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Christmas shopping
Seguro Social reforms moving through legislature
Island and beach privatization law passes, litigation to ensue
FRENADESO back on a small scale, contemplating next moves
Poll shows drop in support for canal expansion
Business & Economy Briefs

article and photos by Eric Jackson

When the government and the strikers backed down from the brink last July after a month of strikes and protests, the president's approval ratings were in the low 20s and the unions' strike funds were spent. Neither side expected that the argument was over, but neither could they carry on the way that they had been.

The dialogue turned out to be a farce, with an already rigged cast of characters being altered by government coup attempts in the AMOACCS doctors' union and the Federation of Professional Associations being seized upon by the government to throw its critics in those groups out of the process. The Torrijos administration, however, had to proceed slowly and finally act during the holiday season when it's hard to mobilize a crowd, and furthermore had to soften the Law 17 terms that would have denied any retirement possibilities at all to roughly half of the Panamanian working class.

FRENADESO still doesn't like what's being done, especially because the door has been opened to invest virtually all of the billion-dollar retirement fund into the private sector and they expect that a fair amount of the money will disappear in Banco DISA-style scams to come. The umbrella group of labor, leftist and civic groups also doesn't agree with the sacrifices that working people are still being obliged to accept and dismisses the government's promises to invest billions of dollars into the fund after Martín Torrijos leaves office in the most contemptuous of tones.

There's not going to be another strike this time. The militants have forced the government to back down as far as was possible on the Seguro Social issue, and are now setting their sights on battles yet to come. "We're back to being small," the radical priest Conrado Sanjur told this reporter.

But probably nowhere near as small as the moderate labor unions that went along with the government and have nothing positive to show their memberships. Though the radicals have been thrown out of CONATO, they are the labor movement that the public recognizes while the officially recognized moderate leaders are perceived as pretenders who in most cases represent only their own personal interests.

FRENADESO, meanwhile, is looking forward to a battle over an expected free trade agreement with the United States, wherein many public employees may not be as riled up as they were about the Social Security Fund but other forces, particularly farmers and indigenous groups, are likely to swell the protester' ranks. The group also expects that the government will hold a canal expansion referendum this year and that it will lead the opposition, turning the question from a vote on the need to modernize the waterway into a no-confidence motion against a government it perceives to be too corrupt to successfully carry out a project of this magnitude.

That anticipated foray into electoral politics may not be the end of the matter. Some within FRENADESO want to turn the movement into a political party to fight the 2009 elections. If they can sign up the nearly 60,000 members to get such an organization listed on the ballot they would draw voters mainly away from the PRD and might either hold the balance of power in the next legislature or force the Torrijistas and Arnulfistas into a grand coalition to prevent this. The problem is that the largest group on the Panamanian left, the November 29th National Liberation Movement (MLN-29 and its student affiliate, FER-29) has a rather orthodox communist idea about vanguard parties and front groups but not the hegemony to impose this on the smaller leftist organizations that together outnumber them. It would be better not to get into an electoral formation that the MLN-29 doesn't control, so the thinking goes. However, if the bulk of FRENADESO adopts an electoral strategy its largest component might have little choice but to go along.

What the workers want is lower prices and higher wages, SUNTRACS construction workers union leader Genaro López explains

The Ministry of Education has thrown a number of young militants out of the Artes y Oficios and Instituto Nacional high schools, and the main effect of this has been to increase the number of angry youngsters on the streets

The liberation theologians of the Catholic left, though marginalized within the church by a conservative pope, play a substantial role on the left wing of the Panamanian political spectrum