opinion

Pedro Miguel González
plays a nationalist card
by Eric Jackson

Without batting an eyelash, the guy voted to subordinate Panama's economy to that of the United States in an unequal free trade agreement. To attract supposed hordes of rich gringos to Panama, he backed a land and beach development law that's now playing itself out in countless local dramas where fishing villages and other long-time residents are being run off of lands they and their families have occupied for decades, to make room for foreigners. He voted for legislation to retroactively shield public officials of his party from liability for ignoring the specified legal procedures and restrictions on development in the former Canal Zone, which offenses include the trashing of national parks. His crowd even wants to turn the symbol of our capital and of our nation's full sovereignty, Cerro Ancon National Park, into a privatized tourist trap "just like Disney World" for the most vulgar of the foreign tourists. So when Pedro Miguel González plays the nationalist card, I look askance.

The particular card? The 20th of December. On that day in 1989, El Chorrillo burned. Hundreds of innocent people were killed, plus a much smaller number of brave combatants on both sides.

Manuel Antonio Noriega was Uncle Sam's sadistic son of a bitch for many years. The man whom General Omar Torrijos described as "my gangster" got along so well with the Reagan administration that the US State Department vouched for him when he imposed the dishonest banker Nicolas Ardito Barletta in a fraudulent 1984 election. But then the men in Washington wanted things that Noriega couldn't or wouldn't deliver and there was a falling out.

The 1989 US invasion wasn't motivated by drugs. It wasn't about bringing democracy to Panama. It was an egotistical act by a politician trying to prove something that could never be proven because it never was true, that said politician was not a wimp. George H. W. Bush was and is a wimp --- that's what that "read my lips" election promise and its subsequent violation were all about.

(Is there a lesson to be learned? Perhaps it's that parents should make their little boys eat their broccoli. Otherwise they might catch a horrible vitamin deficiency disease and grow up to be wimps.)

George H. W. Bush ordered a reckless blunt instrument invasion to do what could have been done with a surgical strike, killing hundreds of innocent Panamanians and dumping their bodies into big unmarked pits, hoping to hide his crime from world opinion. But the man's not only a wimp but also a racist and because the bodies of a couple of US citizens were mistakenly thrown into the mass graves he ordered other people to dig up the rotting bodies and sort through them to find the two Americans.

The conduct of many Panamanians in all of this was disgraceful in its own way. The Geneva Conventions require that an invading army maintain order and suppress looting and in the invasion of Panama, as with the subsequent US invasion of Iraq under George W. Bush, American forces deliberately violated this international law and stood by to watch the looting. That so many Panamanians went along and provided this sort of entertainment for an invading army is a permanent stain on this nation's character.

(In Iraq it was something a bit different. There much of the looting was of Saddam's arsenals, in order to grab the materials for improvised weapons that have stained the roads of Iraq with the blood of many American soldiers. History, you see, doesn't exactly repeat itself.)

The looting that accompanied and followed the invasion was not just a matter of mobs raiding stores, but also of US troops taking the cars and other valuables of many people who had jobs with the military government, whether or not they had committed any crime. Generally this property was duly turned over to the new Panamanian government and in many cases it then disappeared. Were the truth to be found and told about what happened to all these valuables, it would likely embarrass more than one current political notable.

So now Pedro Miguel González has led the National Assembly to make December 20 an annual day of mourning, and order the Public Ministry --- whose funds he and his colleagues have cut and whose investigative apparatus they have taken away --- to conduct an investigation of this sad historical event. Now that the Public Ministry's investigative arm, the Judicial Technical Police, has been disbanded and merged into the National Police, any actual detective work would be done by the Ministry of Government and Justice --- which is headed by (former) Colonel Daniel Delgado Diamante, a member of Noriega's general staff back then, and (former) Major Severino Mejías, who was Noriega's adjutant.

About 700 people were killed in the 1989 invasion. By and large, their names are known. There are also about 700 complaints pending with the Public Ministry about people who were allegedly poisoned to death by cough syrup containing toxic diethylene glycol that was mixed and distributed by the Torrijos administration. Pedro Miguel González and the National Assembly he leads have made sure that the budget doesn't give the Institute for Legal Medicine what they need to do the proper toxicology tests on the remains of the Panamanians that his party's administration poisoned.

Wimp politicians setting up rigged investigations? Wimp politicians trying to cover up disasters on their watch? Both the United States and Panama have been plagued with too much of that. But this is Panama and the economic effect of the National Assembly's order to investigate an 18-year-old historical event is the cover-up of an equally fatal chain of events in which the current PRD administration's negligence and lack of transparency played major causative roles. It's a pretense of seeking justice for one set of bereaved families in order to deny justice to an equally large set of families, many of whom have lost their breadwinners in the past year and one-half.

Oh, and Pedro Miguel's special little argument with US authorities? I think he probably did kill Sergeant Hernandez, but I also think that there was enough of a reasonable doubt to justify his acquittal. It was a cowardly ambush, but then George H. W. Bush's 1992 trip to Panama to make an election event out of the catastrophe he ordered was also cowardly.

Pedro Miguel González says that he didn't kill Zak Hernandez. He was acquitted of it. Although I don't believe him, it's probably best that he should be taken at his word about this matter. 

But with that allegation deleted, what's left of Pedro Miguel's nationalist credentials? Well, the deputy from Santa Fe has a record in public office that this latest bit of grandstanding doesn't wash away. His nationalist credentials are as genuine as --- the University of Panama rector's doctorate.