opinion

We can look next door at the experience of our Costa Rican neighbors, or the other way at the Colombians, to see what can happen when there’s an alternating cycle in which every election sees the incumbents thrown out.

In Costa Rica from its 1948 revolution until the most recent presidential election, the National Liberation Movement founded by Pepe Figueres would win one election, get tossed out of power by the dominant opposition faction in the next election, and then take the presidency back at the following opportunity. This past time it was National Liberation’s “turn” again, but largely because of that party’s degeneration into a corrupt hereditary caste there was a split, which let the Social Christians break the cycle and win the presidency for consecutive terms. But meanwhile, we see our neighbors with two ex-presidents in jail, largely the result of the “it’s OUR turn to steal” logic to which Tico politics had sunk.

Across our other border in Colombia, from the late 40s until the late 50s their incessant civil war became far more vicious than usual because, in addition to the ordinary problems with regional warlords and rebel factions, the mainstream Liberals and Conservatives went for each others’ throats and killed at least 200,000 of one another. But then they struck a deal, wherein they would stop the massacre and for a generation the Liberals and Conservatives would alternate in the presidency. This may have been all well and good for the moment when the bargain was struck, but over time the rigged bipartisan cycle allowed centrifugal forces to gather strength, with criminal organizations and guerrilla bands taking advantage of Bogota’s complacency to carve out huge chunks of the nation’s territory and economy for themselves. Now it seems that a renegade Liberal, Álvaro Uribe, has definitively shattered the old alternation and is very popular in his own way, but anybody who believes that he is close to winning Colombia’s civil conflict or solving his country’s main problems has been deceived.

When alternation in power is a foregone conclusion, politicians don’t have to offer anything, and much less do anything of consequence. Usually all they have to do is be born into the right dynasty, ascend the rungs of the right career ladder, accumulate the right IOUs along the way and await their turn.

The cycle is even more corrosive for parties than for individuals. It usually turns candidate selections into searches for the right surnames rather than the right mix of talents. Because it generally means that the works of one administration will be abandoned or actively destroyed by its successor, it makes long term plans and thus political programs increasingly irrelevant. It reduces political life to a series of photo opportunities and catchy slogans that really don’t mean anything.

Since the US invasion that ended “the revolutionary process,” a controversial part of Panamanian history with its own accomplishments and horror stories, we have been trapped in our own alternating cycle, which perhaps might be better described as a downward spiral. Better yet we might look at it as a rigged roulette wheel run by mobsters, who work the hidden remote control on alternating shifts.

One-third of Panamanians always vote for the PRD, not so much because they love the party that Omar Torrijos founded, but because they despise Arnulfista racism and self-serving rabiblanco Liberalism to the extent that they align themselves with the party founded by the man who sidelined these tendencies for a generation. Almost as many Panamanians always vote against the PRD, either due to snobbery akin to that of a high school in crowd or because they despise the legacy of the dictatorship and its abuses. There are enough people stuck to neither of these poles so that after five years of abuse by a government elected for essentially negative reasons, they can be counted upon to tip the balance the other way.

After he lost his 1998 re-election referendum, Toro seemed to be as petulant, selfish and unconcerned with this country, its people and its institutions as any president could ever be. Then we got Mireya, whose far more destructive actions, based on the calculus of alternation to the extent that she thought anything at all about the consequences of what she did, brought Panama to the brink of ruin. She made many Panamanians nostalgic for Toro, and many of those who couldn’t stomach that option long for the days of the failed Endara administration.

Meanwhile we have a young generation trained or in training to serve as cogs in the mechanisms of this cycle, whose most creative minds have been browbeaten and excluded, whose most capable organizers have been pressed into obsolete molds to serve as functionaries in bureaucracies that have no appreciation of their abilities. Should anybody be surprised that in such a situation talents that could lift our nation from the morass are instead dedicated to petty personal aggrandizement, which finds its maximum expressions in crime and corruption?

This cycle is harming the nation and needs to be disrupted.

As necessary part of the disruption, Mireyismo needs to be smashed into a billion smithereens, far beyond repair.

The junior partners, the sneering punks of the Rosas family, are at this moment purging MOLIRENA so that they’ll be there on the gravy train when the anti-PRD forces get their turn. But they need to be sent to prisons where gravy is not served, and stripped of their rights to run for or hold office in the next elections, for the crime wave that they sent crashing across the public education system and the other fiefdoms that Mireya doled out to them.

At the same time the Mireyistas are clinging to power within the Arnulfista Party. This is only one good reason why the ex-president herself, several of her fancy relatives and a bunch of her cronies also need to be sent away to do hard time and banished from public life for at least a generation. Even more than as a means to pry their greedy fingers from the levers that might return them to office, the Moscoso gang needs to be punished to show the nation --- particularly younger citizens --- that the old unwritten rules no longer apply.

Opportunists with short term perspectives --- except for the really stupid ones --- are fleeing the ranks of Arnulfismo and MOLIRENA if they haven’t already done so because there are no benefits to derive from these associations. But there are honest people who for reasons of tradition or ideology still embrace Arnulfista cultural nationalism or MOLIRENA business-oriented conservatism. Remove the criminal element and these moribund parties might undergo a renovation, as profound as the one that the PRD underwent after Noriega’s removal or even deeper yet.

So what’s to keep a coalition led by a Mireya-free but otherwise unchanged Arnulfista Party from coming back in five years’ time to keep the destructive cycle spinning?

Various possibilities exist.

Reformers might change more than just the face of the Arnulfista leadership.

The recently deposed ruling parties could be displaced and consigned to irrelevance by Guillermo Endara’s Vanguadia Moral, or by a left that uses its collective brain for a change and poses an electoral alternative, or by some leader who grabs ahold of the public’s imagination. Of course, any one of these potential new alternatives could win power and then play the same old games.

Whether or not they choose to take advantage of it, I think that the best chance to break the cycle is in the hands of Martín Torrijos and his allies.

Looking at the early performance of the PRD-Partido Popular legislative caucus, I don’t perceive much will to change things. I’d love to be proven wrong about this.

The proofs would register as deeds rather than words and accumulate over time. If, toward the end of five years, the next PRD standard bearer could come before the nation and credibly argue that Martín did a good job, his programs should be continued, his few errors should be corrected and some new initiatives should be undertaken, then it could be the Torrijistas who replace the crooked little roulette game that our politics have become with a more meaningful democracy.

In order to rise to such a task, however, the PRD would have to break some bad habits that in part stem from the assumption that the cycle through which we have been living will continue forever.



Also in this section:
Jackson, Panama loses at roulette
Bernal, Panama's moral and institutional crisis
Gutman, Political demagoguery in religious garb
Espinosa G., Chávez and Uribe
Weisbrot, The overvalued US dollar
ICFTU, Problems loom as textile agreement expires
González M., Caribbean regional tourism strategy
PANUPS, An unethical experiment on children
Ovetz, Longlining and shark finning
Leis, Panama's national security threats

Back to top