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opinion

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Bernal, the "MAMIocracy"
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Armington & Birns, Roger Noriega's sorry Latin American policy legacy
Gutman, Grooming politicians for Satan
Silié, From the Cold War to the War on Terror
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MAMIcracy

by Miguel Antonio Bernal

A phrase is becoming incessantly repeated in the vocabulary of commentators --- for more than a year for this one’s part --- and of a good part of the population and of the politicians who run our country: the MAMI Pact. Not a week passes in which the president or the ex-president and the principal lieutenants or followers of each don’t, through their actions, declarations, relations, positions, ambitions and so on, corroborate for curious observers and followers of current events the existence and maintenance in effect of said political scheme.

The date and place of the MAMI Pact’s signing is something that everyone may never be able to know, but every day the actions of its signers and/or participants place into evidence the existence of this Panamanian branch of Creole politics. Its transcendence has surpassed the effects that the so-called META Pact, signed at its time between the leaderships of the Democratic Revolutionary Party and the Christian Democratic Party, the latter now re-baptized as the Partido Popular.

How you describe or define the MAMI Pact isn’t something that in any way worries or annoys its authors and beneficiaries. It creates confusion among the people who are the victims of its consequences and of the coordinated compliance of its member parties. We Panamanians haven’t had the opportunity to know, in the short history of our partisan political life, a contractual relationship whose nature permits the primitive autocracy promoted by the 1968-1989 military dictatorship and its benefactors, lost in the jungle of the authoritarianism and totalitarianism contained in the 1972 constitution and its codes, to be able to make this the obligatory reference for any hypothesis about working in our political society.

In effect, if one considers continuism “the prolongation of the political or economic systems or styles of a government by the one that succeeds it,” you can’t lose sight of what the experts have so well shown us: “Generally the word has a pejorative connotation because it means the extension in time of a negative order. It refers to the continuation of the errors, abuses, dishonesty or ineptitude of the preceding political regime. It also indicates… the lack of change or renovation in political systems.”

The last elections and their electoral paraphernalia served the current government to raise innumerable expectations by way of a rosary of promises of “change” in the social, economic and political fields (with a long et cetera). However, the balances, analyses and commentaries after 12 months of government have placed in evidence an accentuated continuism and an absolute absence of will or proposals for change. It couldn’t be otherwise, in light of the breaking of electoral blandishments, which corroborates the notion that offers produced by demagoguery forever remain the stuff of Greek calends.

The matters and problems left unresolved since the invasion and the hoped-for democratic transition have contributed to the citizenry’s disenchantment with politics and politicians and have created the basis for apathy and its hybrid “anti-politics politics,” which in turn is a simulation of the despotism that’s well named as the “MAMIocracy.” To define the regime of MAMIocracy is important but not necessarily determinative in the present circumstances. What’s important for us is to know well the practices of this neo-populism a la panameña that results from the fusion of so-called Torrijismo with Arnulfismo, which permits the oligarchy to recover its leading role while the government is trapped in corrupt practices, the president’s inner circle acts like a neo-oligarchy and over time there’s a progressive lumpenization of society and politics, accompanied by a profound institutional crisis and the dismantling of the state.

The MArtín-MIreya Pact acts brazenly to feed impunity, as for example is corroborated by the latest luncheon of the members of the Moscoso cabinet. Many won’t be around for the last supper when the MAMIocracy calls it. Devoid of grandeur, of historic projects, and above all of ideological perspectives, the MAMIocracy advances in its rash attempts to leave us without a country. It’s worthwhile to re-read Edmund Burke and to remember, as he did, that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”