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Panama News Briefs

Impasse over Seguro Social continues

by Eric Jackson, in part from other media

As this issue of The Panama News was uploaded, the strikes affecting the public health, public education and construction industries as well as a number of smaller private sector enterprises continued and the government was ratcheting up the violence in the dispute over changes to the Social Security Fund at the same time that it was calling for a "national dialogue" about the crisis which excludes the strikers.

On Friday, June 17, border police brought into the city for anti-riot duty opened fire on striking doctors, nurses and medical secretaries with rubber bullets in front of the Arnulfo Arias Hospital Complex when some of the protesters attempted to block the Transistmica. In an ensuing sweep five persons were arrested, including two members of the leftist Thought and Transformative Action (PAT) student group who were taken away for walking down a sidewalk carrying their group's banners.

On the same day the developers of the Conado del Rey construction project brought in strikebreakers under police protection, sparking a brawl between SUNTRACS members and their would-be replacements that left one worker injured and prevented further work at the site.

Simultaneously in San Miguelito, protesters and riot police fought a pitched battle at the overpass where the Tranisitmica and Tumba Muerto cross, while in the capital the opposition legislative caucuses criticized the Torrijos administration for attempting to hold talks to resolve the crisis without including the strikers.

A day earlier, the University of Panama and a number of public primary schools were declared open, but most teachers and students stayed away.

Meanwhile confrontations continued in the Interior, most notably with bus drivers in Veraguas province parking their vehicles on June 16 to join the protests.

The drivers, most of whom own the buses they drive and are members of syndicates that control various routes, have traditionally been at odds with the militant labor unions at the core of the national strike for two major reasons. First, the labor unions have usually opposed the drivers’ occasional demands for increased fares. Second, whenever the unions get really angry with the government, they tend to express their displeasure by blocking traffic on major roads, which causes much annoyance and significant economic loss to anyone who drives for a living.

But the bus drivers, while not joining the FRENADESSO strike committee, are part of a growing middle class protest that has left the government at odds with even a large segment of the membership of the ruling Democratic Revolutionary Party.

A Dichter & Neira poll commissioned by La Prensa showed President Torrijos with a 21 percent public approval rating, and more than 80 percent of those surveyed opposed to the government's Seguro Social reforms.

The middle classes are disaffected because the self-employed, ranging from solo practitioner lawyers and private dentists down to the people who sell empanadas from pushcarts, will have to pay 11.4 percent of their gross income, later to be increased to 13 percent, into Seguro Social, while receiving absolutely no medical coverage and in many cases no real possibility of retirement benefits in return. Although businesses that gross less than $800 per month were excluded from paying income taxes or filing tax returns, many slightly more prosperous small businesses will, under the combined effects of the tax reforms passed earlier this year and the new Seguro Social law, be obliged to turn 25 percent of their gross revenues over to the government.

Professional groups complain that the effect and intent of the Torrijos economic policy is to oblige lawyers to either go to work for the big law firms or pull down their shingles, make doctors and dentists closed down their private practices and go to work for large health care corporations, and force independent CPAs go the way of the dodo so that the scandal-tainted multinational accountancy firms can take over their businesses. Vendors of street food complain that the Seguro Social reforms are designed to eliminate part of Panama's culture, eliminating meat on a stick and boosting the fortunes of the McDonald's corporation for which Martín Torrijos once worked.

Some of the rare praise for the administration's tax and social security policies has come from Wall Street analysts and the US State Department.

(The Bush administration's support, expressed to La Prensa's Washington correspondent Betty Brannan Jaén by a diplomat on condition that his or her name not be used, creates some strange befellows. On of the very few legislators willing to talk to the press about Seguro Social is the PRD's Pedro Miguel González, who is wanted by the FBI on capital terrorism charges. González was accused in the 1992 drive-by shooting death of US Army Sergeant O. Zak Hernandez, and although he was acquitted by a Panamanian jury Washington has never accepted that verdict.)

In Panama attorney and newspaper columnist Silvio Guerra has been one of the Seguro Social reforms' few public defenders, while none the local banking and insurance executives who pushed for and got the private management of part of the retirement fund nor many of the PRD and Partido Popular legislators who passed the measure are willing to talk about it.

As this issue was uploaded the SUNTRACS strike fund had run out and collections were being taken from working Panamanians who are still on the job and from sympathizers abroad to replenish it, and doctors were soliciting food for construction workers' families at points around the country. More than 1,200 protesters had been arrested, most of them without criminal charges and most having been subsequently released on bail, but 12 jailed construction workers were on a hunger strike.

The national dialogue for which the president had called was still taking shape as this issue of The Panama News was being produced, with business organizations and the non-striking CONATO labor federation agreeing to take part. The bulk of the labor movement and most professional organizations, on the other hand, are refusing to take part in the talks so long as the FRENADESSO strike organization is excluded and unless the talks are moderated by someone whom they will accept as impartial. (The president has appointed the Council of University Rectors to mediate the talks, and although the group's current president is Panama Technological University's Salvador Rodríguez, by law all of Panama's universities are subject to supervision by the University of Panama, whose self-styled "Rector Magnifico" Gustavo García de Paredes is a leading PRD member who has in the past expressed presidential ambitions.) The Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Council have agreed to participate only as observers. No date had yet been set for the dialogue to commence.