Endara concluded.
But that doesn’t mean that he’s advocating a socialist command economy. In answers to specific questions he sounded mostly pragmatic and a bit jaded. He was for the old state-owned INTEL phone company’s privatization because the government couldn’t afford the needed modernizations. He likes parts of the recent tax legislation and dislikes others, but argues that in general a country “shouldn’t raise taxes in a period of high unemployment” and that the tax system “should be simple.”
Endara says he’s for a new constitution, but here too he seems wary of slogans and easy solutions. “Panama has never had a better time to change the Constitution,” he said, but added that the convening of a constituent assembly is “a difficult process.”
Though he’s well educated, he doesn’t think much of educational requirements for public office. A person with little formal education could be president and do well, he argued. “The people must take the responsibility to choose their president.”
Endara talked at length about the team that he assembled for his first presidency, noting that due to more than two decades of dictatorship in which “there were no normal politics,” most of the people in his cabinet had little experience in public office. He said that some of the inexperienced ones did quite well, but said that his preference is not for untested youth. If he gets back to the Palacio de las Garzas again, he added, he will have “much more freedom to choose” his team than the 1989 political alliance allowed him.
Endara would like to do something to cut the excesses, costs and rampant corruption in the legislature, but he didn’t put forward the oft-heard propositions that reducing the number of legislators or electing them at large will solve the problems.
He’s for reforms in Panamanian diplomacy. While allowing that consuls should be given some incentive to sign up foreign ships for the Panamanian flag “instead of playing golf,” he argued that “the system of consuls can’t go on.”
A second round election when no candidate gets a first-round majority “undoubtedly has its advantages,” Endara said, but then he pointed out that in countries that use this system the crooked deals inherent in presidential alliances under our current system are equalled or surpassed in the secret promises that get made between the first and second rounds of voting. The advantage to a second round, however, is that “Panama doesn’t want a bipartisan system, and the second round is one way to solve this.”
More than anything else, Endara argued, there needs to be transparency in government and a will to fight corruption. “The presidents have spent millions of dollars on secret funds, and that shouldn’t be,” he said. He called for a “fight without quarter, without rest,” on bribery and kickbacks. He said that he wouldn’t continue the privileges of the currently untouchable, and wouldn’t hesitate to “send them to jail” for corruption. “We need a good Attorney General,” to do this, he said, eliciting cheers from the audience and suggestions that Miguel Antonio Bernal, who was there, would be a good person for the job.
The discussion returned from time to time to the political parties and their manuevers. At the moment any appointed public official who supports Endara will promptly be fired, and those bureaucrats whose relatives support him are similarly at risk. Mireya Moscoso has a death grip on the Arnulfista Party and Maco Rosas exercises similar power over MOLIRENA and says he’s committed to the alliance with the Mireyistas, but repeated polls suggest that the rank-and-file of both of those parties are with Endara.
“MOLIRENA has not been putting its best people forward as candidates,” Endara opined, adding that he hasn’t ruled out getting MOLIRENA’s support in the end “but this isn’t the moment.” He’s also hopeful that, in addition to the Solidaridad party that nominated him, certain Liberal factions will jump on his bandwagon.
Endara says he likes one bit of legislation that came from a Liberal Nacional deputy, the law that promotes the teaching of English throughout the educational system. “Definitely, English is the international language today. People who want to be in international business must learn English. In another century it was French, but now it’s English.”
In Panama’s indigenous comarcas --- where there are many swing voters --- there are frequent demands for more schoolteachers who speak the local indigenous tongues. To Endara, however, the teaching of indigenous languages in the schools is maybe an “interesting idea” but one that’s “not important for economic activity.”
Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
Endara at Excedra Books
Misguided way to punish a hated monopoly
