Rosas family rule over public education winding down

The way that Mireya Moscoso organized her administration, different political parties received different fiefdoms and the individuals in charge were then free to turn their ministries into family businesses. One of the political parties in the Mireyista alliance, MOLIRENA, itself became a business subsidiary of the Rosas family, and its most important political patronage plum became the Education Minister, which was put in charge of Doris Rosas de Mata.

More than a dozen Rosases got administrative posts, and MOLIRENA’s dues-paying membership ballooned as teachers signed up in order to be eligible for decent school assignments. But on May 2, poll returns suggest that nearly every teacher who paid their dues to the Rosas family party voted against MOLIRENA.

Doris Rosas de Mata has returned the compliment. Some 1,500 public school teachers have not been paid for more than three months. Supplies have run in out, and vital maintenance has been left undone, at schools across Panama. There have been repeated purges of school administrators and non-teaching staff for disloyalty to the Rosas clan.

And now the country has had enough.

In its rawest form, discontent has been expressed in violent street protests that have degenerated into common assaults, robberies and vandalism touched off when the Artes y Oficios vocational school found itself without materials for the shop classes. At the public school system’s elite Instituto Nacional, the rocks and tear gas flew over an administrative purge. There were other street-blocking protests by students at high schools in Colon and the Interior.

And then, on June 16, more than half a million public school students missed a day of class because their teachers took the day off for a protest march to the presidential palace. The nation’s often feuding teacher unions presented a united front, and were joined in their march by groups of students and parents, to deliver an ultimatum threatening an indefinite school strike if the back wages aren’t paid up in full by June 30.

The different participating organizations had their own separate demands, ranging from opposition to any free trade agreement with the United States that touches the issue of education to specific repairs to specific schools.

The main grievance was so flagrant that even usually stridently anti-labor voices in the media and business circles supported the teachers’ demand for unpaid wages. Administrative Prosecutor Alma Montenegro de Fletcher chimed in with an opinion that the ministry’s failure to pay wages amounts to a human rights violation.

Rosas de Mata blamed the problem on general economic conditions --- after a campaign in which the Mireyistas told an incredulous nation that we were in good economic times --- and told the protesters that the back wages will be paid in mid-July. Thus be prepared for several days of protests and street blockages starting on July 30.

Meanwhile over at the nation’s public educational television channel, Canal Once, director Ariel Rosas is trying to explain just how it is that the Spanish company Elecnor, SA was paid some $22 million to develop a network to make the channel’s signal available nationwide, the Rosas family representative signed off on the work, and yet the channel is unavailable outside of the metro Panama-Colon area and Chiriqui. It seems that much of the equipment never worked, and that several of the people who were needed to run it --- apparently those insufficiently enthusiastic for the Rosas family political subsidiary --- were fired.

In a June 16 opinion column in La Prensa, the minister told part of her side of the story. No explanation about what happened at Canal Once. No apology for the MOLIRENA shakedown of the teaching profession. No justification for putting all those relatives on the payroll. No explanation of how hundreds of teachers haven’t been paid for months. No, Doris Rosas de Mata just confined herself to the matter of crumbling, and in some cases totally unusable, school buildings.

“The job wasn’t finished because we haven’t had five years,” she said after four years and nine months on the job. “With some exceptions, we found all the high schools in a state of advanced deterioration,” she wrote. “Nevertheless, we’ve made an unprecedented repair effort.”

With that latter statement, the protesters will surely agree --- and insist that the Moscoso administration precedent never be repeated.

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The Rosas era winds down with much shouting and finger-pointing

The Rosas era winds down with much
shouting and finger-pointing