Young voters sweep Torrijos to victory

A lot has happened since the last issue was published.

First and foremost, Panamanians went to the polls and handed the incumbents a series of humiliating defeats. The current administration is going out --- WAY out --- and most of the members of the current Legislative Assembly will have to start looking for new jobs.

Mireya Moscoso’s hand-picked presidential candidate, José Miguel Alemán, finished in a distant third place while the PRD’s Martín Torrijos broke through the party’s usual ceiling of about one-third of the electorate, taking just over 47 percent in a four-way race. Come September 1 the PRD will have an absolute majority in the legislature and control over most city halls.

Between now and then we may see some ugly displays from the defeated faction, but in the week after the election we saw the lack of a quorum rather than a Machiavellian frenzy over at the assembly. Maybe the assault on the public trust is in disarray while the in crowd waits for the Mireyista leaders to regain their senses. One party in the president’s coalition, the Partido Liberal Nacional, lost its ballot status and another, MOLIRENA, just barely held onto its legal existence. The Supreme Court has a politicized Mireyista majority that theoretically would hold through the next five years, but now the PRD will have the votes to pack the high court and thus override a series of decisions that block investigations and prosecutions of public corruption --- if that, indeed, is something that the Torrijistas care to do. Yet in the face of catastrophic defeat Mireya Moscoso and Maco Rosas pretend that nothing much happened, and act as if they are going to be leaders of the opposition come September 1 and back in power five years after that.

Also in this issue, we take a peek at a situation that has a lot of University of Panama law students shouting, review the labor movement at the Mayday parade and note the sentences handed down to several anti-Castro activists who apparently planned to kill Fidel Castro and a lot of other people during his 2000 appearance at the university.

We consider Central American youth gangs, US-Panamanian trade talks, this country’s Chinese community and William Boyd’s new book. We go out to fight night in Juan Diaz and Jueves de Algo at the Café de Asis.

This issue contains part three of “Anatomy of a scam,” and a lot of our Letters page is again taken up by this story.

Both the English and Spanish Opinion sections are larger than usual this time, with about half the articles about Panama and the rest looking at the world around us. In the Spanish section we have an interview with one of the Colombian FARC guerrillas’ top leaders, Raúl Reyes, wherein he defends his group’s kidnapping of Green presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and gives us a glimpse of where he sees our neighbors’ long-running civil war heading. On the English side Willy Gutman takes a look at the Latin American record of the Bush administration’s new man in Baghdad, Mark Weisbrot ponders the meaning of the recent torture scandals coming from Iraq and I comment on the viciousness of the US campaign.

I doubt that those revolting trophy photos of American torturers will be a passing matter. They are evidence of systematic corruption coming from the very top of the command structure --- those damning pictures exist because none of the people involved expected to face any negative consequences for what they were shown doing. Nobody expected to be called to account because George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld et al have explicitly thumbed their noses at the Geneva Conventions, for one example by sacking former US Army Chief of Staff General Tommy Franks because he insisted upon sending sufficient troops to carry out the invading army’s legal duty to suppress looting, and for another example the conditions imposed at the Guantanamo prison camp. And so what are the consequences of the Bush policy? Well, didn’t we see that in the charred corpses of American mercenaries hanging from an Iraqi bridge? That’s what happens when the laws of land warfare and the customary restraints are ignored --- what goes around comes around, and it’s getting taken out on American captives.

So what does an embarrassed White House do? It ratchets up the spurious attacks on John Kerry’s military record. It questions the patriotism of those who break the news blockade against reporting the true story in Iraq. It sends Colin Powell forth to complain that the US-sponsored Iraqi “resistance movement” against Saddam Hussein gave bad information on weapons of mass destruction. It asks for billions more in stop-gap military appropriations. It pleads without success for Spain, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Norway and the Netherlands to keep their troops in Iraq. It brings in one of Saddam’s old generals to try to restore order in Fallujah. It puts off any real consideration of Iraqi democracy or self-determination.

Could it be worse? Of course it could be worse --- Americans ought to be glad that they are stuck with George W. Bush rather than Mireya Moscoso as their chief executive.

The flip side of that is that Mireya’s performance was so amazingly bad that the great majority of Panamanian voters rejected her and her followers on May 2. In the United States, however, people seem to be about evenly divided in their opinions about Bush. Thus the anger that many Panamanians feel for the outgoing government found its decisive democratic outlet and this country is ready to move ahead into a different era, while the United States appears ever more polarized between angry and approximately equal-sized camps of Bush supporters and detractors.

The nastiness in the states is one of the factors --- not as important as the matter of economics, but still one of the driving forces --- that’s gradually increasing the size of Panama’s American community. But be advised --- not all gringos are welcome here. The lame duck Moscoso administration may not particularly care, but the English-speaking community here seems to be getting more particular about whom it tolerates in its midst. And the less attractive we become to the hustlers and thugs, the more attractive Panama will be to foreign investors and retirees.

So this is a time to be cautiously optimistic about Panama, deeply concerned about the United States and totally fascinated if your job is to report the news. I hope that some of this fascination comes through in this issue.

Enjoy.

front page

Martín Torrijos and his supporters
redraw Panama's political map

front page

Martín Torrijos and his supporters redraw Panama's political map

Martín Torrijos and his supporters
redraw Panama's political map