Come the revolution...

Actually, these young men are practicing for November’s patriotic parades, but as you read these words people are in fact being called into the streets in large numbers for a bit of class warfare.

The Panamanian labor movement is on the move, and working men and women are being urged to join in a nationwide general strike set to begin on September 23. On the 18th at least 100,000 people marched in the rain to Plaza Cinco de Mayo to demand the restoration of Dr. Juan Jované as Social Security director and to oppose any and all moves to raid the fund for an election year spending spree or to privatize the system’s services. A couple of days earlier, Paitilla residents were unable to leave their neighborhood as construction workers and police did battle with stones and tear gas near both entrances to the area. The nation’s teachers and many Social Security employees are already out on strike and almost all of organized labor (with the notable exception of the Panama Canal workers’ unions) is backing the general strike.

And what’s a working class uprising without the student militants? If you are planning to drive through Panama City in the coming days, you may want to plan your route so that it doesn’t pass by the University of Panama or the Instituto Nacional. But even those usual precautions may not keep you from being delayed. The other day on the bus to the Interior I caught the tail end of a street blockade by high school kids in Chame, of all places.

The unifying national issue is Social Security, but students and educators have a backlog of grievances of their own. President Moscoso has divided the Panamanian government among a handful families into fiefdoms to be exploited. Education is the Rosas family’s turf. The Rosases dominate MOLIRENA, the little party with the fighting cock as its symbol, and Doris Rosas de Mata is the much-hated Education Minister. Jesús “Maco” Rosas is a probable vice-presidential running mate on the doomed ticket headed by Mireyista anointee José Miguel Alemán. But ask the striking teachers or student radicals and they’ll deny that chicken is on the menu. To them, the Rosases are a species of swine. After four years of university budget cuts, political patronage and nepotism in public school hiring and promotions, water and electricity cutoffs at schoolhouses, the degradation of public television into a fourth-rate propaganda outlet and Philip Morris being allowed into the schools to tell kids that smoking’s a grown-up thing to do, only a handful of sycophants are willing to listen to anything that Doris Rosas de Mata has to say.

The Social Security crisis dominates the TV news here --- and you can tell which side the broadcasters take --- but there are many other important things happening in the country and the region.

It’s our centennial year as a republic and that’s attracting a record number of tourists. A season-long CBS television show shot in Panama has just taken to the air in the United States and that has already brought the first wave of Survivor tourists to our shores. The Carnival Legend is about to set sail from New York to Panama, with many Big Apple residents who trace roots through Panama aboard. Although the Moscoso administration likes to pretend that black tourists don’t exist, another wave of visitors, most of them of African descent and many of them from New York, will be in Portobelo for the October 21 Festival of the Black Christ. But of course, the really big tourist influx will be in November. Tourism is the brightest part of the Panamanian economy, so it’s fitting that Panama’s American Chamber of Commerce would hold a tourism forum, which I attended.

The big international story, with tremendous implications for all of Latin America even though the Panamanian government has had next to nothing to say about it, is the deadlock at the World Trade Organization’s Cancun ministerial summit. Led by Brazil, China, India and South Africa, the developing world has stood up to the United States and the European Union and the sort of “globalization” that has been imposed up to this point. The Free Trade Area of the Americas talks are a separate process. However, in light of Cancun, a resurgent Panamanian labor movement and our national farmers’ organizations’ refusal to even talk with Mireya’s agriculture minister, the possibility of a free trade deal with the United States passing with little or no opposition on this end has pretty much evaporated.

In this issue’s Opinion section the Secretary-General of Association of Caribbean States, Professor Norman Girvan, gives a West Indian perspective on what happened at Cancun. In the Business section I report on an Uruguayan observer’s presentation on the summit at Excedra Books. Our Spanish-language news section reports GOP US Senator Grassley’s reaction to Cancun, while among the Spanish opinions we feature Mexican guerrilla leader Subcomandante Marcos’s message to the summit’s anti-capitalist protesters. My own Opinion column is about free trade negotiating principles.

Brazil is emerging as the leader of a Latin American collective bargaining bloc, while Cuban-Americans have long since emerged as the leading force in US relations with Latin America. Thus it is fitting that in this issue the lead Spanish opinion column is an unflattering look at Brazil’s president Lula da Silva by former Cuban political prisoner and US diplomat Armando Valladares, and in our English opinion section the American scholar and activist Saul Landau takes an unflattering look at one of the Cuban-Americans who’s currently awaiting trial here on bomb conspiracy charges.

These are “interesting times” for this country, but there’s no need to get all Confucian about it. Despite the social conflict, you can safely visit Panama and you won’t be stranded here against your will. (On the other hand, not wanting to leave is the risk that every visitor to this isthmus runs.) In my working class neighborhood I have seen several foreign tourists, including some Americans, engulfed by crowds of protesters. A number of the marchers gave their cordial greetings to the visitors and tried to explain what their movement is all about. Nobody was unfriendly, let alone threatening.

Panamanians are rightfully concerned about a number of important issues at the moment, but in the world scheme of things we are very tolerant. Do you doubt what I have to say? Read this issue and think about what Americans would do if the government in Washington acted the way that the Panamanian government does. Then come visit Panama and notice the difference.

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Calling the troops into formation?