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opinionAlso in this section: "Yerros en la yerra constitucional" Mistakes in the constitution by Miguel Antonio Bernal Well in advance and by diverse means, many of us citizens who support a constituent assembly gave the alert --- in timely manner --- that the price we would pay as a society for the political and juridical implications of the mechanism imposed to reform the militarist constitution, the product of a reformist whim --- a judgment made without sufficient examination --- would not take long to manifest itself. Today, the new corruption scandals in the Supreme Court of Justice, the foundering of the court system and along with it the judicial security of the citizens, gives us the evidence and thus underlines the urgency of proceeding to restructure the state by way of convening a national constituent assembly. Let us recall that, thanks to their influence the reformists, with the Martín-Mireya Pact under their arm, transferred the competence to initiate reform to the recently elected president, who, in turn, looked for the capacity to carry it out in the outgoing executive. The whim took shape thanks to the determined role of the communications media and the open identification of its proprietors and managers with the aim of petrifying into the most absolute immobility the present fundamental charter. The absence of a reform procedure served, at every moment, as the decisive ally of the improvisation staged for the approval of the reforms which, more than anything, sought the strengthening of partisan power, authoritarianism and autocracy, completely turning its back on the need of a pluralist state to be allowed to create, guarantee and develop a basic agreement so that Panamanian society could establish the rule of law, a constitutional order in which participative democracy would not be a chimera. Moreover, it mattered little to them to introduce effective reforms of the courts, but they did dedicate themselves to multiplying the anti-democratic powers of the Electoral Tribunal. The concept of the constitution --- which I denounced at the time --- was subjected to a litany of procedural vices both in form and in substance, and to a long chain of adulterations of constitutional techniques and norms, and was approved and promulgated as the "Political Constitution of the Republic of Panama of 1972, reformed by the reforming acts fo 1978, by the Constitutional Act of 1983, by the legislative Acts 1 of 1993 and 2 of 1994 and by the Legislative Act 1 of 2004." But now it turns out, according to note AL-CGJYAC-102-04 circulated by the president of the National Assembly's Committee on Government, Justice and Constitutional Affairs, that "there have been detected" in the publication of the definitive text of the constitution published by the Gaceta Oficial "several articles which include words, phrases and punctuation marks different from those promulgates.... Moreover, inconsistencies in the usages of capital letters and the accentuation of words, for which we had believed we had taken the opportunity to unify these aspects and make them consistent with the rules of the Royal Spanish Academy, are observed." In other words, due to the anti-democratic attitude and the haste to promulgate a legal draft, now they don't know how to defend it. Those errors have given the nation a constitutional branding. Due to the way that the reforms were enacted, I said that: "never before in the history of Panamanian constitutional law have there been collected so many and such flagrant violations of all theoretical and practical constitutional references." Now, in the face of the litany of corrections, those responsible for them at the same time that they confess them try to cover them up. But as the adage goes, a party's confession relieves the opponent's burden of proof. Once again the "Bermuda Triangle" formed by the executive, legislative and judicial branches, attempts to drown the hopes and demands for true change and a updated constitutional update that expresses a social contract among all Panamanians, yearnings that are found in the aspirations of the sectors that form the majority in this country. Once more the rhetoric turns its back on equity, freedom, solidarity, justice and the dignity of labor, becaue they don't want to put into circulation the necessary political will to democratically convene a national constituent assembly. Will we permit more errors, or will we dare to reject another branding? Also in this section: News | Business | Editorial | Opinion | Letters | Arts | Review | Community | Fun | Travel
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