Most ads are interactive -- click on them to visit the folks who make The Panama News possible

opinion

Also in this section:
Leis, Until when is unexploded ordnance off the agenda?
Jackson, Departed giants, law enforcement standards and great performances
Human Rights Watch, Stand up the Bush administration's torture policy
Khalil, Why Al-Hurra has failed
Lettieri, The sordid Honduran electoral campaign
Weisbrot, An economic report from Caracas
Bemowki, It's not as if the Democrats are innocent about Iraq
Silié, Fear of migrants
Betto, Welcome to Brazil, Mr. Bush
Bernal, Patriotism, sacred holidays, the country --- everything's for sale

Everything for money and the patriotic holidays

by Miguel Antonio Bernal

With the absolute lack of any connection between the knowledge and acceptance of the current constitution on the one hand and the necessary commitment to order and fundamental rights in a modern society on the other, we Panamanians celebrate our patriotic holidays.

The significance and scope of the commemorated dates has been diminishing with the passage of time, amidst bands of drums and cornets, while the authorities live ever more distracted --- and unconcerned --- in other pursuits that have nothing to do with the commitment, sympathy and rationality that the moment requires.

The attempts to cut corners and to be able to identify certain provisions imposed in the militarist constitution that's still in effect with some sort of reality that brings us to a true rule of law have not yielded results that favor liberty. The theories and practices of constitutional knowledge are kept ever more distant from us. This allows, above all, for a series of concepts evocative of these times. They all boil down to: “Everything for money!”

All resources, local and foreign, are employed to impede us from having a civic conviction, to be able to count on a sensible constitution, to keep us from finding our national heritage. We have maintained over us, by diverse means, a constitution born of humiliating situations that still, after 33 years, continues to be the principal impediment to us enjoying a sense of legitimacy that would serve as a means of creating and consolidating institutions that are required if we are to have a true justice system and not a spiderweb of corruption that wraps itself at the same time in the pseudo-constitutionalism and the disregard for the constitution by the misgovernment of the Everything for money! crowd.

These days could serve to multiply the efforts that allow us to take due possession of our objectives and consolidate the basic ideas upon which a true rule of law is built, a demoractic, solidary and just society, an effective cultural advance and the presence of human dignity in every moment and place. However, it's all for naught to point out the importance of our freedoms to the ends of justice and harmony. The new slogan is Everything for money!

The moment is apt to reiterate that the politics of the ruling politicians aren't drawn from the identities, the interests, the aspirations and the rights of Panamanian society. The divorve between what the citizens want and need, between the problems for which they demand resolution and the capacity of the ruling politicians to do this, is ever more evident. They do little or nothing, nor do they care to do anything that's real, against unemployment, poverty or inequality. They do a lot, it's true, to enrich themselves, to fly hither and yonder and have themselves photographed with all rulers whose people repudiate them because they have stolen their hopes and ideas of progress and made them believe that change is impossible.

The patriotic holidays have been emptied of all civic sense, of all participation that allows people to reach for a revaluation of the tasks that are up to us, to obtain and enjoy the truth and our social rights. They're patriotic holidays that don't teach us to build the democracy that we need, that don't allow us to understand the most viable mechanisms to achieve the rule of law. They're patriotic holidays that deafen the young so that they can't think, that hide from us the many unemployed who have no place to look for work, that militarize the parades and increase privileges for a few. They're patriotic holidays for the purpose of doing away with social security, continuing to close the schools, turning away from the sciences, education and culture.

There we have it, for those who wouldn't believe: the “patria nueva” doesn't like the citizens and, without a twinge of conscience, is dedicating itself to leaving us without a country, ever loyal to the teaching of “Everything for money!”