On the campaign trail

On the Sunday afternoon (August 3) in which these notes were compiled, motorcades, sound trucks or canvassing teams for five different PRD primary candidates made their way down Perejil’s Calle Primera, where The Panama News office is located. The working class neighborhood is a “must win” battleground in the event of a close election between Martín Torrijos and represented at City Hall by the PRD’s Ramón Ashby Chial, who’s seeking reelection. The most annoying pitch was from the deafening sound truck of rabiblanco legislative hopeful Richie Porras. (“This is my neighborhood! These are my people!” --- right.) The longest motorcade was for Ashby, but legislative candidate Maribel Coco also mobilized an impressive crowd, who waved coconuts and got some cheers from residents who looked on from their balconies. No incumbent legislators worked the neighborhood on this day, the last Sunday before PRD members go to the polls on August 10 to choose their candidates for representantes, mayors and legislators.

For nearly every PRD nomination, there is a huge mob seeking the job. Most of the candidates have no money and are more or less invisible. The party won’t even give reporters a list of who’s running. There’s no way that The Panama News is going to try to sort out the primary races for you.

A couple of the long-shot legislative primary campaigns, however, are worth mentioning.

With the Marc Harris scandal unfolding across the Americas, Harris’s lawyer Max Hidalgo is running for a PRD legislative nomination. His campaign signs are calling for “a new political class.” Hidalgo accompanied Peruvian bribe coordinator and torturemeister Vladimiro Montesinos on his flight from Panama to the underground. (Authorities finally caught up with Montesinos in Venezuela, and now he’s doing time with one of the guys he caught, Shining Path founder Abimael Guzman.) So what kind of a political class might Hidalgo have in mind?

When one hears the name Genaro López, one thinks of the militant leader of the SUNTRACS construction workers’ union, a guy who humbly says that “I try to be a good communist,” dislikes all the political parties on the ballot and denigrates electoral politics as a no-win game for working people. So what’s this about Genaro López running for the Legislative Assembly in the PRD primary? It’s not the labor leader, but his son. The younger López had his 15 seconds of fame a few years ago when the principal of the Instituto Nacional was in front of the TV cameras defending some new policies designed to throw the student radicals out of school and the union president’s son ran up and decked him with a roundhouse punch. Genaro junior got thrown out of the Instituto for that, despite his hunger strike. Now the young man, who says he hasn’t turned against his father’s political principles but seeks to apply them in a more pragmatic way, has thrown his hat into the electoral ring. Neither his father nor the various leftist groups are backing Genaro López hijo’s bid for office and it’s one of those pretty much invisible campaigns.

Should it come to pass that either Max Hidalgo or Genaro López make it onto the PRD ticket for next May’s general election, color that an upset.

Meanwhile, the four presidential candidates have all been nominated and even amidst the noise accompanying the PRD primary for lesser offices they have been out campaigning.

Martín Torrijos marked the anniversary of his the death of his father, General Omar Torrijos, in a 1981 plane crash, pointing out the growth of a middle class and gains for working Panamanians during his the general’s time in power. “Torrijos lives and is very strong in the hearts of the Panamanian people,” the PRD standard bearer said of his dad’s legacy. He characterized talk of human rights violations under his father’s government as mudslinging directed against himself.

Torrijos also criticized President Moscoso’s recent trip to Monaco (Mireya, who was shown in the dailies and on TV with Prince Rainier, said she was promoting Panamanian yucca exports!) as wasteful. In an appearance in Chiriqui he also faulted the current administration for allowing too the importation of too much rice and pork, to the detriment of Panamanian farmers.

Solidaridad nominee Guillermo Endara, meanwhile, said much the same in a swing through the central provinces. He promised that he would protect farmers against cheap imports and predicted that the rank-and-file Arnulfistas in this, the movement’s traditional stronghold, would side with him against President Moscoso’s chosen candidate on election day. Polls suggest that were the vote held now, that’s exactly what would happen.

In another campaign appearance Endara said that he left the Arnulfista Party because, even though he’s “an Arnulfista in his heart,” the party has gone bad and is now at the head of a “corrupt regime.”

Arnulfismo’s official nominee José Miguel Alemán, who’s running a distant third in the polls but moving up a bit, for his part said that if he’s elected president he’ll make education his top priority. Alemán said that the extension of English instruction to and Internet connections for all public schools will be his specific priorities, and promised that schools that have had their electricity or water services cut for unpaid bills would get reconnected. He also said that he’d beef up technical programs in the nation’s secondary schools.

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On the campaign trail

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On the campaign trail