Bernal, Wolves and wolf hunters

Occasionally it is borne in mind that “constitutional law is the law of the state, when the state is the law.” This leads many to forget the importance --- for the citizens --- of having the constitutional mechanisms that permit them to eliminate the caprices of those who govern, as well as the privileged situation of the privileged.

What this means is that, as citizens, we are obliged to rationalize the exercise of political power, to seek and implant equality before the law. Thus, today’s democracy demands not only voting but participation, to expand our function as citizens to every plane, to contribute to the development of the intellectual revolution through which today’s world is living, and to be able to do so, to have a society with a creative, understanding and inclusive human intelligence.

However, mediocrity and opportunism, in addition to having risen to the top of the national scene, has taken it over to promote its “constitutional reforms.” The reforms --- and their promoters --- deceive with their illusions of power, with their crumbs of civic participation, with their false exits that seek to turn the ghost of autocratic power into the body of power. Whatever means to implant the government of the Government and impede “government of the people, by the people and for the people” is valid for them.

We see how our neo-reformist yuppies have risen to the top not only in their role as “fool hunters,” but have also learned ways to sharpen their fangs and turn themselves into accessories of the executioners of civic participation, relying, more than at any time in the last 35 years, upon the victim itself --- the citizenry --- to “constitutionally” give them the power to implement their infernal imagination. These modern Origens have decided to civically castrate themselves to prove “their faith” in (their) constitutional reform. In their dynamic, these Kafkaesque heroes, the neo-reformists, without intending it, have torn the mask off of power, also unintentionally reminding us of the teachings of Ferdinand La Salle in his work “What is a Constitution?,” that “constitutional problems are not primarily problems of law but of power.”

In the political and socio-economic context in which our society lives, when we refer to the subject of reforms, we start off from an axiomatic assumption: the Political Constitution of Panama is, more than just written, rigid. To reform it you must respect the processes and procedures, which impose the burden that the reformist process must be clothed in very precise guarantees, to which there is absolute compliance.

We citizens must be inflexible and doubly scrupulous about them complying with the basic precepts of a the rule of law. To not do this means that the supreme guardianship and the highest order that the constitution embodies as the fundamental law will disappear, which will make possible and legitimize violent action.

The compass of hope that has been given to the Panamanian people to turn from passive spectator into actor is inseparable from the action that’s up to them to carry out at the present moment, in which there is an attempt to impose --- by way of extraordinary sessions of the Legislative Assembly --- a “reform” to avoid changes that are urgent. The foolishness of some confirm to us that “democracy only belongs to those who understand it, not to those who have it.”

Aesop, the fabulist by antonomasia, tells us in “The Dogs Reconciled With the Wolves”:

“The wolves said to the dogs that cared for the flocks: ‘Why, as you look like us, don’t we come to an agreement like brothers? We don’t differ in anything but ideas. We live in freedom, you, subjugated and enslaved by men, suffering their blows, wearing the collars they put on you and guarding their flocks, and when your masters eat, they only throw you the bones. Believe in us, give us the flocks, and we’ll put them in common to satiate our selves.’ The dogs listened to this proposition and the wolves, getting into the stable, massacred the dogs first.”

The moral is applicable to many opportunist fools, puppets, hypocrites, predators and cynics of our time. But those who bear very much in mind that “there is no greater illegality than that which invests itself in the clothing of legality” must press ahead with more faith than ever, because just like the movies defeated old age and death, the constituent assembly will defeat mediocrity and opportunism. And then we will hunt the wolves!

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Bernal, Wolves and wolf hunters

opinion

“Of wolves and wolf hunters”