Fundamental disagreements about human rights in Panama

According to the US State Department's report on human rights in Panama in 2007, "[t]here were no reports that the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings."

That would come as news to the Public Ministry, given that the National Police's Captain Clemente Buitrago and Lieutenant Cleofo González are are currently facing murder charges for the October 9 beating death of La Joya Penitientiary inmate Daniel Vela Rodríguez, as an extrajudicial punishment for an escape attempt.

"It's not true," law professor Miguel Antonio Bernal said of the State Department's assertion. "Look at all the murders in the prisons and jails. Look at the police shooting [of unarmed SUNTRACS activist Luiyi Argüelles] on Isla Viveros last August." (Two police officers are under investigation but have not been formally charged in that case.)

The Torrijos administration was profuse in its gratitude to the US government. A press release from the presidential palace said that it "appreciated" that the State Department human rights report "recognized the advances made by Panama in this important matter."

The Bush administration has taken the United States well along the road to international pariah status with its open embrace of waterboarding torture, but to attribute US support for the beating to death of unruly prison inmates and the shooting of militant labor activists solely as a function of solidarity among human rights violators would be to ignore a lot of history. When an administration of any stripe is trying to persuade a reluctant US Congress to pass something with respect to Panama, it will deny human rights problems here. For example, Jimmy Carter denied the dozens of disappearances by the dictatorship to get the Panama Canal Treaties approved. And now the Bush administration wants ratification of a free trade deal with Panama.

Meanwhile, a week after the US report was released the Red de Derechos Humanos - Panama (Human Rights Network - Panama) issued a "shadow report" on human rights. Not, the 33-group coalition said, to criticize governments, but because the United Nations Human Rights Committee meetings were coming up the following week (March 24 and 25) and, although by treaty Panama is committed to issuing periodic human rights reports to the UN, it hasn't done so since 1992.

The coalition, which includes the Catholic Church's Justice and Peace Commission, criticized six broad areas of human rights abuses:

Discrimination against immigrants, people with dissident political views, the disabled and those who are infected with HIV;
A lack of resources allocated for the enforcement of laws protecting human rights;
The displacement of people from their homes, particularly to make way for tourist developments, hydroelectric dams or mining projects;
A prison system in which there is overcrowding, police brutality, poor health care and non-compliance with rules designed to combat abuses;
The government's refusal to normalize the status of refugees, including some who have been here 15 or more years; and
Violations of the rights of minors.

Meanwhile another human rights group that doesn't get along particularly well with the Catholic Church was issuing a separate critique. The New Men and Women's Association of Panama (AHMNP), Panama's principal gay and lesbian rights group, complained that the Torrijos administration had understated the rate of HIV infection in this country in a statement to the Global Fund. This, the AHMNP argued, leads to the assumption by international aid organizations that "Panama is a middle class country that needs no outside help," when the reality is that much of the HIV-positive population "is unattended by health authorities."

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