opinion

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Fisher, Coming full circle
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Jackson, Suppress the Mireyista thugs
Bernal, Post-election inventory

On May 2 more than three of every four Panamanian adults went to the polls, and of these nearly five of every six voted against Mireya Moscoso’s hand-picked lapdog. This lapdog would have earned a perfect grade at obedience school, but for one thing. Even José Miguel Alemán took notice of the tidal wave of public opinion and said that he supported a Boquete-Cerro Punta road not along the route that bisects the Volcan Baru National Park and serves properties owned by Mireya Moscoso and her relatives, but rather by way of the much more sensible and less destructive southern route outside the park.

The Panamanian people have decisively rejected Mireya Moscoso, the corruption that has prevailed on her watch and most especially her so-called “Ecological Road.” Were the road submitted to the voters in a public referendum she wouldn’t even get 10 percent of the vote.

But for the past year Mireya has been supported in her bid to destroy the park by a gang of vigilantes, who, often with the open support of the National Police, have repeatedly blocked anti-road protests. Now, despite ANAM’s rejection of the construction company’s environmental impact statement, essentially the same group of hoodlums has without any pretense of legality invaded the park and begun to cut trees for the road.

Let us understand the political roots of Arnulfismo to better understand the phenomenon with which we are now confronted.

The movement has its roots in the Accion Comunal of the 1920s, a group that went around in Ku Klux Klan robes and advocated the elimination all persons of Asian, black West Indian or Middle Eastern descent from Panamanian society. In 1931, Arnulfo Arias put a gun to the head of President Florencio Arosemena to stage Panama’s first coup d’etat. Later his brother appointed him ambassador to Mussolini’s Italy, where he became enamored of Il Duce and later Adolf Hitler. Elected president in 1940, Arnulfo Arias embarked on an ethnic cleansing campaign that was cut short by an October 1941 US-backed coup, which took place because Franklin D. Roosevelt was unwilling to tolerate an Axis sympathizer in control of Panama as the American entry into World War II loomed.

Let us also understand Mireya Moscoso’s record of fostering contemporary vigilante movements.

In the Darien, Colombia’s far-right AUC death squads repeatedly invaded Panama, committing robberies, arson, rapes, kidnapping and murders. The Moscoso administration issued no arrest warrants or diplomatic protests. When the AUC invaded the Panamanian villages of Paya and Pucuro and assassinated four local officials, Mireya jailed the man who ran from the former place to the latter to warn of the attack and thus prevented even worse bloodshed. Her government didn’t lower flags to half-staff for the slain sahilas or send a representative to the funerals. In Bocas del Toro, Mireya’s then provincial IPAT director and later the losing Mireyista candidate for mayor of Bocas, along with American real estate scamster Tom McMurrain, recruited a bunch of thugs called the Angel Patrol, who set themselves up as a vigilante group in that district. McMurrain’s lawyer pleads that the Angel Patrol isn’t there to protect the people of Bocas from crime, but rather to protect the foreigners that McMurrain, who does not sell to Panamanians, is trying to bring into the area.

There is a clear and unbroken historical context. The armed men who invaded the Volcan Baru National Park are a fascist goon squad, just like the KKK, Mussolini’s black shirts and Hitler’s brown shirts, all of whome inspired Mireya’s late husband. They have a lot in common with the AUC and Tom McMurrain’s neo-colonial vigilantes, whose activities President Moscoso has condoned.

Under Gonzalo Menendez's direction, ANAM is pressing charges against those of the park invaders who it can identify. As was the case with many honorable and patriotic Panamanians whom Manuel Antonio Noriega used, this is a sign that not everyone who worked for the disgraced outgoing administration need hang his or her head in shame. However, once the new administration takes office, the gangsters fostered by Mireya Moscoso’s government will still need to be confronted.

There is no room in a democratic Panama for private armies, partisan militias, vigilante groups, foreign paramilitaries or anything of the sort. Despite all that legitimately or not so legitimately divides us, we are one independent nation with one sovereign government.

Thus the current government’s de facto alliance with the Colombian death squads needs to end.

Thus Mr. McMurrain’s Angel Patrol needs to be disbanded and the foreigners behind it need to be expelled from the country.

And yes, there is an urgent need for talks between the government and the men who invaded the park.

Those talks should be in the form of police and prosecutorial interrogations, and should take place behind bars. The men who invaded the park, as well as the rich and powerful individuals who paid, organized and inspired them, belong in jail.

If the people who trashed Volcan Baru National Park are not sternly suppressed, that would be a clear sign that Ernesto Pérez Balladares’s “end to judicial terrorism” policy of impunity for the political class and those who do its dirty work continues and that Martín Torrijos’s “zero corruption” pledge is not to be taken too seriously. It would be an inauspicious start to the new government, a sign of weakness unjustified by the clear mandate that Torrijos won, a retreat from the national sovereignty that the president-elect’s late father championed.

What’s called for here is neither a reign of terror against the election’s losers nor any sort of broad-brushed smear campaign, but some semblance of the rule of the law after long years of lawlessness extending from the top of government down through all levels of Panamanian society.



Also in this section:
Rumsfeld, Iraq and the War on Terrorism
Lerner, Rumsfeld, sexual abuse and Iraq
Fisher, Coming full circle
Weisbrot, The economy and India's elections
Jackson, Suppress the Mireyista thugs
Bernal, Post-election inventory