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opinion
Also in this section: Jackson, Martín's neocolonial dream Not a proud future by Eric Jackson
We don’t serve your country, don’t serve your king Don’t know your customs, don’t speak your tongue Midnight Oil What’s wrong with a little bit of colonialism? You mean, besides the violence, cruelty and hatreds that it engenders? Besides the fact that the tide of history has been running the other way for some decades now? Beside the fact that in almost all countries that extricated themselves from colonial shackles --- including Panama --- people died for their nations’ independence? From the colonizers’ perspective, there is this insufferable arrogance, even when there are the best intentions and the utmost civility rules. It’s pure hubris, proven foolish time and time again, for people in one nation to believe themselves capable of properly running the public affairs of another nation. Although in relatively brief emergencies there have been some nations rescued by others, those are rare and ephemeral occasions. From the colonized point of view, there is this disgusting dependence. Even if many individuals manage to hang onto their dignity, the obsequious are the ones who get ahead and helplessness becomes the national culture. Once the illusions go away but the colony lingers, a sullen separation ensues. I grew up colonial. They called it the Canal Zone. It was too big to completely fence, but they had a police force to plug the gaps and maintain this enclave as a gated community, if you will. There were many wonderful things about the Canal Zone, especially for the Zonians, but in the long run it was unsustainable and the flashpoint for ugly passions on both sides. It was a colonial social experiment that needed to end. Generations of Panamanians poured their best efforts, and sometimes their blood and lives, into making it end. The agreement that made it end happened on the watch of one Omar Torrijos Herrera, a man about whom nasty things may truthfully be said, but this shining accomplishment of his will always wash away a great deal of sin in the eyes of many Panamanians. Leave it to Omar’s son to mortgage this country’s future to another colonial scheme. His dad did away with an exclusionary foreign-speaking enclave. Martín has issued regulations to implement his new coastal and island development law that are designed to create new colonial enclaves. This isn’t a scheme for posh resorts on formerly idyllic beaches. It’s a program to promote housing developments that specifically discriminate against both Panamanians and foreigners who are legally resident in Panama. The law allows for concessions and creates special incentives for upscale beachfront residential developments in which 80 percent or more of the people are foreigners who are not legal Panamanian residents. The intention is for big businesses to claim dibs on formerly public beaches for the use of foreign millionaires who maintain their principal residences elsewhere. There was a time when I was a Rust Belt wardheeler in a small city with auto parts plants and a teachers’ college, wherein there was this self-destructive Chamber of Commerce forever selling the mirage of developments that would bring millionaires to town and thus turn the local business climate around. I smell similar pathos here --- Panama will attract a lot more rich people than Ypsilanti did, but then the former is a country with a population of 3,000,000 while the latter was a city with 30,000 people. But it’s the same search for a sugar daddy savior and the results will be predictably similar on one level. What worries me the most, however, is the creation of ghettoes for foreigners. People are going to be angry about their displacement and the privatization of public assets that they had long enjoyed anyway. Then the new developments will be physically organized to minimize contact between the locals and the foreigners. It will make it very easy for any demagogue to demonize the foreigners, because it’s easier to do that when people don’t know the would-be demons on a personal basis. Think about how that worked in recent Panamanian history. When I was a kid, American soldiers were mostly young draftees confined on bases, who didn’t learn the language and who were mainly seen when they came into town on weekend passes to party. Few Panamanians actually knew these people, but a large segment of society actively despised them. When I returned many years later, there was an all-volunteer military, a large portion of whose members were housed off base. Toward the end the face that the US Armed Forces showed to the Panamanian people was more often than not the polite and considerate neighbor down the hall or in the house next door. Even after all the horrors of the 1989 US invasion and its aftermath, that made it hard to demonize the American troops in the eyes of most Panamanians, because people actually knew those whom others urged them to see as devils incarnate. The biggest part of the changed attitude about American soldiers was the increased personal contact. But such decolonization as Omar accomplished, Martín seems eager to fritter away. In search of a purported economic quick fix, the son is willing to once again make Panamanians third-class non-citizens in parts of Panama. It’s a blunder of historic proportions and probably a violation of several parts of the Panamanian constitution to boot. I am sure that there will be Americans who protest that I have misinterpreted their intentions, or disrespected their individual right to choose. To a certain extent, the latter may be true, in the sense that I would also disrespect the desire of some white Americans to live in fenced-off neighborhoods where black people are not allowed. They have laws against that sort of thing up there, and we should also have them here. But I don’t want to denigrate the positive things that many people in the American community here do for their neighbors. I would, however, advise people to be quietly and selectively positive in their charitable works. Americans won’t save Panama, but the long established gringo community here can be, should be and usually is a positive factor in isthmian society.
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