opinion

Dysfunctional Panama is
into an election year
by Eric Jackson

Mayday 2008 --- a year and a couple of days from Election Day 2009. If you haven't registered to vote at the place where you're living by now, the law puts you on the sidelines for next year's election. The campaigning --- and the end of administration looting binge by public employees --- has been underway for some time now.

So did we see a labor movement ready to jump in there and tip the balance? Hardly. In this year's parade we saw the drastic non-participation of CUT, FENASEP, the racketeering company unions with which the PRD is attacking SUNTRACS and so on. Unlike last year, nobody was passing out any literature about how the PRD --- let alone any of the opposition parties --- speaks for the Panamanian working class. Organized labor was divided roughly in three: the government-aligned CONATO and CUT unions (which are feuding among themselves), the leftist ULIP unions and organizations (which are feuding with other leftists) and the left contingent that was larger than all the others combined, the FRENADESO / CONUSI / SUNTRACS crowd. In other words, we have seen a polarization and shift to the left in organized labor. There has been a collapse of pretenses that the PRD is offering anything positive to working men and women. There's an institutionalization of the rift in the left, with FRENADESO against electoral politics and ULIP thinking that it ought to offer voters an  alternative but unable to get it together.

Politically, then, we see a dysfunctional labor movement.

As the proud union members and their families marched down the street, in several spots they had to step around the raw sewage that was bubbling up from the sewers, from breaks that only a few short months ago, after a very long time without any response, the IDAAN water and sewer utility pretended to have fixed. One of these is a block away from my office.

The sewage didn't smell as bad as it usually does, because on this morning my sense of smell wasn't working right. The afternoon before I covered a baseball game at the Rodney Carew National Stadium, which was covered in a pall of smoke from a brush fire that has swept into the city dump on Cerro Patacon. The fire was still smoldering on Mayday. My clothes hamper had the stench of burned plastic and my sinuses were killing me.

Those who picked up La Estrella along the way would have noticed the lead story about how, according to US and Colombian government sources, the kidnapping of businessman and right-wing Cuban-American political activist Cecilio Padrón at Costa del Este a month before was a FARC job. And what's the provenance of the three suspects who have been arrested so far? They're members of the National Police.

President Torrijos was in Havana to talk with Raúl Castro, having previously shown up at international Social Democratic meetings and also having given his assurances to the Americans about his commitments to a free trade agreement and the War on Terror. He wasn't available to answer questions about how it appears that FARC has infiltrated the National Police.

Of course, from a Panamanian perspective the national concern about terrorism should extend to an interest in the activities of the Cuban American National Foundation in this country. The armed affiliate of the right-wing Miami exile movement, the US state-sponsored terrorists of the Luis Posada Carriles gang, did after all try to set off an explosion at the University of Panama that would have killed hundreds of people, some of them at the nearby Arnulfo Arias Hospital Complex.

So is our political opposition jumping up and down and screaming about working people getting the short end of the stick, collapsing government services, an increasingly unlivable capital city, incongruent Panamanian foreign policies, a police force infiltrated and subverted by gangsters and Colombian bad guys and terrorists on the streets of our capital? I haven't heard very much of that at all. Most of what I hear from the opposition parties lately are arguments about who gets what. The honorable exceptions are from a few individuals whom the others deride as crazy, ineffectual or both.

And the PRD? They're having a primary brawl, wherein Juan Carlos Navarro is going around promising this and that and Balbina Herrera is emphasizing her Torrijista / Norieguista / Dignity Battalions roots.

There are always exceptions, but the general rule here is that nobody works on Mayday. But even making allowance for that, it's still very clear on this day that our public institutions don't work well on any day, and though nobody's very happy about the situation we don't see any groundswell of support for a viable alternative.

Leave it to the politicians and the tourism promoters to hail all of this as democracy and stability. To me it look like things have all been neatly arranged with the big boxes balanced atop the little ones below, such that a trivial nudge might bring the whole stack tumbling down.