Bernal, Panama's moral and institutional crisis

To identify the hallmarks of a crisis of values in Panama, with a view towards specifying the great challenges that must be addressed in the process of restoring civic ethics, is an urgent task.

The present Panamanian society is undergoing --- without a doubt --- a grievous structural crisis. The multiple and complex social realities, Alfredo Castillero Calvo observes, "is hidden from us above all because we don't know how to recognize the obvious, to identify that which many times jumps into view and as it is too close to the eyes we can't see. These are the things that because we are too wise we ignore and that because we ignore we end up forgetting."

In effect, we live a worrisome contradiction that leads us to permanent and growing insecurity, as spectators of a past that's not ours, of a present that we escape and a future that we believe is lost. The fears, the hopes and the dreams produce a strange mix: we don't know who we have been, we don't want to know who we are, we can't decide what we will be. Perhaps our principal crisis of values stems from the fact that when it comes to the frame of reference for our society we are ever less certain that we know the real and effective meaning of the concepts of freedom, politics and democracy, even when they define our mental horizon.

Values play a fundamental role, not only in changes and definition of identity. They also play a decisive role in the particularities of a moral and institutional crisis in any society. Historically in our Panama, the real agents of power, through and from the leaderships of the political parties, have in one way or another usurped the interests and aspirations of the Panamanian people. Thus our moral and institutional crisis, which is also an identity crisis, is intimately united with our political order and our governmental system. It's a system characterized by a lack of desire to base itself on a sense of what must be, of responsibility, of principles, of values that guide the authorities and the citizens. And it was demonstrated in a most emphatic manner from the time the dictatorship began in 1968, when the rulers initiated the practice of not giving reasons for their actions and couldn't show why those actions were desirable.

Panamanian society suddenly witnessed a disastrous spectacle in which all the values of its emergent institutional development --- which would have permitted us to live together as a society, not just in any haphazard fashion, not by substituting the general's will for the general will, but on the bases of equity, freedom, solidarity, justice and the dignity of labor --- were kidnapped. They stripped us of these, in a whirlpool of deinstitutionalization from which we have still never recovered. Proof of this is the fact that the concept of citizenship, just like institutionality, continues to be the object of the most extreme manipulations and worst abuses among us. Citizenship is not seen as a method by which individuals belong to a political community, while that which is institutional is ever more absent along our path as a society.

It's enough to cite, as an immediate example of the foregoing, the recent event in which the legislative chamber was converted into a platform for local fundamentalism, in an open abuse of and profound disrespect for republican institutions.

The moral and institutional crisis in Panamanian society is, above all, a true crisis of citizenship, a crisis of politics and of the politician, which shows us how much we have forgotten to educate --- to educate about ethics and to educate about politics, ethics to achieve better people and politics to achieve better institutions.

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Bernal, Panama's moral and institutional crisis
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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

opinion

Panama's moral and institutional crisis