editorial

The greatest sacrifice

First Sergeant Luis Pérez Becerra, Seaman Jackson Angulo Valderrama and Seaman Omar Anselmo Durán Rico gave their lives for Panama. The three members of the National Maritime Service, the coast guard branch of our police forces, died in a training exercise in which they, along with SMN colleagues and members of other law enforcement services, were practicing an amphibious assault in the event that an enemy force were to take over an island in Gatun Lake astride the Panama Canal shipping channel.

This maneuver was a part of a much larger set of US-led naval exercises that involved 10 countries and 24 warships. Though it seems that more Panamanians supported the war games than opposed them, objections were raised to these war games on various grounds. Some critics are wary that the post-invasion decision to abolish Panama’s military forces is being undermined by the militarization of our police. Others suspect the Pentagon’s motives for organizing such periodic international events, as it has been doing for decades. But these or any other questions about the wisdom of such maneuvers should not be used to deny the utility of what these three men were doing.

The Panama Canal is this nation’s most valuable property, a unique industrial asset upon which much of our economy directly depends. While this country could never with its own resources be able to pose an effective defense against an enemy that launches nuclear missiles or sends waves of bombers or fleets of warships against us, we ought to have the means to defend ourselves in the event that some small group of attackers takes over an island in Gatun Lake and attempts to use that position to close the canal. These three men died while sharpening Panama’s defenses against such a possibility, which is one of the things that our law enforcement agencies must regularly do in order to protect the nation’s interests, assets and sovereignty.

To deny this necessity would be to forget the plastic explosive bomb that went off in the hands of a mysterious Mr. Jafar just a bit more than 11 years ago, in a commuter plane flying from Colon to Panama City, roughly at the same time that a much deadlier bomb went off at the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. It would be to forget the carnage in New York, in Washington, in Bali, in Madrid, in London and so many elsewheres. It would be a most dangerous dereliction of civic duty.

Armed amphibious assaults are, like the terrorism that these men were practicing to oppose, a deadly business. So is the training needed to acquire the skills needed successfully carry out such operations. And so, for that matter, are many other aspects of the jobs that members of our National Maritime Service and other law enforcement agencies perform every day. These three men were not the first in their profession to fall in the line of duty, nor will they be the last, and it does nobody any good to pretend that it could be otherwise.

It is proper to investigate and assess the circumstances of this tragedy, and proper to debate this country’s defense and foreign policies. But first Panamanians should take time to mourn, to honor these three brave men and to see to it that the families they left behind are cared for.

Sergeant Pérez, Seaman Angulo and Seaman Durán gave their lives for us. It’s a debt that the nation can never repay, but must never forget.

Rotten from the top down

El Panama America ran a sting operation, and caught administrators from a school in Chame and officials of the Ministry of Education selling a high school diploma for $300. To his credit, Minister of Education Juan Bosco Bernal closed down the school in question and suspended the functionaries involved pending a full investigation, and vowed that those responsible will pay for their crimes.

Contrast that with the University of Panama, where the self-proclaimed “Rector Magnifico” was caught having affixed his signature to a diploma meant to be issued to one of his “student leaders” who had not taken the classes needed to qualify for a university degree. Also on that diploma were the signatures of the dean of the Faculty of Business Administration and Accounting and the university’s secretary general. The diploma came to light because an anonymous whistleblower came forward, and law professor Miguel Antonio Bernal filed a criminal complaint about it. But now, after an investigation by a committee of professors found deliberate fraud, the next level of university governance recommended a demotion for the secretary general and a two-year suspension for the student “leader,” and no discipline at all for the rector or the dean. The final decision on disciplinary measures, thanks to the university “reform” passed by the National Assembly and signed by President Torrijos, rests with a participant in the crime, Dr. Gustavo García de Paredes himself.

But that’s not all. The Rector Magnifico took out large ads in the daily newspaper, which created and then destroyed a straw man about how allegations of massive fraud due to hundreds of diploma irregularities found in university files are false. The one who raised the possibility that all the irregularities were instances of fraud was Dr. García de Paredes himself. It’s a corny sophomoric debating tactic that earns the not-so-magnificent rector a D- in demagoguery and an F in ethics. The ads not so surprisingly made no mention whatsoever about the spurious diploma that the rector signed. But they did repeat the oft-made claim that there is a campaign to discredit and destroy the University of Panama.

Now another accomplice in the fraudulent diploma case, the university’s secretary general, has filed a complaint seeking to have Miguel Antonio Bernal fired from the law school professorship that he has held for many years.

Let us not forget the person who more than anyone else set the example of the conduct that Education Minister Bernal and professor Bernal insist in their own ways must be excised from the nation’s academic life. We must not forget, because the godfather of academic fraud is looking to retake control of the government in 2009.

Remember all those billboards, which proclaimed that “Dr. Ernesto Pérez Balladares Cumple” that were posted at public expense on highways everywhere in Panama between 1994 and 1999? Toro Pérez Balladares had no doctoral degree. He’s not a doctor of anything. When the editor of The Panama News asked his press aide, now RPC-TV news director Dorita de Reyna, the simple question of where Toro got his doctorate and in which discipline, the question was treated as an act of great disrespect.

Panama’s culture of juega vivo started with the man who had Vasco Núñez de Balboa executed, Pedrarias the Cruel, and has survived to this day in the inbred Creole aristocracy that he spawned. In itself, that wouldn’t be so bad. Ruling classes like that can, after all, be overthrown. The problem is that the culture of fraud has seeped into all levels of Panamanian society, to the point that we see presidents appropriating academic titles that they haven’t earned, university administrators signing diplomas that they shouldn’t, and even diplomas from undistinguished high schools in the Interior for sale.

The issue of academic integrity is a challenge to all social classes. Because this country’s educational diplomas have been cheapened by internationally notorious fraud, people here and abroad who would invest in this country, or who would hire Panamanians bearing academic credentials, must think twice. This sort of fraud is a major obstacle to this nation’s development.

It started at the top, but by no means stopped there, and it’s important to recognize what and whom we must confront. People who flaunt or traffic in phony academic credentials, from former President Ernesto Pérez Balladares and University of Panama rector García de Paredes on down to faceless high school bureaucrats and dishonest students, are traitors and parasites. For Panama to progress they must be eliminated from academia and from public life.

Bear in mind…

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

Mary McCarthy

If you feed the people with just revolutionary slogans, they will listen to you today, they will listen tomorrow, they will listen the day after tomorrow, but on the fourth day, they will say "to hell with you."

Nikita Khrushchev

Power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims.

Rabindranath Tagore

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