opinion
Also in
this section:
Editorial,
Panamanian voters should check and update their registrations this
month
Bernal, The Intoxication of the Polls
Leis, Look in the eye of the needle
Baker, Meet the new welfare king
Holdeman & Birns, NAFTA becomes an
issue in Democratic primaries
Jacinto, NAFTA and Mexico's farmers and
president
Pilgrim, Slash and burn in US presidential
race
Human
Rights Watch, Olympic Committee operating in a moral void
Reporters
Without Borders, China's plan to manage Olympics journalists
Gutman,
History lessons to be forgotten
Sirias, Winning an award for a book that had no
publisher
Letters to the editor
Panamanian
voters need to defend their franchise
Check
and update your voting address by the end of April
In
the name of cleansing the voter rolls of people who are dead, no
longer live in Panama, or haven't voted for many years, the
Electoral Tribunal has removed more than 90,000 names from the
voting lists. At the beginning of the recent PRD internal election
process we saw that even a public official of the ruling party had
been mistakenly removed. We have also seen government ads
threatening prosecution for those who vote at the wrong mesa. The
PRD-dominated tribunal has also set an unusual and unfair April
30, 2008 deadline for voters to update their addresses in order to
vote in May of 2009.
We
know this government's intent from its behavior in the 2006 canal
expansion referendum, from the arrest of a candidate for a
Vanguardia Moral nomination for a seat in the legislature while he
was campaigning in El Chorrillo, from the election authorities'
acceptance of Balbina Herrera's use of public assets to promote
her personal political fortunes, from PRD deputy Franz Wever's use
of the national baseball federation's assets to advance his
aspirations, and from the Norieguista pasts of key Torrijos
administration officials. If they feel they have to do so and
think they can get away with it, the current ruling party is
prepared to use fraud to prolong its stay in power.
The PRD
may legitimately get the votes for another term in power.
And it's not just the PRD that could fall victim to the temptation
toward fraud, but they are the only ones with the means to pull it
off in this election cycle.
We
can't afford the old games. This country's public institutions are
broken.
You'd be a fool and an irresponsible citizen to
trust someone else to fix the problems. You should vote and you
should defend your role in the political process. Check with the
Tribunal Electoral before the end of the month to make sure that
you are registered to vote. If you are registered at an address
where you no longer live, update your voting address.
Panamanian
citizens living abroad, including those who were born in Panama to
American parents, will also have the right to vote in the 2009
elections, but only if they register to vote on or before April
30. Now is the time for Panama's overseas voters to contact the
nearest Panamanian consulate and get registered.
Plenty
of fault to go around
Recently
in Caracas, we had a meeting of the Inter-American Press
Association and at the same time the First Latin American
Conference Against Media Terrorism. Fewer than 400 of the several
thousand news organizations in the Americas were represented at
the former gathering and an even smaller percentage of Latin
America's news media were at the latter meeting.
The two
meetings did not speak with one another, they spoke past each
other.
The
IAPA (or SIP, by its Spanish initials) took on Venezuela's real or
imagined offenses against the formerly ruling oligarchy's
corporate media. Across town those gathered for the opposing
conference took on those same media's attempts to foment coups in
Venezuela, secessionist movements in Bolivia and other
undemocratic measures whenever a Latin American electorate moves
left.
The
IAPA has never come to the defense of The Panama News or any other
small Panamanian medium faced with bogus criminal defamation
charges. The folks at the encounter against media terrorism didn't
see fit to call for the freedom of the people serving prison terms
in Cuba for attempting to practice independent journalism.
There did not appear to be a full discussion on either side about
the harm that exclusions on the basis of economic class,
ethnicity, ideology and partisan affiliations do to both freedom
of the press and the healthy development of Latin American
nations.
It
really is a shame that the two groups keep shouting past one
another, because they really are two of the several necessary
parties to a public debate that the region ought to have.
Without denigrating the many excellent people who work for
the US-based Associated Press, the UK-based Reuters, the Agence
France Presse, the EFE news bureau that's based in Spain,
Miami-based Univision, Atlanta-based CNN or the
Australian-American-owned Fox, people in this region are not well
served by having our news exclusively reported to the rest of the
world by corporations from elsewhere.
Nor are our
societies well served by local news monopolies exercised either by
governments or tiny wealthy elites. The technology and expertise
are out there to give us a new information order that includes
press freedom, higher standards and the ability of Latin American
societies to present their realities to themselves and to the rest
of the world without all the distorting filters.
Latin
America can't solve its many problems without full and frank
discussion of them and we can't have those discussions without
good information. Yes, there are powerful people with economic or
political interests at stake --- by and large, many of those whose
organizations were represented at the two meetings in Caracas ---
but none of them should be allowed to monopolize our regional
discourse or censor our information.
It's time to get past
the notions of media barons conspiring with militarists to
overthrow elected governments, of governments --- elected or
otherwise --- attempting to silence the voices of those whom they
don't control, of little corporate elites deciding which subjects
are reported and which aren't. Latin American democracy needs a
free, diverse and thriving Latin American press and we don't yet
have it.
Bear
in mind...
A
casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not
prove anything.
Friedrich
Nietzsche
Of
all God's creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave
of the leash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with
the cat it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the
cat.
Mark
Twain
Advice
is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we
didn't.
Erica
Jong
Also in
this section:
Editorial,
Panamanian voters should check and update their registrations this
month
Bernal, The Intoxication of the Polls
Leis, Look in the eye of the needle
Baker, Meet the new welfare king
Holdeman & Birns, NAFTA becomes an
issue in Democratic primaries
Jacinto, NAFTA and Mexico's farmers and
president
Pilgrim, Slash and burn in US presidential
race
Human
Rights Watch, Olympic Committee operating in a moral void
Reporters
Without Borders, China's plan to manage Olympics journalists
Gutman,
History lessons to be forgotten
Sirias, Winning an award for a book that had no
publisher
Letters to the editor
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