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opinion
Also in this section: Sirias, "Folklore" that Panama can live without
A corrective gloss on the US human rights
report on Panama Every year when the US Department of State makes its annual pronouncements on human rights in other countries, there is a wave of criticism to the effect that the Americans are hypocrites to issue such reports because there are human rights problems in the United States as well. These are points generally well taken, even if usually by people and institutions making bad faith arguments instead of facing up to the injustices that they create. On the other hand, if the State Department is supposed to provide any sort of service to the American people, one of them surely ought to be these sorts of warnings to anyone thinking of living or investing abroad. Quite frankly, I found some of this year's report on Panama particularly annoying, in part for shortcomings common in prior reports, but also for a number of egregious gaps that go beyond what we have seen before. I think that my annoyance is in many respects emblematic of my problems with the Bush administration's attitudes about and practices regarding human rights general. What can you expect from a US administration that practices torture? To wit: 1. "Prison conditions remained harsh and, in some cases, life-threatening. By December the prison system, which had an official capacity of 7,213 persons, held 11,748 prisoners." Quite true. But what the State Department doesn't say this year, and has never said, is that by and large Panama's prison overcrowding is the result of War on Drugs policies urged upon this country by the United States --- things like no bail for drug offenses and this country's requirement that in drug cases the accused must prove his or her innocence in lieu of the internationally recognized norm that a person is presumed not guilty until it's proven otherwise. 2. "The law prohibits arbitrary arrest and detention, and the government generally observed these prohibitions." The government didn't observe these norms with respect to radical labor activists. Unionists were arrested and in some cases beaten up for passing out leaflets, or attempting to march in the November patriotic parades, and a lot of the arrests during the Seguro Social strike were not for any acts committed but for fitting a profile of those to be rounded up. 3. "There were no reports of political detainees." See the above, and also note the jailing for several days of labor leaders during the strike. 4. "e. Denial of Fair Public Trial... Trials are open to the public." Most of the observations about problems in the courts were right as far as they went, but the issue of "public" was not addressed in a realistic fashion and that omission tends to oscure both a serious human rights problem and an attribute of institutionalized bribery and influence peddling. Not only are many legal proceedings effectively closed to public scrutiny, but so are almost all court case files. These opaque practices form one of the great bulwarks of judicial corruption here. 5. "The independent media were active and expressed a variety of views without restriction." Actually, most of the news organizations here are aligned with the parties of the government alliance to the extent that it's in many cases illusory to talk of them as "independent" media. There are all manner of information control games by which the true independents are denied access. And of course last year, under political pressure, the one TV station that gave reasonable consideration to organized labor's side in the Seguro Social dispute, the Catholic FETV, had a purge in which these views were taken off the air and replaced with pro-government opinion shows. 6. "There were no governmental restrictions on... academic freedom." Say what? Uncle Sam doesn't consider the PRD-run University of Panama's declaration of law professor Miguel Antonio Bernal to be "non grata" a governmental attack on academic freedom? 7. "d. Freedom of Movement Within the Country.... The law provides for these rights, and the government generally respected them in practice." Throughout this year's report there was an ostrich-like refusal to recognize any human rights offenses arising from the clashes between the government and the labor movement. I would suppose, then, that it would be a matter of "balance" not to fault the militant unions --- and the campus radicals and the Panamanian political culture in general --- for the standard protest tactic of the street blockade. Say what you will, but this practice, used by folks ranging from the commie radicals to parents upset about their kids' dilapidated schools to people who live along dangerous roads, very clearly violates everybody else's freedom of movement within the country. 8. "The law provides citizens with the right to change their government peacefully, and citizens exercised this right in practice through periodic, free, and fair elections held on the basis of universal suffrage." Except that the ballots are burned, precluding recounts, and even when there is clear evidence of election fraud the person appealing must have full proof that the fraud was sufficient to sway the election in order to get an investigation. Except that we have secret campaign financing by which elections tend to be bought, in some instances by hoodlums. Except that the political parties can remove legislators elected by the people. It all adds up to something a bit less than "free" and "fair," methinks. 9. "The law prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, gender, disability, language, or social status and the government effectively enforced these prohibitions in practice." The government did a few things, but actually very little, to address the systematic discrimination that the report then goes on to highlight. 10. "National/Racial/Ethnic Minorities.... Minority groups generally have been integrated into mainstream society, but there remained problems with discrimination against blacks, indigenous people, and other minorities." Oh, please! Maybe people in the United States who have little concept of Panama might find this terminology convincing, but the facts of the matter are that most Panamanians are of mixed race, that there are several times more black people than white people here, and that although our censuses don't take racial, ethnic or linguistic data, whites are less than 10 percent of this country's population but almost completely dominate our economy and to a slightly lesser extent control our political life. It's white people who are the minority in Panama, and the use of terminology appropriate to US society tends to mask the raw abuses of white power that we see here. You don't have to look much farther than the hues of the models that the advertising industry prefers and compare them to the folks you see on the street to know how racially stratified and exclusionary Panamanian society is. By comparison to the racially obsessed United States, it is arguable that we are fairly progressive in certain respects. But race relations in Panama ought to be looked at through a Panamanian rather than an American lens, and if that is done objectively there are clear and severe problems to see.
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