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Also in this section:
Heavy fallout over Avenida Central chopper crash
Colon vocational high school uprising
37 years after disappearance, Gallego still inspires
New high court packing scheme in the works
Chávez expresses annoyance with FARC
Colon incinerator operators don't want photos
Campaign battles over polls, on many other fronts
Panama News Briefs
Lots of things up in the air in early campaigning
Education scandals won't go away
New Penal Code, with late amendments, goes into effect
Is the Merida Initiative going to bring a US base to Panama?
Restless indigenous areas
Burma's military situation altered by cyclone

Military issues, once thought settled, raise their heads again

Is Panama really demilitarized?
by Eric Jackson

Officially, Panama has no army. We have a police force that answers to civilian authority, as far as the law says on its face.

Officially, Panama has not had foreign military bases since the end of 1999, when the Carter - Torrijos Treaties mandated that the last US troops leave.

However, in recent days a number of events have called these arrangements into question, adding to long-standing incongruities:

Democratic members of a US congressional committee, in these days of heightened election year partisan warfare, noted a line item in a Bush administration bill --- an item that had been passed in previous budgets without comment --- and raised an objection. The money was for military aid to Panama, and the honorable representatives noted that Panama abolished its army after the 1989 US invasion. But Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told the committee that this country's National Police are "an army in all but name."
The Center for Security Policy, a neoconservative think tank, raised the issue of the Yellow Peril, this time obliquely touching Panama. In an April report entitled "China displaces the US at Ecuador's Manta Base," the group bemoaned the coming loss of the US air base in Manta Ecuador, without actually demonstrating a Chinese takeover of the facility. It calls for the base's urgent replacement.
The Bush administration is pressing the Congress to pass the Merida Initiative, which critics who include the AFL-CIO and Human Rights Watch frequently call "Plan Mexico" after the notorious Plan Colombia. But not so, argue backers of the initiative. It's an aid package intended to equip Mexican military and law enforcement authorities to gain the upper hand against drug cartels, with smaller appropriations for anti-drug, anti-corruption and anti-terrorist operations in Panama and the Central American countries.
Despite a law requiring the National Police to be directed by a civilian, President Torrijos has put a uniformed police commissioner in charge, using the subterfuge of calling him an "acting" director. His immediate superiors are both former officers of the old Panama Defense Forces, General Noriega's adjutant and a member of Noriega's general staff.
President Torrijos went to Washington on May 6 to meet with President Bush and the latter used the occasion to call on Congress to pass the Merida Initiative without amendment, something that appears unlikely to happen. Torrijos, having excluded the one Panamanian journalist who might have been expected to ask questions about the plan from the press conference, had nothing to say to the press about the matter.
We get constant reminders, by rumor and otherwise, of our proximity to Colombia's civil conflict. Among the recent ones are suggestions that the leftist FARC rebels hold a Cuban-American businessman and right-wing activist who was kidnapped here in April; the finding of the headless corpse of an unidentified man, whose hands had been bound, on a Panamanian beach near the Colombian border, the circumstances of which suggest an execution in the style of the right-wing Colombian paramilitaries that officially don't exist but very much still do; and former President Endara's declaration that he doesn't intend to take his 2009 presidential campaign to the Darien for fear of Colombian insurgents.

So what's going on here?

Former Seguro Social director and attorney Rolando Villalaz, in a column published in La Prensa, called the Panamanian president's silence "suspicious" and warned that even if the Merida Initiative doesn't include the sending of US troops to Panama, its alliances, training programs and military aid "respond to US requirements."

And might one of those requirements be the replacement of the air base at Manta?

Understand, first, that for budgetary and political reasons the United States hardly ever establishes bases as they have been traditionally known anymore. In these days of privatized warfare, American military policy is to establish "forward operating locations," in which private companies maintain dedicated spaces, supplies and equipment, and have nominally civilian contractors on duty to support military or mercenary operations at a moment's notice. Albrook Airport is one of these, where the US Southern Command contracts for Evergreen Air (not to be confused with the Taiwanese shipping company) to conduct Plan Colombia support flights, ferrying equipment, mercenaries and military personnel into our neighbors' war zone. SouthCom also has dedicated facilities available at the former Howard Air Force Base if needed for, say, an attack on Venezuela or Bolivia. (But Howard, of course, is slated to become an import - export processing zone and international air hub mostly for freight and may become unsuitable as a forward operating location because of too many other things going on.)

So what to do? Well, there is a plan to build an international airport, purportedly for tourism development, near Penonome. There are indications from both US and Panamanian sources that part of the plan for this facility is something very much like the rejected Multinational Anti-Drug Center plan that was rejected during the Pérez Balladares administration, an air base in all but name, the forward operating location replacement for Manta under the auspices of the Merida Initiative.

The labor - left FRENADESO umbrella group denounced the Torrijos visit to Washington and the Merida Initiative, calling on "all Panamanian patriots and revolutionaries to repudiate this new attempt to revive the Multinational Anti-Drug Center, a project that has been cooked up behind the backs of the people."

Law professor and mayoral candidate Miguel Antonio Bernal concurred. He said that in the name of guarding against drugs and weapons of mass destruction the US government wants to set up naval and air bases in Panama aimed more at projecting US military forces into Latin America than at protecting the United States.

Are there limits on this? Surely they are. The Multinational Anti-Drug Center proposal was, after all, agreed to by a PRD president but withdrawn in the face of objections of his own party's legislative caucus. At the time it was reported that Balbina Herrera told Toro Pérez Balladares that the proposal was unacceptable. Were Torrijos to openly advocate anything like a US base or forward operating location in Panama, to take the US and Colombian side against Venezuela or any other Latin American country, or to officially take sides in the Colombian conflict, it would deeply split the ruling party in an election year. But then the PRD has a long history of accepting foreign policy arrangements it would never admit, so long as they are kept under the table.

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