opinion

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Reporters Without Borders, 2006 was a year of danger for journalists in the Americas

Among authorities...

by Miguel Antonio Bernal

Much of what one learns in the daily struggle for democracy, justice and freedom is that "Democracy is the guarantee that human rights won't be suppressed, whether it's convenient or not." However, now we encounter the so-called Technical Committee of Health Guarantors, who say as a footnote to their "Road Map" that "You can't change the status quo trying to be politically correct."

In other words, the end justifies the means and thus the distinguished medical professionals turned "guarantors" in their zeal to stay on the chief executive's good side propose to turn citizens into merchandise and facilitate the violation of the Social Security Fund's autonomy and attempt, by way of their proposal to create a National Health Care Authority (ANAS) to facilitate the violation of one of the most elementat human rights, the right to health.

To suggest that it doesn't matter what means one has to recur in order to change the status quo in the health care of Panamanians and other residents of our country is to forget that the means justify the end. As Savater told us: "I believe taht fundamentally, democracies are the political regimes in which the means justify the ends. The true concept of democracy is that, instead of that maxim that 'the end justifies the means' in which tyrannies always clothe themselves and the abuses in the names of these ends that never come about --- but the abuse always comes and the end that you get is the abusive means --- instead of this, in democracy the means are what justify the end."

The proposed ANAS doesn't respect the inviolability of the person, nor the autonomy of the person and moreover disrespects that dignity of the person because they believe that what they're imposing is good, forgetting that "when the good is imposed it stops being good," that we can't imposed what's good.

The indiscriminate use that we hear lately in our midst of the term "authority" is evidence not only of the loss of the principle of authority, but also that of the authority of principles.

The listing of contrived "authorities" is endless. Thus we've had the Interoceanic Regional Authority (ARI), the National Environmental Authority (ANAM), the National Maritime Authority (AMN), the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), the Transit and Land Transportation Authority (ATTT), the Consumer Protection and Defense of Competition Authority, the Public Services Authority, the Aquatic Resources Authority, and now the National Health Care Authority (ANAS), which, in turn, proposes a Medicines and Technology Authority!

The vices of authoritarianism blossom day after day, thanks to the maintenance of economic, social and political structures that give them life and form. Given that authoritarianism is a form of political conduct, the word, Borja tells us, "derives from authority, that is, the idea of a juridically regulated ability to command, which denotes a tendency to impose an abusive and unlimited power in society." And the same author expands: "In general, all authoritarian regimes, in the relationship between power and freedom, accentuate power as the factor of social order. They produce a disequilibrium between these two elements of the political equation. But the concept, in all its manifestations, is very extensive and ends in a broad gamut of authoritarianisms, which can run from totalitarianism and tyranny to caesarism, with different gradations of severity in public authority."

The Technical Committee of Health Guarantors (Carlos  Abadía, Irina Alvarado, Rafael Aparicio, Gaspar García de Paredes, Enrique  Mendoza, Jorge Medrano, Jorge Motta, Daniel Pichel, Julio Rodríguez, Xavier Sáez-Llorens, José Terán, Pedro Ernesto Vargas, Guadalupe Verdejo, Juan Antonio Tejada), by opting for a reformulation of the sentence that 'the ends justifies the means' expressed in their statement that "You can't change the status quo trying to be politically correct," has chosen to put into effect the thinking that has harmed so many, over so long a time: "We can't reveal the objective behind our actions to leave the people distracted and uninformed. If you have no idea of our intentions, you can't prepare a defense. We have to carry them far down a mistaken road, enshrouded in smoke, so that when we tell them what we propose it will be too late."

This is, in synthesis, where the "Road Map" of those, because they want to be among authorities, tell us that they offer a "universal, solidary and equitable" health care system with "primary attention," which is "participatory," and of excellent quality, when in reality they just want to please the monarch/president and thus opted to follow the advice of Baltasar Gracián (1601-1658): "You can't end up being taken for an actor in a farce, even though it's impossible to live today without being one. You have to let the biggest and most malicious lie conceal that which looks malicious."

Sirias, Daniel Ortega in retrospect
Jackson, The late great Molly Ivins
Bernal, About authorities
Gutman, The danger in the Middle East
Lerner, The "New Anti-Semitism"
Donovan, Uruguayan pulp fiction
Henke, Is Cuba really at a crossroads?
Pilgrim, The Iraq War from a Caribbean perspective

Silié, Fidel Castro and the Youth Revolution of the 50s and 60s

Reporters Without Borders, 2006 was a year of danger for journalists in the Americas