opinion

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Gutman, Open letter to George W. Bush about the Iraq War
Silié, For peace and development in 2007
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Cohen, Negroponte becomes Latin America's problem again
Bernal, Panama facing Poland's frequent fate?

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Jackson, Who's left?

The polonization of Panama

by Miguel Antonio Bernal

Twenty years ago we Panamanians were facing a social, political and economic situation that, for those who identified with and benefited from the militarist regime, was acceptable and tolerable. The dictatorship had found a second wind after the “approval” of the 1983 reforms to the militarist constitution, brought about with the almost total support of the political party leaderships, which in 2004 repeated this reformist attitude.

However, the yearning for democracy, justice and liberty didn’t hesitate to manifest itself on the streets beginning in June of 1987. The imposition --- by way of election fraud --- of Ardito Barletta in 1984, the rise of the National Civilista Coordinator (COCINA) to oppose the attempts to raise taxes, the reactions against the paramilitary group F-8, the murder of Serafín Mittroti, the decapitation of Hugo Spadafora Franco, the proposed changes to the Organic Law of Education and the Social Security Fund reforms, and moreover the increases in worker and employer withholding and the increase in retirement age, and the elimination of price controls, were the immediate causes of the protests that erupted after the declarations of then-Colonel Roberto Díaz Herrera.

After the invasion, we lived under an unceasing governmental policy marked by its evasion of the central problems of Panamanian society, in which the options given citizens were devoid of all content, based as they were on a so-called “electoral mandate” without active participation, without political debate or reflection, in which poverty, inequality and unemployment reached unacceptable levels which confirmed that those who governed neither attend to citizens’ needs nor permit Panamanians to express themselves as citizens with full rights as equals on the public stage.

The imperative need to build, by way of a constituent assembly process, a new legitimacy for the Panamanian state, one that abandons once and for all the prevailing and increasing inequalities and that leaves behind the electoral farces and moves toward a true citizens’ democracy, continues to be rejected by almost the all of the party leaderships over which those who hold true power in our country preside. The best example of this we have just lived through, in the months preceding the canal expansion referendum when every sort of instrument of manipulation was used to support the anti-national thesis of a country in service to a canal.

Day by day, Panama is living through an accelerated race toward social disintegration. The citizen is ever less considered a person who has rights, the rules of political relations are upset and deformed by state institutions, the sense of law and constitutionality has been displaced in favor of autocracy and authoritarianism. It has been forgotten that, as the writer Carlos Fuentes reminded us, “The exercise of democracy is an affirmation of a nation’s sovereignty: it requires a democratic framework that derives from sovereignty in its pristine political sense. There is no sovereign nation on the international scene if it’s not sovereign in its national order, that is, if it doesn’t respect the political and cultural rights of the population conceived not as a simple number but as a complex quality, not as a quantity of inhabitants but as their quality as citizens.”  

Everthing indicates that we have now fully entered intro a process of “polonization” of Panama. The neologism “polonization” means the dismemberment and disappearance of a country. Literally it’s the action of dividing it and giving parts of its territory to other countries.

The concept comes from what happened in Poland, which was invaded by the Russian armies of Catherine II and by the Prussian armies of Frederick Wilhelm II. The military occupation permitted, in 1795, the partition of Polish territory among Austria (which got the southern provinces), Prussia (which got the northern provinces) and Russia (which got the eastern provinces). The Polish state was extinguished and the Polish nation wasn’t able to re-establish its unity as a state until 1918.

With respect to Panama, “polonization” is the product of internal decay, of divisiveness provoked by the great social, political and economic inequalities. Every day we are less of a society and more of a place where people live. It’s enough to consider what’s happening with public services such as water, electricity, education, health, environmental protection, transportation and the rule of law. That’s not to mention what’s happening to our coasts, our islands, our lands.

In olden time conquerors came “to steal the honey from our hives,” but today in the face of the anti-national, anti-democratic and anti-people behavior of those who govern us we’re guarding a silence that sounds very much like stupidity.

What they're saying about the Iraq War "surge"
Wallis, A criminal escalation of an unjust war
Gutman, Open letter to George W. Bush about the Iraq War
Silié, For peace and development in 2007
Birns, Chávez and Insulza get out of line
Watt, Ecuador says no
Cohen, Negroponte becomes Latin America's problem again
Bernal, Panama facing Poland's frequent fate?

Sirias, A tribute to Virgil Suárez

Jackson, Who's left?