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opinion

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Cortizo's resignation is just a shot over the bow

The free trade battle is joined

by Eric Jackson

My tactical way of looking at things comes in large part from my political background, which largely developed in the United States. That includes things like passing out leaflets for Democrats when I was way too young to vote, years spent in elected and appointed offices in a small Rust Belt city, and in between those things an interval of street fighting after the antiwar majority saw the 1968 Democratic nomination stolen from it and then Richard Nixon tried his utmost to stamp out all dissent. Quite frankly, this background makes the usual block the street, throw a few rocks when the police come and then scurry back onto campus game that student militants play here look awfully lame to me.

But now the government has infuriated the nation’s cattle ranchers, and think about what it would look like if instead of a few dozen masked, stone-throwing young men in the street, just a dozen brave ranchers stampeded their cattle herds down the Transistmica, Via Tocumen, Avenida Balboa and so on. I don’t know that this will happen and I’m not sure that it should happen, but if it did happen maybe the student radicals would be shamed into some of the creative tactical thinking that seems to be so passé in those circles these days.

But that’s just tactical brainstorming in the SDS-Yippie mode, a relatively low level of political thinking. It’s more important to look at the social forces that are in motion and think about what else is likely to happen around the free trade issue.

The first major breach in the Torrijos administration’s unity can be dismissed as the defection of a non-PRD member of the ruling alliance. Laurentino Cortizo, after all, came to the cabinet from the legislature, to which he had twice been elected on the Solidaridad ticket.

It’s also easy to dismiss Cortizo the rancher as a rich man who put his special economic interest ahead of his public duty, or to lampoon him by caricatures showing him riding a cow into battle.

One grain of truth that gives traction to such characterizations is Panama’s history of abusing sanitary regulations to achieve economic protectionist aims. There have been two exclusions of American beef over mad cow disease, and it seems to me that the first one, imposed by the Moscoso administration, was unduly prolonged as a 2004 election campaign tactic. Last year’s problems importing Peruvian turkeys over alleged bird flu threats, when Peru wasn’t afflicted by that malady, is another case in point. A complete list would be long.

But Panama is free of mad cow disease, and free of hoof and mouth disease, and it is so because we have strict agricultural quarantine rules. The United States has not always been free of mad cow or hoof and mouth, and its demand that we lower our agricultural health standards is best seen as a bit of bullying at the behest of American farm interests.

There’s no reciprocity in this. We can’t get our citrus fruit into the United States because we have a very real Mediterranean fruit fly problem, but then what’s the excuse for the US government keeping Panamanian frozen citrus juice concentrates off of the American market?

Let us not dwell too much on the merits and demerits of the particular issue that compelled Mr. Cortizo to resign as agriculture minister. Let’s look at the specific and general contexts in which that argument arose, because what’s shaping up is not a battle between a government with broad aims and a little special interest group with a narrow demand.

Some vital principles and many sectors of the nation’s economy are in play. The immediate cause of Cortizo’s departure was a letter, secret until he leaked it, wherein the Panamanian government assured US negotiators that it would back down on the sanitary rules for beef exports. The form that was taken was not some guarantee that our regulations won’t be abused, but that we would renounce all sovereignty over the matter and accept all US meat certifications at face value.

These talks have been held in secret, with the only information we have coming in the form of leaks and press statements which the respective governments have felt convenient for their purposes. The infamous letter that came to light with Cortizo’s resignation begs all manner of other questions.

What other American certifications is the Panamanian government willing to take at face value?

Do we have to forever abandon the right to set our own standards and accept US meat and poultry that has been raised on hormones and antibiotics? Will we have to accept intellectual property rights notions and market forces that will make Panamanian farmers exchange their rice and beans for genetically engineered and patented seeds that produce sterile crops, so that they will have to pay multinational corporations for the seeds they sow instead of saving a bit of the last crop for the next season’s planting? Will we have to accept US patents on the genetic codes of Panamanian individuals, or on medicines derived from ancient Kuna herbal knowledge? Will Panamanian journalists and photographers lose their present residual rights to their work, and cede them to the newspaper publishers as is the practice in the United States? Will the last vestiges of Panamanian culture be drowned in a tidal wave of Hollywood imports, while most of our artisans and performers are unable to obtain visas to enter the United States?

“Free trade” is a misnomer in the context of the NAFTA model on which the US-Panama talks are patterned. It’s about big business overturning most national standards in the smaller countries, in exchange for free access to the US market mainly for things that the smaller countries don’t produce. As it affects us at this point in time, it’s about giving George W. Bush the power to rewrite many of Panama’s laws.

The secret letter that incited the wrath of the nation’s ranchers, then, is better compared to a canary keeling over in a coal mine, as a warning of much more serious things that are about to manifest themselves.

I would expect that if a free trade agreement is signed and its details are revealed to the Panamanian people, cattle stampedes on the capital’s main thoroughfares would be the least of Martín Torrijos’s worries. The public realization that Uncle Sam should not be confused with Santa Claus is likely to be far more damaging to the president than a few annoying street blockages.