|
|
|
|
|
News
| Business
| Editorial
| Opinion
| Letters
| Arts
| Review
| Community
| Fun
| Travel |
Volume
13, Number 23 |
|
|
|
||
Also
in this section: The
PRD's strategy to confront social movements Different sectors of Panamanian society, in organized or spontaneous ways, have demonstrated in the streets demanding government attention to their demands and claims. The Torrijos administration's response to society's just demands has been compulsion, intimidation, repression, incarceration and even death. This method is not new, it's a hand-me-down from the epoch of the military rulers, who to confront the struggles of the popular sectors gave themselves the task of murdering and jailing popular leaders, and also promoted a process of cooptation that allowed them to created pseudo-leaders responsive to their party in some popular organizations. Today, these latter are the first tools they use to harm the public interest and to try to discredit those who are promoting the struggle in defense of society's claims. Using the cooptation of leaders or pseudo-leaders to divide the unions and professional organizations, and also to advocate a long struggle in an attempt to exhaust them, and at the end of the story to impose their decision. Clear examples of this conduct were given during the process of imposing the social security law (the death law) and in the union struggles of the teachers and the doctors, in which the PRD administration undertook the task of taking over unions, dividing organizations and imposing representatives who have no base of support in the labor movement. They also dedicated themselves to creating ad hoc groups to confront the struggles for the demands that various social sectors advance, and thus to break strikes and defeat other forms of action that the popular movements may use as methods to assert their causes. Through these ephemeral fronts they try to divide and weaken the social movements. Another of the tactics employed by this administration is the manipulation of information. They use, to the extent that they control them, the communications media to turn public opinion against the social movements' actions and for this in this year only the government has put more than $25 million into publicity. As part of this strategy they also cut off access to the communications media by the legitimate representatives of Panama's social movements, so as to avoid the fallacies of their arguments being unmasked. To the extent that the population and the social organizations take notice that only organized struggle allows them to accomplish their goals, the repressive methods become more evident. This is the situation through which the construction workers are living, in which, facing a leadership committed to the interests of the working class, that won't succumb to cooptation, intimidation and repression, the government and the employers take recourse to using strikebreakers and hit men, the result being the murders of our union brothers Osvaldo Lorenzo and Luiyi Argüelles. This is the way the PRD historically acts. In no case is there the disposition to attend to social demands --- on the contrary, they look for conditions to weaken the unions and strike out at them, as they have done with the workers, with the teachers and as they are now doing with the doctors. They exercise power over the media in the first place, through the closure of independent communications media, falsification of information and the mounting of an advertising campaign that tries to discredit those who struggle. On the other hand, they sow divisions in the organizations via government adepts and moreover promote corruption and cooptation in order to impose "accords" that don't respond to what the rank-and-file are legitimately demanding at the misnamed "dialogue tables." These methods aren't new but they have intensified. They are a means of dealing with the actions of the unions, associations and working class organizations that are making demands of redress for the problems of the Panamanian people at a moment of broad public rejection of Martín Torrijos's performance in office. In this scenario organizations like FRENADESO, which fight against neo-liberalism, corruption, nepotism and the sale of our country, have had to confront the repression and incarceration that this government has imposed upon us, with the complicity of the oligarchic parties, business owners and their adepts. We also confront the millionaire's machinery, the media blockade and the manipulation of information by those who flaunt their economic power to control society's communication media. This anti-democratic reality obliges the Panamanian social movement to organize and unify its forces, to resume the methods of struggle of the popular sectors in order to confront the methods of repression and cooptation, and thus to confront the anti-popular policies that the PRD imposes upon us.
The author is a construction worker and secretary general of the SUNTRACS construction workers union Also
in this section:
Make
the Executive Hotel your headquarters in Panama City --- http://ww.executivehotel-panama.com
|
||||||||||
|
©
2007 by Eric Jackson email: editor@thepanamanews.com or phone: (507) 6-632-6343 Mailing
address: |
|
|
||||||||
