Last year’s Independence Day and Flag Day parades were huge, with tens of thousands of people of Panamanian heritage who live abroad returning to join the centennial festivities. Even a kleptocratic regime with a government and justice minister who assaulted Panama City’s mayor and tried to stop the Rubén Blades concert couldn’t spoil the party.
This year, we got back to “normal.” As in large crowds even without the mass influx of visitors. As in most people thinking positively about Panama. As in none of the former regime’s edicts about the marching bands’ colors or hemlines, and none of their bizarre prohibitions of baton tosses or pirouettes. It was a good time.
The day before our festivities began, the United States went to the polls. The American people made their choice, which is not the choice I would have made, but there you have it for the next four years.
Democracy has also been at work elsewhere in the Americas. In Venezuela supporters of President Hugo Chávez stomped all over the opposition in local and provincial elections, while the party of Brazil’s President Lula da Silva lost ground in local voting. It seems that in the Nicaraguan local elections the leftist opposition Sandinista Front gained ground (results were coming in as this was written). The big shift, however, came in Uruguay, which moved way to the left in its national elections. That’s the general direction in which most of South America is going.
This hemisphere has many corrupted democracies, brutalized and intimidated democracies and unconsolidated democracies. In a few places in the Americas --- Cuba under Fidel Castro and Haiti under the US-appointed dictatorship, to name the most prominent examples --- there is no democracy. But in these places, too, change is in the wind. It took just a little fall for Castro to show his frailty and thus his government’s weakness. It took a big disaster to expose the clowns who have been installed in the Haitian government. In each case, the repercussions are likely to be felt well beyond the Greater Antilles.
All of this makes for some interesting times for international relations wonks. Panama and the United States just went through another round of free trade talks, which was indecisive, and meanwhile the Torrijos administration has been tightening up its relations with Latin American countries of both the left and right. Now whether this will make us everybody’s neutral friend or instead the target of everyone’s bitterness remains to be seen, but the Panamanian aim is for a free trade area of the Americas in which the arguments and agreements are hashed out in a headquarters located in Panama.
The perils and opportunities of a changing international situation are the subject of this issue’s editorial.
Three weeks ago passions were mounting about Martín Torrijos’s power play for control of the Supreme Court, and although his nominee was quickly approved and sworn in, the final decision in that case is not yet in. (My bet, as I have said before, is that whether or not César Pereira Burgos gets to remain on the high court after his 75th birthday, by this time next year the 5-4 majority of Mireya Moscoso appointees will be history.)
Most of the passionate rhetoric about Torrijos attempting a coup d’etat has cooled down. A couple of tiny parts of it are that the Inter-American Human Rights Commission denied Pereira Burgos’s motion for an injunction that would have restored him to his position on the bench, and that one of the staunchest critics of the move, former President Guillermo Endara, is recuperating from triple bypass heart surgery.
More than anything else, however, the growing scandals surrounding the former government have distracted attention away from the arcane legal issues surrounding the composition of the Supreme Court.
For lawyers, the argument about whether a law that was held inapplicable to the magistrate for whom it was named can now be applied to a judge who was appointed after the law was enacted may be exciting. But all this pales in comparison to the revelation that Mireya Moscoso spent more than $1000 per day on clothing, all paid for with public funds. And that’s not to mention the jewelry and the cosmetic surgery.
Add to that the criminal complaint against the former Minister of Economy and Finance, who didn’t bother to hide his huge unexplained accumulation of wealth while holding public office. Add to that the former head of the Canal Once public TV station fleeing to Costa Rica and asking for political asylum, because auditors want to know what happened to all the money and the equipment that the Japanese donated.
So corruption is the issue of the moment down here. In our opinion section Martín Torrijos says some of what he’s doing about it, Raúl Leis puts the issue in its proper social framework, Miguel Antonio Bernal looks at its structure and I ponder it in werewolf mode.
This is also a time of changes in our cultural scene, some of them welcome, some of them not. We have lost the Café de Asís but are about to gain a children’s theater. The Theatre Guild of Ancon pulled off its most successful event in awhile. The Panama News smashed its readership records.
This is also a time of impressive migrations. Members of many of the Americas’ first nations came from as far away as Alaska and Tierra del Fuego to meet at the Bridge of the Americas and conduct a spiritual healing ceremony. That was a special event, but even as the nations gathered around the fire, everybody could look up and see a more regular and far more ancient migration, of hawks circling on thermals, soaring southward from North America.
It adds up to a lot going on as we move into the height of rainy season. And three weeks of it to cover, since October had five Fridays.
As always, it’s a fair amount of work and a lot of fun. I hope that you find it useful and entertaining.
Enjoy.
