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opinion

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Don Justo Arosemena knew to warn us that "if there's something that could justify insurrection in a constituted and free country, it would be precisely the caprice of the legislators to not make the necessary reforms, after great defects in the constitution are proven."

At the sesquicentennial of one of the patrician's many teachings, the National Assembly's decision to table (once again) the complaints lodged against the magistrates of the Supreme Court of Justice brings us even closer to democratic despotism --- disguised as farce or tragedy --- and puts us several quick steps away from any project to be a country with the rule of constitutional law. Once more, law gives way to coercion.

Behind a decision that should not be surprising, there is a clearly drawn conception of politics, distinct from that which society articulates as the organization that it creates for its own conservation, is just one more button in the inexhaustible collection of evils in the reigning system of government that every day accompanies the covert authoritarianism, the militarist peril and the neo-populist distraction as promoters of the constitutional degeneration through which we live when we flee from the responsibilities that we have to begin a process of true constitutional reform and to start to lose the fear of freedom.

At moments in which the society every day sends more signals that it has freed itself from the innumerable obstacles that impede reason, which block the capacity to understand, to listen, to argue, to exchange opinions and to move to take new roads, the agents of power who hold a monopoly over the organs of state do not vacillate in taking the route that's absolutely contrary to democratization and instead bet on despotism.

Why can't we be capable of building a democracy where debate can exist, with the daily opportunity to collectively sort the good from the bad, what's acceptable from what's not, the due from the undue?

To maintain silence or desist from saying what we think of the behaviors of the Supreme Court magistrates --- the rectors of the judicial system, if you will --- of the attitudes of the members of the legislative branch, and of the actions of those in charge of the executive branch, would be to fail to assume our role as citizens. As citizens we must not and can not abandon our decisions to the hands of others because all of us, in one way or another, for better or worse, are responsible for what happens, including the positive and negative things that are sensitive.

To continue imposing upon the population the mistaken conception that the high court magistrates are the only authorities that in practice can't be judged by any other authority is to decidedly contribute to the corrosion of the foundations of our fragile republic. To get wrapped up in the pomposity of legislative chatter doesn't guarantee judicial security to the governed. It's only useful as a marketing technique and a PR image to keep our society from confronting and resolving the challenges that they keep imposing. It doesn't mean that they are governing, but does show us that they are manipulating.

Far from coming away from the legislative decision strengthened, our discredited unbalanced administration of justice emerges much more broken. It actions --- good or bad --- will continue to be imputed, politically and juridically, to the rectors of the state.

The need for real transformations in the structures, procedures and functions of the organs of state is more urgent today, given that we can't allow the responsibility for and effectiveness of our rights to remain in the exclusive hands of our legislators.

To subject the value and validity of our freedoms and guarantees, our right to know the truth and the preservation of our dignity to the legislative will will only lead to an ever more irrational exercise of political power.

By leave, then, of the magistrates, permit me to recommend that you bear in mind the teaching of constitutionalist Pablo Lucas Verdú, from whom we learn that under the rule of law it's not a matter of fundamental rights which must move within legal limitations, but the reverse, that "it's the legal limitations that must move within fundamental rights."

Also in this section:
Delarge, Why not build a road through the Darien?
Hassan, Double standards about nepotism?
Jackson, Wolfowitz, a tougher guy in a weaker World Bank
Weisbrot, The World Bank's problems go well beyond Wolfowitz
Kozloff, Venezuela and the oil weapon
Revenga, The world's growing water crisis
Noriega, Customs modernization
Avnery, Splitting Sharon from the settlers
Leis, Public faith in the law is at stake
Bernal, Judicial and legislative scandal