Disturbing days

They shot her husband in the back, then the following day twice attacked the victim's mother's home to threaten the family. photo by FRENADESO

President Torrijos calls for "courtesy"

Cop charged with murder, other cops taunt victim's family

If you watch news on the PRD-aligned Panamanian TV stations --- that's all of them except for the Evangelicals' Hosanna TV --- you may have seen the violence that took place on the third time the police moved in on Al Iromi Smith's mother's house on February 13. You will not have been told that this was the objective, or of the previous two raids on that house that same day.

Al Iromi Smith was a construction worker by day and a university student by night, married with two children aged 5 and 11. His wife worked at the pharmacy at Policlinica Hugo Spadafora, the old Coco Solo hospital next to which this reporter grew up.

Injured with a birdshot pellet to the face, Smith and and two other similarly hurt members of the SUNTRACS construction workers union was at the entrance to that hospital when the lince motorcycle cops drove into their midst and Sergeant Eliseo Madrid Valdés pulled out his pistol and shot the unarmed Smith in the back at point-blank range.

National Police Chief Rolando Mirones issued a televised lie about how the cops acted in self defense. However, the medical examiner announced that Smith had been shot in the back and there were more than a dozen eyewitnesses just outside the door to the hospital where Smith was killed, and the prosecutor charged Sergeant Madrid with murder.

Colonel Daniel Delgado Diamante of General Noriega's general staff (now Minister of Government and Justice) and Major Severino Mejía (then General Noriega's adjutant, now Vice Minister of Government and Justice) did not discipline Mirones for being an accessory after the fact to murder by spreading a false cover story. No, they definitely didn't do that. Instead, these three men sent the police over to Smith's mother's house in Colon's La Feria the next day, while they were holding a wake for Iromi, to threaten family members with arrest. They did this not once, but twice.

Then the police came back to harrass the murder victim's family again, and this time neighbors responded first with rocks and bottles, then with sniper fire. Four police officers were shot and though some may end up with permanent limps none would die from their injuries. A paddywagon was set afire and the neighborhood police sub-station was trashed.

The PRD-aligned television stations presented it as a neighborhood full of savage blacks attacking the forces of peace and justice. In La Feria it was seen more as a neighborhood having had enough of a criminal gang that killed one of their own coming to taunt their victim's family.

And then Delgado's, Mejía's, Mirones's and Madrid's boss, President Martin Torrijos, went on TV to denounce Smith's union for the violence and call on SUNTRACS and the rest of organized labor to show more "courtesy."

The days of disturbances set off by the Iromi Smith murder are the subject of the lead news story this time.

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Quick polls by local news media found that, notwithstanding the generally anti-labor mainstream news coverage and steady stream of vitriol against SUNTRACS, which has this annoying habit of blocking the roads about their industrial and political grievances, a slight majority of Panamanians said that the violence was the government's fault and among the rest most people said that both the government and SUNTRACS were to blame. Those polls are not scientific but I suspect that Torrijos loses public approval points the next time that the respectable polling organizations measure this.

But the dictator's son who militarized the police and has overseen the killings of three unarmed SUNTRACS activists in recent months is not to blame. Unnamed government intelligence people gave a background briefing to selected lapdog "journalists" and, without giving any of the particulars, laid the blame on --- Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. The allegation, again without one shred of factual detail, was picked up in the newspaper column of discredited former Christian Democrat mayor Willy Cochez.

This tale also spread like wildfire among the right wing of the American community and beyond, and of course there are GOP-aligned websites here that are specifically designed to spread disinformation.

One of the readers of The Panama News asked me about it, and this was our email exchange:

I heard a rumor that Chávez was backing and providing funds to SUNTRACS for the current conflict. Is this fact or fiction?

I doubt this.

First of all, SUNTRACS collects a lot of money in dues from its members to finance its activities, and its leaders do not live extravagant lifestyles.

Second, it really didn't cost a lot to stage this week's protests. The big expense was about $50,000 to pay fines to bail out arrested members.

Third, Genaro López and Saúl Méndez are of the MLN-29 leftist faction / party, and the student affiliate of that group, FER-29, beats up members of MEBO, the Bolivarian Student Movement that's most closely ideologically aligned with Chávez.

Fourth, Venezuela and Panama have fairly good bilateral relations.

Now there are these Cuban exiles in Miami who dominate all US policy toward Latin America and after decades of casting everything that happens here in terms of Fidel Castro plots, they now do the same in terms of Hugo Chávez plots. They would spread the rumor you have heard.

Then there are the inbred 80 or so families that own everything in this country and blind themselves to what's going on in society --- most of them were never permitted by their parents to go into working class neighborhoods or meet any working people except for servants, and they continue that ban with their kids and are willing to believe any weird explanation about what's going on that avoids any mention of the privileges they hold having anything to do with the problem. They'd believe and pass on the rumor you heard.

But really, if Chávez were calling the shots and wanted a radical government in Panama he'd surely call the MLN-29 on the carpet and tell them to stop their sectarian BS, get over their reflexive street blockade habit and form a political party along with other radical groups, grabbing the balance of power in the legislature next year and being a threat to take over the country five years later.

Don't look to Venezuela. Look to decades of bad blood among factions in Panama and the particular problems that the country now faces to understand what's going on.

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An old feud? Miguel Antonio Bernal gets into just how old, with his take on an ongoing international court case about a disappearance and murder by the president's dad's dictatorship, which the current government is trying to get thrown out by essentially making arguments that Nazi war criminals vainly asserted at the Nuremberg trials.

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Now it seems that the government is about to sue SUNTRACS for property damages that took place during the disturbances. I wonder if President Torrijos or his government will pay child support for Iromi Smith's kids.

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Meanwhile, in the USA Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama continue to duke it out in a close race for the Democratic nomination and most likely the presidency itself; and Fidel Castro has ended the speculation and resigned his formal positions within the Cuban government. Panama will be affected by what happens in the USA, and to a much lesser extent by what happens in Cuba.

There is no assurance that the Democrats will take the White House in November, but the odds are looking that way at the moment. If they don't, the United States will have its first Panamanian president and my brother Nick, now the new secretary for the local chapter of Democrats Abroad, has an opinion about that.

Is Fidel's resignation message "cool?" I can imagine all sorts of opinions about that, but notice that the mainstream corporate media only publish snippets of it, along with George W. Bush's demands about what Cuba's now former strongman's successors must do. I include the link to the entire message in the review section's Cool Internet sites feature.

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Yes, this front page and many of the features herein are ridiculously late again. However, a bunch of readers saw the lead news story a few days ago. See, as I make progress on each issue or as there is a special announcement of some sort --- a lot of time about an event about which I got late notice --- I post these things to my email list. If you want to be included on The Panama News email list, send me an email asking to be included on the list.

I have been slowly changing the format of The Panama News for awhile, and the next edition will look a bit different, as I am changing the format to be more on a constantly updating and less on a twice a month cycle. Once that reformatting has taken place, there will be continued changes.

One of the changes to happen will be the updating and expansion of the links. I know that it has been years since I have updated my listing of English-language religious services and that my Latin American and Caribbean news links also need a lot of work.

Another change will be in the form of some new online alliances that will put a lot of The Panama News content in other places. One such virtual locale will be the nascent Panama Sphere.

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In the USA February is Black History Month, and about half of the fun section, where all poetry and fiction go, is on that theme. The problem is that a lot of serious fiction is anything but humorous and really doesn't belong under the heading "fun," but there it is. The Panama News isn't dumbed down, and when we get good fiction from someone who grew up at Fort Davis, we will find a place for it.

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A few days after these are written, this reporter will be taking to the great outdoors to do a bunch of stories from one of the more remote parts of Panama. But I didn't have to go far to get this edition's outdoors page. Hanging clothes to dry one day, I noticed my mom's rose bushes. The next day, three out of the four of them had been stripped clean by leaf cutter ants. Ah, life in the tropics. The foliage and flowers will grow back once the rains start again in earnest.