Leis: Never an evil without its true cause

"An evil never exists without its true cause," said José Martí. Nobody denies that Panamanian society has been shaken by its citizens' insecurity. The combined effect of the daily acts of violence make it appear that human life and property are under attack by criminal practices, which affects the quality of Panamanian lives and in many cases has people living in fear and anquish. It is all too easy for the citizenry to become possessed by the culture of fear --- shown so well by Michael Moore in his exceptional film "Bowling for Columbine" --- and decide to arm ourselves to the teeth, to create not only life imprisonment but the death penalty, and deny ourselves an exit from this corner.

The problem also reveals the quality of the responses, given that "A state shown incapable of effectively responding to the true causes of the problem normally responds by prescribing a formula of penal repression. However, the fight against criminality has always meant an open door to transgressions against and non-recognition of the fundamental rights of the most economically deprived sectors, who customarily bear the brunt of this problem." (Roberto Cuellar)

The causes of insecurity are various, but among them you find poverty and inequality, moral rot, family disintegration, violent messages in the mass communications media, social exclusion, corruption with impunity, the deficient justice system and the situation in the jails as it was describe a century and a half ago by Justo Arosemena:

"The penal system is more to impoverish than to correct a delinquent. Our prisons are centers of physical and moral infection, schools of perversion in which a man, healthy when he enters, is corrupted and perfects his criminal skills, thus losing the last shred of his virtue."

The Citizens Audit of Criminal Justice in Panama, recently unveiled by the the Citizens' Alliance For Justice, confirms: In October of 2003 the prison population was 11,458 inmates, while the physical capacity of the prison system in this country was 7,348. Thus the number of detainees exceeds by some 40 percent the capacity of the jails. The consequence of this is marked overcrowding, a situation that's aggravated by shortages in budgets, trained personnel, and adequate infrastructures.

The execution of a penalty that deprives the condemned of liberty is done in penitentiary centers and in cells at police installations that don't meet the minimum conditions to allow respect for human rights and thus limit, in many cases, the development of wholesome rehabilitation programs. In general, the installations that house the prison population are not built taking into account the technical criteria for criminology and penology.

According to the penal system's information, as of September 12, 2003, 54 percent of the inmates, on the national level, were being held in preventive detention. The number of public defenders is not sufficient to attend to this population of scarce resources, who require free legal services under the constitution.

Tardily, less than two months before finishing its term, this administration announces a package of hard and repressive measures, bereft of preventive actions or proposals for resocialization and rehabilitation. Moreover the announced measures only address crime in the street without attacking high-level corruption and the white collar crime that have made impunity their bulwark.

It has used the citizens' reactions of fear and horror at their lack of safety to sell this punitive package that might gain the support of a lot of people but that won't mean a true solution. Citizens' insecurity is not a problem that's resolved only with harsh penalties, repression, arms, police and patrols. To see it this way is to have a limited vision, one that doesn't see a broader concept of security in which there are dignified living conditions for all. It means to neither locate nor examine the structural causes of violence, nor consider the lack of justice, nor see the public yearning and society's need to create a judicial power that's sufficiently involved to clear up the docket backlogs.

The wall, the gas chamber, the electric chair to end this insecurity? In the face of this insecurity, and of the administration's unilateral and non-sequitur responses, the country has to come up with a holistic vision of security for its inhabitants, which means that the problem must be faced in its entirety and by a broad alliance of forces.

For example, in the 1999 elections the candidates signed a Pact With the Youth which contained key elements of this holistic focus, but which weren't put into effect. Today they would criminalize poverty without offering proposals to improve the lot of those whose lives are many times truncated, those who are subject to exclusion.

Also in this section:
Leis, Never an evil without its cause
Singer, The EU, MERCOSUR and the FTAA
Bush, Progress in the War on Terror
Kerry, A new era of responsibility
Amnesty International, Contempt for human rights at Guantanamo
Grant, Trinidad's dirty little secret
Jackson, I don't want to hear it, George
Bernal, An appeal against the absurd

opinion

"An evil never exists without its true cause"