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Now that they're killing people

by Eric Jackson

An infamously corrupt Brazilian company favored by the Torrijos administration requires construction workers as a condition of employment to sign a contract in Portuguese, join a company union and quit the real construction union. When the expected reaction comes, the company's hired goons stab union workers and rob a photojournalist, then the next day open fire on union picketers, killing a local union leader and wounding two others. The Minister of Labor, Minister of Government and Justice and Minister of Education, all of them recycled apparatchiki from the dictatorship, blame the union. There won't be any investigation of the journalist's robbery, there won't be any investigation of the stabbings, and the probe into the shooting will only focus on those with gunpowder residues on their hands and certainly won't touch the company's management.

A couple of days later, the National Police came to the defense of a company headed by a Colombian who had already been handed an insultingly low fine for destroying eight of Panama's precolumbian archaeological sites, who has made public death threats on the front pages of our leading newspapers, whose partners include a Frenchman convicted of embezzlement from the bank for which he worked and one Héctor Alemán, a legislator, former government and justice minister and President Torrijos's campaign manager. The police opened fire on a group of workers armed with a letter from the mayor, noting that the construction project for which a company union and hired hit men had been brought in didn't actually have a building permit. An unarmed 25-year-old father of two was killed. The government first said it was an accident. Then they said that the men against whom they fired had been armed. Then they said that the cop who fired had only used rubber bullets. Ah, but before the act of violence, the police had twice frisked members of the union delegation and afterwards they were in control of the death scene, and yet they produced no weapon. And then the medical examiner reported that the young worker's heart had been punctured with a shotgun pellet, not a rubber bullet.

Now the government has come up with an allegation that the leaders of the SUNTRACS construction workers' union had conspired to cause violence at a march that turned out peaceful, even though police had on at least three occasions during that protest directed traffic into the marchers.

The Torrijos administration has taken a tactical and strategic turn in the direction of a police state. It's time for the groups and individuals who are disposed to resist this trend to take notice and adjust behavior.

And I don't mean the deployment of a new type of missile in the course of blocking the street in front of the university. I don't mean a new plan to snarl city traffic. I don't mean a renewed argument about which Marxist-Leninist clique has the right to call itself the vanguard. I don't mean walking down a street lined with as many people who are hostile as those who are friendly chanting "the People united will never be defeated."

SUNTRACS and FRENADESO and the factions aligned with it need to get over their stupidity about electoral politics right away. Those factions of the left and the labor movement who have been alienated from SUNTRACS and FRENADESO who really do advocate progress and the cause of the working class need to reacquaint themselves with the old socialist maxim that "an injury to one is an injury to all."

Strikes and street protests may still have a place in an effective resistance against the government's return to Norieguista ways, but understand that all the people who marched to the Presidencia on August 16 were ignored as one more crowd of protesters but if they put themselves to the task of canvassing the nation for supporters they could put a new political party on the ballot in about a week. Understand that if they dedicated themselves to reaching out to working people on the buses they would offset all those hideous gangsta rap "Martín Torrijos as protector of the environment" ads that the government has placed on radio stations with our money. Understand that if half of the journalism students who marched that day got together and showed the least bit of independent initiative, there would be a newspaper to challenge the anti-labor information oligopoly.

For any labor union to be satisfied with its position in an economy that's overwhelmingly organized is scandalous, and union leaders who concentrate on defending what they have in this situation are committing a serious error. For any campus radical group to be satisfied with the perks it gets from a corrupt university administration that undermines the futures of the great majority of students by its very existence is scandalous, and student leaders who bask in the temporary comforts they now enjoy and shirk the homework of transforming a troubled university and a troubled society aren't really leaders.

Yes, the president and his hoodlum clique have now determined that they're going to smash the labor movement and all other opposition, and that people who oppose them will be killed. Those of us who are serious about social change must be ready to die, but far more important than that will be our commitment to live and work for the cause and to do so with a greater measure of intelligence and creativity.

Bernal, Dissent and violence
Gutman, Has America lost its moral compass?
Amnesty International, China lags in implementing human rights promises
Nasser, Gaza beyond the humanitarian and political perspectives
Weisbrot, The western mainstream media and Venezuela
Carmona, Climate change in Latin America and the Caribbean
Pilgrim, Another hurricane season in the Caribbean
Denis, Defending the interests of small states

Kellberg & Duncan, Haiti's cautious government

Caribbean Guyana Institute for Democracy, Repression in Guyana is a CARICOM issue

Schaeffer & Sánchez, Why Paraguay matters
Schaeffer, A scandal a day in Brazil while Lula was away

Lauer, The CAFTA referendum in Costa Rica

Jackson, Now that they're killing people...