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The gang’s payrolls

La plantilla de la pandilla
by Miguel Antonio Bernal

While tens of thousands of Panamanians have as their only environment an increasing poverty and diminishing quality of life, while the population is confused and divided with deceptive and demagogic publicity, about the fiscal reforms, social security and the Panama Canal, the gang’s payrolls --- las plantillas de la pandilla --- is increasing with impunity.

The Royal Academy of the Spanish Language’s dictionary tells us that the “plantilla,” which is commonly called “planilla” in Panama, is “the ordered relation by categories of the dependencies and employees in an office, public or private services, etc., whose endowment is foreseen in economic budgets.” “Pandilla,” for its part, is the league or union “that some form to deceive others or to do damage.”

If more citizens and more civic organizations, if the associations, business and professional groups and the rest were more demanding of the communications media, we could analyze the government payrolls (executive, legislative, judicial, etc.) and thus know the countless irregularities that they have been producing, that they continue to produce... and continue to increase now with the arrival of the promoters of the “Patria Nueva” and their deceptive “zero corruption” formula.

The scant analysis that our media give to the ethical question, particularly in the case of the state, contributes enormously to what’s not known about the social-political-economic context in which elected officials and public servants operate, knowledge that’s needed to determine the conditions that --- ever more --- produce the ethical deviations and abuses of power, which permit these officials to use their authority and their powers for their own benefit.

If we review, for example, the information released by the National Assembly’s Payroll Department, we find that it has 762 permanent employees, 948 contractors, 84 temporary workers and 232 deputies and alternates, on a payroll that used to have 751 employees. It yields us a total of 2,777 employees just in the Assembly, who receive $2.5 million in salaries per month.

As most of these functionaries are employed as contractors, we face a grave distortion by which the National Assembly and its payroll is really political booty for the gangs. In effect, the professional services contracts have no relation to working for the legislature, thus the beneficiaries can work in other state institutions. Thus the gang begins to own the payroll.

On the National Assembly payroll it’s known that we find full-time university professors, ex-legislators, Social Security Fund employees, television commentators and trial lawyers. We find functionaries with salaries of $7,000 per month, aides to the deputies who get up to $3,000 per month and others who get only $25, all of which awakens many suspicions. The deputies have personnel paid by the permanent employees’ payroll, employees by contract and people hired by the deputies themselves, amounting to a great number of “aides” with salaries that range between $2,000 and $2,500 per month.

Both the deputies of the government and those of the opposition have personal nominees that according to my modest understanding are “botellas” or “garrafones” --- phantom employees or carboys --- although some arrive as “demijohns.” There is, for example, the notorious loan shark from a provincial capital who appears on a deputy’s payroll at $2,250 per month. This is what they call “zero corruption.”

It’s urgent for the new Comptroller General of the Republic to ask for a report on the 948 contract employees of the National Assembly. This, in order to know if they comply with the requisites established by law, and if they report about the work they do, and to whom. But --- and there’s always a but --- what’s very clear is that the gang’s payroll in the National Assembly is only a sample of those that exist in the other organs and dependencies of the government. To believe that the gang is going to allow people to know about all of the payrolls is to believe that Germans aren’t Germans and that the German’s don’t like beer, although they traffic in it.