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Also in this section:
Notable newsmakers of 2005
Martín appoints two longtime public employees to high court
Costa Rican presidential election season
Panama News Briefs

People of the year, 2005

by Eric Jackson

This past year will probably not go down in world or Panamanian history as a great turning point. Great men and women probably were at work, but in general the greatness of their works wasn’t immediately obvious. Add to that the historic reticence of The Panama News to name a man or woman of the year, and we won’t single out an individual as an emblem of 2005. We do, however, make note of 10 people, half on the Panamanian scene and half on the international stage, whose actions over the past year deserve special notice. The attention they merit is not in all cases for praiseworthy deeds or characteristics. In each category they are listed in alphabetical order rather than in some sort of ranking of importance.

In Panama

Ana Matilde Gómez

Upon taking office as Procuradora General (Attorney General, by The Panama News’s customary translation style) just about a year ago, she asked all the prosecutors in the Public Ministry to hand in their resignations. With a few exceptions, her request was scornfully rejected. But rather than accept all the holdovers from a decade when the nation’s top prosecutor was openly pro-corruption, she fired more than a dozen prosecutors for specific improper acts or manifest incompetence, jailing a few of them. She also purged the medical examiner’s office and cracked down on abuses in the Judicial Technical Police. For the first  time in a long time, public corruption appeared to be taken seriously by the ministry she heads. How far the courts and politicians will let her go remains to be seen.

Genaro López

The month-long strike against President Torrijos’s reforms of the Social Security Fund was a watershed event in Panamanian labor history. In the end, the banks and stockbrokers won complete access to the pension fund. The reforms’ structural problems were papered over with a promise of $7.1 billion in government payments into the fund to be made in the course of future presidencies. Working people saw their paycheck deductions increased and their retirement prospects dimmed. The strikers took the final outcome as a terrible setback. Still, the original Torrijos plan would have abolished the pension rights of about half the Panamanian working class and the president was forced to back down on that, by a labor movement that showed strength after years of weakness. True, the government-approved CONATO labor federation threw the SUNTRACS construction workers’ union that Genaro López heads and other militant unions out of their fold. But despite all the management, government and company union triumphalism, López ended the year as the most popular and most authentic voice of an increasingly insistent Panamanian working class.

Danilo Pérez

Like so many other talented Panamanian entertainers, jazz pianist Danilo Pérez had to emigrate to gain the recognition and prosperity that his talent merits. However, we can’t really say that Boston’s gain was Panama’s loss. Pérez has come back to organize the annual Panama Jazz Festivals, fabulous artistic successes that are growing tourist attractions. In so doing he has implicitly mocked the lazy and rapacious Panamanian promoters who are so largely responsible for keeping the big international acts from performing here and driving our best creative people to emigrate. Via the workshops that are part of these events, he has gone over the heads of the nation’s dysfunctional academia to inspire and educate a new generation of musicians. Also during the course of last year, Pérez played a benefit so that jazz singer Barbara Wilson, who died in poverty after a lifetime of brilliant performances given in the context of the local promoters’ system, could be given a decent burial. If others led the protests about things that are and shouldn’t be, Danilo Pérez demonstrated an alternative way of doing things by his actions.

Winston Spadafora

This Supreme Court magistrate, deprived of his US visa for corruption, became the symbol of a persistent old order of public corruption with impunity. According to a Los Angeles Times, report, the specifics that the US government has only officially released to its Panamanian counterpart and to Spadafora himself were about the magistrate taking bribes to do judicial favors. Elevated to the high court by Mireya Moscoso in an unusual proceeding over the vehement protests of the PRD --- according to PRD ally Ricardo Arias Calderón it was a matter of Mireya bribing the legislature to ratify the nomination of her boyfriend --- this year Spadafora became the beneficiary of a PRD legislature’s determination that despite the constitution, Supreme Court magistrates are immune from investigation for corruption. After yet more criminal charges and civil lawsuits brought against journalists who reported on his sleazy actions, Spadafora’s own brothers and sisters issued a public condemnation. As 2006 begins he still sits on the high court, one of several bulwarks of a reviled system that runs on bribery and influence peddling.

Roberto “La Araña” Vásquez

This dimunitive athlete, a junior flyweight boxer, has led Panama into another golden age in his sport. At the beginning of 2005 this country had no world champions, and by the end of the year we had three, with nine more fighters classified in the top 10 of their respective weight classifications. La Araña won three fights in 2005, gaining and defending the WBA belt and now setting his sights on a bout to unify the various world titles. Our other two champs are super-featherweight Vicente “El Loco” Mosquera and super-bantamweight Celestino “Pelenchín” Caballero. True, with the proliferation of international boxing organizations and an increase in the number of weight classifications a belt might not mean as much as it did in Panama’s earlier pugilistic heyday of the 1970s. However, the truth of the matter is that the spiderman is so brilliant that he stands out clearly against the backdrop of a very bright national boxing scene.

On the world stage

Pope Benedict XVI

Successor to the long-reigning, globetrotting, popular and conservative Pope John Paul II, Benedict XVI appeared at first glance to be yet more conservative, coming as he did from the ecclesiastical organization formerly known as the Holy Inquisition. However, the challenges facing the Catholic Church are complex and difficult to pigeonhole along simplistic left to right spectra. In much of Africa Christianity is in a head-to-head competition for souls with Islam, and the issues confronting the church there are very unlike the challenges presented by the northern industrialized democracies, where the trivialization and marginalization of religion are best exemplified by low attendance at Sunday services and the commercialization of Christmas. Benedict was known in his former post mainly for his ferocious attacks on followers of the Liberation Theology, but now he heads a church whose biggest regional following is in Latin America, where the Catholic left is strong and could be driven to a major schism. So far the new pope has moved cautiously to maintain unity in the fold while upholding the notion that Catholicism is a belief system that means something, not a mix and match set of consumer options.

Junichiro Koizumi

Across the Third World and especially in Latin America the neo-liberal economic philosophy is under concerted attack because it hasn’t delivered on its promises of greater prosperity. In a number of the industrialized countries, however, conservatism has held its ground or even advanced. In Europe, for example, 2005 saw election gains for the right in several countries. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi  insisted on the privatization of certain important financial services offered by his country’s post office. He was initially blocked by a revolt within his own Liberal Democratic Party, then fought a snap election on the issue and stomped all challengers. Koizumi thus has a comfortable parliamentary majority that will allow him to do what he wants. If his policies work and he gets some lucky breaks with an economy that no politician controls, there will be global repercussions.

Evo Morales

White rule over a two-thirds indigenous country, the US “War on Drugs” and globalization on the NAFTA model have suffered a shocking defeat in Bolivia, with the instrument of that setback incarnate in the person of Evo Morales, the coca farmers’ champion and leader of the Movement Toward Socialism. It’s part of a generalized South American rejection of neo-liberal economic policies that have increased debt loads and the gaps between rich and poor rather than delivering the promised prosperity. On election eve pollsters predicted that Morales would obtain less than a majority and have to make a deal with elements of the traditional elite to obtain and retain the presidency, let alone to get his programs through the congress. Then the votes of Aymara and Quechua speakers from remote rural areas where pollsters never go began to trickle in. Morales ended up with a strong mandate to change Bolivia’s policies on many issues and to overthrow a social structure dominated by the wealthier members of the 20 percent white minority. Bolivia is too poor and too small to act without taking other countries’ concerns into consideration, but Morales comes to power with friends in power next door in Brazil and Argentina. Bolivia’s first indigenous president will still have to put up with power plays directed from the United States, and the successes or failures of those will become an important barometer of US influence in Latin America.

Harry Reid

After the American people were shocked by the September 11, 2001 attacks, the entire US political class was stampeded into a number of unprecedented measures. These include “preventive wars” against countries that hadn’t attacked the United States; widespread police surveillance against members of political and religious minorities who are not reasonably suspected of committing crimes; a ban on travel by dissidents singled out by a government that claims a right to act in this way without providing justification; long-term detention without charges or access to lawyers; the systematic use of torture; the monitoring of books that people read; the jailing of journalists for not exclusively reporting Pentagon propaganda from war zones; and the holding of political prisoners as young as eight years old. However, hysteria wears a bit thin after awhile, and after a series of defeats and years of timidity, the Democrats have begun to give George W. Bush the opposition that he hardly had for some four and one-half years. Senator Harry Reid, the minority leader from Nevada, galvanized this opposition into a filibuster that essentially ended the Patriot Act, which gave “legal” cover to many of the most abusive practices. There are hearings about wiretapping and other intrusions that went even beyond the scope of the Patriot Act, and then mid-term congressional elections, to come in 2006. Public opinion is volatile and anything might happen in those elections, but it appears that under Senator Reid’s guidance the political calendar has been advanced into Bush’s premature lame duck period.

Shakira

The Colombian diva of Lebanese extraction is not the first Latin American musician to enjoy some success crossing over into North America’s mainstream Anglo culture. She is by no means the first artist to mature from adolescent love songs to more profound lyrics about more serious topics. She probably won’t sell as many recordings as Madonna. But she’s not just another foxy young singer. For one thing, this past year she became the first person to ever top both the English-language and Spanish-language Billboard charts at the same time with two different albums. Moreover, Shakira is a voice for toleration and good citizenship from Colombia, a land where mobbed-up politics, gangland economics and perpetual civil war prevail. Her message has been so widely received that some of the most intolerant Middle Eastern countries have banned it. So now people of other regions who have come to stereotype Latin Americans as either tyrants and thugs or victims and the oppressed have a fresh young image of who the people of this region so frequently are: beautiful, socially responsible and wonderfully creative. And though hardly any of the little Panamanian girls who so devoutly practice Shakira’s latest dance steps will become so rich and famous as their heroine, we are all enriched by her presence on the international cultural scene.