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Protest at the American Embassy

photos and text by Eric Jackson

On March 13 a small group of protesters from the November 29th National Liberation Movement (MLN-29) and allied organizations gathered in front of the US Embassy on Avenida Balboa to register their objections to US policy during George W. Bush's week-long trip to Latin America. Panama was not on the US president's intinerary this time. In front of the embassy was a line of Panamanian cops and a few embassy security people also looked on. At one point the protesters blocked all but one of the westbound traffic lanes, passing out literature to the drivers who slowly made their way through the one open lane. There was no violence or threat of violence.

The event's significance can be and has been spun in a number of different ways by different observers or pundits.

To this reporter, these are the important conclusions to be drawn:

* Anti-Americanism is not very strong in Panama at this time. The protesters spoke out mainly against the Iraq War, which Panamanians overwhelmingly oppose, and the proposed Free Trade Agreement with the United States, on which Panamanians are fairly evenly divided. Panama is one of the few places in Latin America where Bush gets positive public approval ratings, although his popularity here seems to be slipping as it is in the USA;

* The Panamanian left is divided and even though the protest was called in the name of the FRENADESO labor/left umbrella group, only those most closely aligned with the MLN-29 showed up. In the wake of the canal expansion referendum loss it would be natural for disappointment to lead to recriminations and divisions, and FRENADESO is suffering from some of that. The big division in the left these days, however, is whether there should be a leftist electoral party. The MLN-29, whose roots go back to a split with the Moscow-line communists in the 1960s, uses Fidelista symbolism and professes a fairly orthodox Marxist-Leninist concept of relationship between the "vanguard" and the "front," and insists that it is the vanguard of the Panamanian left and this country's working class. It may still be the largest of the old left formations, but within the constellation of the left the MLN-29 speaks for nothing close to a majority and thus it's against an electoral party in part because it would not be able to control such an organization. That sectarian "we're the vanguard" approach has alienated the other factions of the left, who thus did not participate in the March 13 protest;

* The call for this protest went out only a couple of days before the event, and neither the MLN-29 nor its student group the Revolutionary Student Front (FER-29) nor FRENADESO put a lot of resources or effort into it. This was a "maintain a presence" activity rather than a show of strength. Pollsters don't usually ask the right questions and people on the political fringes often dissimulate to pollsters, so the estimates of the Panamanian left's strength vary from negligible to a realization that more people in this country describe themselves as leftists than in any other place in the region, including the countries that have elected leftist governments in the past couple of years. This reporter roughly estimates that if all of the Panamanian left threw its efforts into a united leftist electoral party, it would get ballot status and receive something around 10 percent of the vote in general elections, becoming the third or fourth largest political party and cutting into part of the PRD's electoral base.

      The radical priest Conrado Sanjur carrying the Panamanian flag. The Panama

      Profundo Collective that's the main voice of this country's Liberation Theology

      Catholics did not participate in the protest.

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