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Notes on a not-too-general
strike
article and photos by Eric
Jackson
October 30,
6 a.m. --- I wake up at the usual time, to the muffled roar
of traffic on Avenida Nacional, which runs about a block behind
The Panama News office. Is it the usual noise, or less? If
it’s less, it doesn’t seem like a lot less.
6:15 a.m. ---
Having washed up and brushed my teeth, thrown on some
clean clothes and put a mug full of water and tea bags into the
microwave to brew, I head over to Via España to pick up
this morning’s newspapers.
It’s still
early to tell, but traffic on this main artery is less than
usual, and buses that are usually standing room only at this
hour are less than one-quarter full. I see a couple of
schoolgirls in private school uniforms, but there are no public
school uniforms to be seen on the streets.
La Prensa,
whose publisher is one of the principals of ProFuturo, one of
the two private insurance groups seeking to manage the Seguro
Social pension fund, has a lead headline that declares
“Support for the strike decreases.” El Panama
America, whose editorial policy is reliably anti-union but not
so brazenly slanted as those of the commercial television
networks and La Prensa, leads with “Divided workers call a
strike.” Why am I not surprised?
I get back to
the office and turn on the idiot box, there to see RPC-TV
replaying yesterday’s anti-strike diatribe by the labor
minister. This time a union leader gets a couple of seconds on
the air, but nothing close to equal time and nothing about the
issues that the minister raised.
7:15 a.m. ---
Some of the neighbors, dressed in work clothes, are headed
out toward their jobs. Not as many as usual. Some cars are
going down the street in the direction of downtown. Not as many
as usual. I stroll down to Via España, where traffic is
also light for a work day, and the buses are mostly empty.
7:30 a.m. ---
I turn on RPC-TV’s “Debate Abierto,” which
features six anti-union talking heads. Actually, this morning
they were sneering heads. But then of course the principal
owner of MEDCOM, which owns the RPC and Telemetro networks, is
also one of the principals of ProFuturo. Of even more
significance, “Debate Abierto” is a round table of
the Panamanian political class, today ably represented, for
example, by Renato Pereira (PRD, a former government minister
and lawyer whose role in the Noriega regime was to put a
“legal” face on its repressive measures), Milton
Henríquez (PP, a former Christian Democrat legislator
and member of the Partido Popular’s national leadership)
and Gloria Young (Arnulfista legislator, whose family is
related by marriage to President Moscoso). It’s not just
the Mireyistas who support the use of a large part of
Seguro’s cash reserves for an election-year government
spending binge, the management of Seguro’s pension fund by
private insurance groups, the sale of Seguro assets by the
Ministry of Economy and Finance to politically connected
individuals and the firing of Dr. Juan Jované, who
objected to all of this. It’s the entire political class
that favors the continued use of Seguro Social as a petty cash
box for themselves and their financial backers. Need you know
anything more about the context for this program’s
discussions of the other great issue before the nation, wherein
Pereira and Henríquez continually rail about the
“danger” that a new constitution would pose to the
nation?
7:50 a.m. ---
Traffic through the neighborhood is still pretty light for
this hour of a working day as I set off toward Seguro’s
Arnulfo Arias Madrid Hospital Complex and the University of
Panama.
The buses at
the stops in front of the hospital and the university are
mostly empty. There are traffic cops hanging around to direct
traffic in case of disturbances but no pickets or protesters to
be seen. The parking lots at the hospital and the university
are mostly empty. I hop onto a Transistmica bus.
8:30 a.m. ---
It’s the start of a work day at the Edificio Bolivar,
which is Seguro’s administrative headquarters. A stage has
been set up in front of the building, musicians are tuning
their instruments, dancers are there in their polleras and
montunos and the place is crawling with cops and security
guards. Several dozen supervisors stand around in their power
clothes. Rows of chairs set up for the employees --- who
aren’t there --- go mostly occupied by children who have
been imported to fill the spaces. But why are the kids
available for this use on a school day? Because their teachers
are on strike.
8:55 a.m. ---
After a ride on a mostly empty bus back to the university
area, there is still no sign of conflict, and there are only a
dozen or so cars in the huge parking lot in front of the school
of public administration. Three little boys from the slums
across from the university scan the horizon for signs of the
local spectator sport, a match between masked protesters and
riot police for control of the Transistmica, but none of the
players have yet taken the field.
9:05 a.m. ---
I catch a glimpse of red flags beside the hospital, and
follow their bearers. I find myself at a strike meeting of
about a couple dozen of the hospital complex’s orderlies.
Their steward notes the partial effectiveness of the strike,
acknowledges the vast strikebreaking resources at the
government’s disposal and passes on instructions for
picketing and marches and a rally to be held later in the day.
He advises the rank-and-file to be peaceful and not to block
the street. He gets an argument from some of the younger
workers, who want to match the SUNTRACS construction
union’s militant street tactics. The steward reminds the
workers that this is not a one-day struggle, that the strikers
must increase their strength, and therefore that it’s more
important for union members to go out and encourage more people
to walk off the job than to spend their time fighting with
police.
9:25 a.m. ---
Back at the office in Perejil, the Girl Scouts are at work
today. Actually, there’s not much to do and their phone
isn’t very busy, but it’s the 30th of the month,
which means payday. There are paychecks to be distributed.
(Around The Panama News, it has been a long time since we have
received regular paychecks, but such as we paid ourselves, we
did so yesterday.)
I get time to
go through the papers in more detail, and look at some of my
notes from the previous days, and weigh how certain other
factors and events are having their impacts on today’s
strike.
First, the fact
that it’s payday has clearly reduced participation in the
strike this morning. The Education Ministry has threatened that
teachers who strike will lose their paycheck in their entirety,
that their pay for work already done won’t be forthcoming
at all if they don’t show up to work today to pick it up.
So how many working people have reported to work this morning,
and once they have received their paychecks will be skipping
work starting this afternoon or this afternoon so as to take an
even longer holiday weekend?
Second, a few
days ago Mireya and the business representatives on the Seguro
Social board of directors lost one of their main propaganda
pillars when the United Nations Development Program’s
Elizabeth Fong reversed her prior position and declared that
there is no basis for a reasonable dialogue about the Social
Security Fund. Fong’s call for further dialogue after
Jované’s firing was bitterly denounced by the labor
movement, and meanwhile the business proponents of the
“three pillars” pension system have sensed victory
and clung to their position. Thus Fong has concluded that there
won’t be any consensus about what to do with the social
security system.
(The
“pillars” are a division of Seguro Social pension
holders into three groups, high, low and middle income
pensioners. Those in the low wage brackets would have a
government-backed pension system that would quickly become
bankrupt and thus they would receive no pensions at all. Those
in middle wage brackets would be given the “choice”
between private plans and the soon-to-be-bankrupt lower income
plan. The high wage earners’ pensions would be in a
separate fund, nominally public but managed by private
insurance groups. The private management of these funds can be
readily predicted by the behavior of the two main insurance
groups’ principals in other businesses. They will use the
pension funds to invest in their own businesses and those of
their friends and relatives. The profits generated by the
investment of pension funds will be skimmed by various devices.
Just like those who dutifully paid into private business
insurance policies in the years before the 1989 invasion were
ruined when the insurance companies refused to pay for damages
suffered during the post-invasion looting, various loopholes
will be found to cheat people out of the fruits of a working
lifetime’s contributions to Seguro Social.)
Third, the PRD
is now officially boycotting the official centennial
celebrations and Mireya is crying foul. The official Centennial
Commission has not only by way of public announcement banned
Rubén Blades specifically because of his politics, but
then Mireya has aggravated that insult by insisting that it was
because Blades wouldn’t play for free, while she is paying
foreign musicians much more than Blades would have been paid.
Add to that complaints that in the official celebrations in
Chiriqui, musicians from that province have been excluded. Then
take into account one black veteran of the local jazz
scene’s complaint to me that jazz and black Panamanians
are also being systematically excluded from the official
stages. Increase the insults list by including mostly black
Colon’s specific exclusion from the official centennial
celebrations, by way of the elimination of the traditional
November 5 celebration of the surrender of that city’s
Colombian garrison from the list of recognized events. So the
Arnulfistas, who have their roots in the Accion Comunal
movement that used to go around in KKK robes in the 1920s, have
by political censorship of the arts and racism put their
neofascist cast on the centennial cultural celebrations and
Martín Torrijos is saying that his party won’t
partake.
This becomes
relevant to the strike movement because Mireya and her sister-
in-law Ivonne Young, whose last day as Minister of the
Presidency was yesterday, had been blasting the strike as an
attempt to sabotage the centennial celebrations. But the
Mireyistas have played their centennial cards and told the vast
majority of Panamanians that we don’t count in their party
plans, which makes all of the president’s whining about
labor sabotage way beside the point.
11:40 a.m. --
- I go back on the streets, bound for Parque Porras, where
strikers will gather for a noon march to Plaza Cinco de
Mayo.
First, a stop
at the Arrocha pharmacy to pick up another roll of film. The
place is open for business as usual, but it seems as if there
are slightly fewer customers than usual.
Around the
corner at the Pio Pio chicken place, and further down at the
bakery and lunch counter, there are hardly any customers.
Usually I’d have to wait in line at this time of a weekday
at either of these places, but it wouldn’t be the case
today.
SUNTRACS is
already in the street ready to march, but the mood is grim.
There are fewer than 1,000 people there. One of the protesters
takes me aside and whispers that the leadership screwed up by
calling a general strike on a payday. Another says that part of
organized labor’s leadership has sold out to Mireya. A
photojournalist colleague, Kathryn Cook from the AP, laments
that while there may be a “silent strike” that has
fewer people showing up for work than was the case in last
September’s strike, from a graphic point of view this
isn’t much of a story.
I mosey over to
Via España and catch a student contingent marching up
the street to join SUNTRACS. The University Popular Bloc (BPU)
is in front, Thought and Transformative Action (PAT) behind
them, and the relatively new Bolivarian Student Movement (MEBO)
holds up the rear. Where’s the Revolutionary Student Front
(FER-29)? In any case, it’s a pitifully small group of
some few dozen campus radicals. The BPU has a cool little
Andean guitar, pan pipes and bamboo flute band, however.
At the
appointed hour SUNTRACS and the students move out, heading
directly to Avenida Central without taking the usual long loop
down Avenida Peru and back up Via España. All the usual
slogans are bravely chanted, but the march has something of a
funereal air to it.
Small groups of
union members fall in along the route, a lady beats on a pot
from her balcony, and people along the parade route want to
read the literature that the union activists are handing
out.
The thing is,
there aren’t very many people along the parade route, at
least not compared to a usual weekday at this time. Avenida
Central is more or less dead.
No, most of the
working class isn’t marching with the red banners this
afternoon. Even the great majority of the SUNTRACS rank-and-
file has stayed away from the parade. But the construction
workers are not at building sites either. Genaro López
has convinced nearly all of his union’s members to go on
strike, but he has lost the competition for where they ought to
congregate. SUNTRACS is out in force at the bus terminal, where
the membership is heading toward the Interior for an extra-long
holiday weekend, rather than on Avenida Central.
By the time
that the marchers get to Plaza Cinco de Mayo the crowd is at
least triple what it was when it started, and then contingents
from Caritas, one of the teachers’ unions and FER-29 make
their belated appearances. It’s still a small and
relatively despondent crowd.
After a few
speeches, the BPU march off to block traffic. That they do,
where the overpass comes down behind the Legislative
Assembly’s Palacio Justo Arosemena, but a car trying to
get through before the street is closed hits BPU member Jorge
Castañeda, whereupon the militants start bashing on the
car with their flagpoles, which sends the driver fleeing toward
the police (who let him into the legislative palace grounds),
which leads to cops being chased by demonstrators. Then one of
the police officers draws his pistol and fires a shot. That
gets a lot of people running from the dissolving rally to the
scene of the confrontation. Meanwhile, the injured man is
bundled into a taxi, which is beaten upon by protesters
arriving on the scene who mistake it for the vehicle that hit
the protester, and this prompts a woman to grab a banner from
one of the men beating on the car and beat on that man about
his head and face with the pole.
It turns out
that the Kathryn Cook has had a harrowing first experience of
being shot at. The bullet that the cop fired has grazed her
leg, not breaking the skin but damaging the threads of her
pants and causing a painful welt.
Meanwhile, the
BPU’s street blockade is kind of ragged, kind of a joke.
Oops! They have just more or less demonstrated the proverbial
inability to organize their way out of a paper bag. (Hmmm ---
these kids carry banners with the images of Marx and Lenin, but
are generally not at the point in their undestanding of
politics and history to understand the differences between the
two communist icons. Karl Marx couldn’t organize his way
out of a paper bag either, but Lenin ran a much tighter
operation than the BPU is running this afternoon.)
A few members
of the crowd are in a manic rage, but the cops between the
street and the legislature talk them down and control a
situation that could get completely out of hand in an instant.
The lack of a recognized and unified protest leadership at the
scene gives the police an opportunity to work their way through
the chaos.
No doubt there
will be some well taken criticism of one officer’s
decision to fire a shot, but after that happened it would be
hard for anybody to deny that the police dealt with the
situation professionally.
1:50 p.m. ---
At the rally at Plaza Cinco de Mayo I asked Genaro
López if the strike would officially continue on Friday,
and he told me that this was in the process of being
decided.
When the BPU
ruckus began I went over to check it out, and by the time that
I wandered back toward Cinco de Mayo the meeting there had
concluded.
I took the bus
back to Perejil and asked two PAT militants if a decision had
been made. They said that for sure the stoppage would continue
the next day, but glumly complained about sellout labor leaders
undermining the struggle to save Seguro Social from
privatization.
6 p.m. ---
Watching RPC news, all the stuff about the strike being a
total failure is being aired as expected. Their coverage
concentrates on one of the Seguro Social unions that isn’t
backing the strike conflicting with another union that is, a
brief student blockage on the Transistmica late in the morning,
how classes were held at the Instituto Nacional and
drivers’ irritation with the SUNTRACS marchers. The
subject of how many people were not on the job today in Panama
City is not broached.
Meanwhile, the
rumor is out that Rubén Blades will be singing in Panama
over the holidays after all --- at a concert that will rival
the Mireyista event. If that’s the case, then today’s
strike was just the beginning of a big-time disruption of
President Moscoso’s expensive but blundering celebration
plans.
October 31,
6:35 a.m. --- I have overslept my usual waking time. I
don’t use an alarm, but when my internal clock
doesn’t go off as usual the roar of traffic on Avenida
Nacional works as an external stimulus. This morning, however,
it’s a low whoosh. There is no truck noise, and much less
car noise.
7:15 a.m. ---
I go out for papers. The traffic on Via España is
light, and the buses are mostly empty. There are many fewer
people on the streets than on a normal workday, and fewer than
yesterday. One notable exception to the trend is embodied in
the public school uniforms that I see. The teachers will be in
their classrooms today.
La
Prensa’s headline screams “Genaro López
recognizes: The Strike Failed.” Reading through the story,
I notice that López is neither quoted nor paraphrased as
saying any such thing.
El Panama
America leads with a tale of how Rubén Blades, with the
help of Panama City Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro, will set up a
separate stage down Avenida Balboa from the politically and
racially censored Mireyista celebrations and give a free
concert from 4 to 7 p.m. on November 3. The above-the-fold
story about yesterday’s labor strife is that the strike
has been lifted for this day.
Out on the
streets --- actually, in many cases on the beaches --- working
people are ignoring the daily newspapers’ declarations.
It’s another slow morning rush hour.
7:30 a.m. ---
On Debate Abierto they’re gloating over the
strike’s failure, proclaiming that just about everyone
went to work as normal.
Except that
Milton Henríquez is pointing out that SUNTRACS has money
in its treasury, and is urging businesses that were damaged by
work disruptions that he was just arguing never happened to sue
the union and clean out its coffers.
Working people
are not being asked what they think. On Debate Abierto, they
almost never are. On the MEDCOM and TVN news shows, they love
to shove microphones into the faces of working people at the
instant that great tragedies afflict their personal lives. This
morning they don’t want to hear about why so many people
didn’t go to work yesterday and are staying off the job
today.
9:30 a.m. ---
The Muchachas Guias for the most part aren’t working
today. I can’t say that they have heeded the left’s
call, but they are, in a way, also part of today’s
”silent strike.” These women have a better excuse
than most, because most of them will be working for at least
part of the holiday weekend, as they guide the Girl Scout
contingent through the streets during the patriotic parades.
9:45 a.m. ---
I set out to do some banking business, to cash a check at
the Banistmo on Via España and deposit some of the cash
at Mi Banco off of Avenida Central.
The
construction sites I pass are silent or nearly so. The labor
movement may not be officially on strike again today, but the
rank and file construction workers are taking a long
weekend.
At Banistmo
there is no guard at the door, like there has been every other
time that I have been there. Moreover, as people line up to
withdraw money for the holiday weekend, there aren’t very
many tellers and it appears that a supervisor is filling in at
one of the windows. It turns out that the signature on the
check I am to cash needs to be verified, and this takes about
half an hour. My conclusion? Banistmo is working short-handed
on this day, but it is working.
On my way to Mi
Banco, I drop in at Farmacia Arrocha to get some film. There
appears to be a full complement of workers, but many fewer
customers than on an ordinary Friday at mid-day. I get my film
without waiting in line.
I make my
deposit at Mi Banco. Like yesterday, business along Avenida
Central seems to be crawling at a snail’s pace.
4:00 p.m. ---
I’m at the bus terminal. The buses are running, of
course. The bus drivers own their rigs, the labor movement
protested against last year’s increase in Panama City bus
fares, and the drivers aren’t about to heed any strike
call by the unions.
The place is
crowded, but not as much as I had expected. Did a lot of people
planning long weekends at the beach leave yesterday? Are people
who usually take their holidays in the Interior staying in town
for the parades and concerts?
So what’s
the balance?
First,
Panamanians are alienated from virtually all institutions in
this society, and that includes a certain disconnection between
rank-and-file union members and the leaders of the labor
syndicates.
Second, working
people will take to the streets in great numbers over a
perceived immediate emergency, but not over what they see as an
ideological abstraction. If the insurance groups conclude that
the events reported herein show that the way is clear for them
to push through their “pillars” retirement pension
system without significant opposition, that would be a
miscalculation.
Third, if some
good cause gives Panamanian workers an opportunity to stretch
their weekends, they will generally take it. However, they
won’t spend their extra days of leisure marching on the
streets.
Fourth, there
are huge gaps between the political class and working people,
and between the mainstream media and most Panamanians, but
although these gaps leave spaces for new players, nobody has
yet taken advantage of the opportunities.
Finally, Panama
is safe from communist revolution at the moment, despite any
and all leftist claims to speak for “the people.”
That fact should not hide the reality that the country is
politically, socially and economically very unstable on this,
the centennial of its existence as an independent
republic.
Also in this section:
Business & Economy
Briefs
Holiday
business
Strike notes
Losing
ticket
Colombian tort claim in an
Alabama court
The Panama News online
readership continues to grow
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