It seems that a Venezuelan disease has spread to Panama --- bizarre political sensationalism in the corporate media.
On December 13 La Prensa ran two stories, based on one source and illustrated by a photo of a young supporter of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez taken in Cuba rather than Panama, which declared that “Chavista cells spread into Panama.” The stories quoted a man who said that there are several Bolivarian clubs in Panama, and jumped to the conclusions that Hugo Chávez, through the Venezuelan Embassy here, is organizing branches of the Venezuelan Bolivarian Clubs that exist in his country partly as grassroots Chavista political organizations and partly as paramilitaries to resist repeated attempts to overthrow the elected government.
Of course, there have been small Bolivarian societies and organizations in Panama for a long time, since well before the rise of Chávez and his Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. These groups draw their followings generally from the left, including the left wing of the PRD, and are united around the beliefs that Latin American countries should look to one another rather than to the United States for political and economic leadership, that the countries that were liberated by Simón Bolívar or were part of his Gran Colombia --- one of which is Panama --- have a special tie that should be maintained and strengthened, and that the squabbling Creole aristocracies of these countries have delivered mostly poverty and corruption when in political power.
And thus a tailor who maintains a shop down the street from The Panama News office displayed a bumper sticker that says “Chávez doesn’t go” just before and after the recall referendum that the Venezuelan president handily won this past August, along with his usual portraits of Che Guevara, Omar Torrijos and Victoriano Lorenzo. However, in Perejil there is no paramilitary, nor even a neighborhood political organization, that’s loyal to Hugo Chávez.
The Venezuelan Embassy in Panama City does occasionally sponsor or participate in events to promote the views of the government it represents --- as do the dozen or so active members of the Venezuelan opposition here. However, the embassy denies that it runs a political organization here, and notwithstanding a weird report in La Prensa, there is no evidence that it does.
(This past August Chávez defeated the recall effort by a wide margin, largely on the strength of solid support from his country’s poor and working class voters. However, in absentee voting in Panama, mostly by Venezuelans who work here in the banking or oil sectors or as diplomats, the opposition won by a lopsided margin.)
The report in La Prensa was followed up by a prolonged and unopposed three-man anti-Chávez diatribe on RPC-TV’s “Debate Abierto” talk show a few days later. In that episode, RPC’s Leo Alvarado, attorney and pundit Renato Pereira (PRD) and attorney and pundit Milton Henríquez (Partido Popular, and also an editor at El Panama America) compared Chávez to Fidel Castro and took him to task for a new Venezuelan broadcast media law.
That law bans the use of radio and television to incite rioting or attempts to violently overthrow the elected government, and limits certain adult-oriented broadcasting during daytime and early evening hours when children are likely to be watching television. The law does not strip such media barons as Gustavo Cisneros of their broadcast licenses for their open incitement of the April 2002 coup attempt and the December 2003 oil strike and business lockout that also aimed at overthrowing Chávez. None of that was mentioned in Alvarado’s, Pereira’s and Henríquez’s diatribe.
So why the one-sided blasts on RPC?
Look first to the money trail. RPC is part of MEDCOM, which in addition to RPC owns the Cable Onda cable system and the Telemetro broadcast network. Mostly as a buyer, but also as a seller, MEDCOM has a web of business relations with Cisneros and his Univision television network. (Cable Onda is also a competitor, as Cisneros is the biggest shareholder in the Latin American branch of DirecTV.)
Then understand that the PRD is the Panamanian affiliate of the Social Democratic International, while the junior partner in the Torrijos administration, the Partido Popular, is this country’s affiliate of the Christian Democratic International. The Venezuelan affiliate of the Social Democratic International, Accion Democratica, and the Venezuelan affiliate of the Christian Democratic International, COPEI, are formerly their country’s two major parties and currently at the center of the opposition that Chávez has repeatedly routed at the polls.
But wait a minute --- aren’t some of the Panamanians who consider themselves Bolivarians, like the tailor down the street, also PRD members?
That is the case, and try to square that with the management of La Prensa, which gained power in a 2001 shareholder revolt led by PRD and Christian Democrat (since renamed Partido Popular) supporters.
And square it with Martín Torrijos’s inaugural address pledge to improve strained relations with Venezuela, his ongoing talks with Chávez and Colombian President Álvaro Uribe for a natural gas pipeline from Venezuela through Colombia to Panama, and his shift in diplomatic priorities from Central America to the Andean region.
It’s easier to understand if one knows a bit about what Martín’s father did and tried to do. Omar Torrijos appealed to both labor and business to set aside their disputes in order to accomplish the national task of gaining sovereignty over the former Canal Zone. It worked until the 1977 Panama Canal Treaties were signed, but then the Torrijista coalition began to fray.
Still, the PRD has its left wing elements and its working class support as well as its more right wing elements and aristocratic backers. Some analysts abroad look at Martín Torrijos himself and take the fact that as a teenager he fought in Nicaragua alongside the Sandinistas to overthrow the Somoza family to bolster their belief that he’s a wild and crazy leftist. Others look to his alliance with the Partido Popular and his choice of Samuel Lewis Navarro --- one of Panama’s richest men --- as his running mate and conclude that Torrijos is just another corporate politician.
The reality is that Torrijos plays a delicate balancing act, with a coalition that could easily fall apart in acrimonious infighting.
Already within the PRD he defeated power plays by former President Ernesto Pérez Balladares, a character clearly of the party’s right wing, a conspicuous consumer who hailed Honduran maquiladoras as a model for the direction in which Panama’s economy ought to move. Then on December 12 when the Partido Popular’s national leadership met at the same time as the mayor’s Christmas parade, Torrijos skipped the usual presidential courtesy of attending the coalition partners’ meeting to go to the parade instead. (At that meeting the Partido Popular grumbled about not getting enough political patronage jobs.)
So look at the Chavista baiting in La Prensa and on RPC not as serious journalism, nor as sincere commentary, but as thinly veiled infighting within the Torrijos coalition. It’s the corporate wing bashing the left wing, and not surprisingly the cautious and well disciplined president has made no public comment about the supposed Venezuelan plot to subvert Panamanian sovereignty.
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