Torrijos signs remilitarization decrees

With people distracted by Olympic glory, Torrijos signs decrees
article and photos by Eric Jackson

"The approval of a request to cease any guarantee or individual liberty corresponds to the presiding magistrate of the Penal Bench or whomever the plenum of the Supreme Court of Justice may designate, or in their absence a magistrate of the same bench shall be designated. The procedure shall be classified as secret...."

Article 53, Decree to reorganize the National Public Safety and Defense Council,
create the National Intelligence and Security Services and make other arrangements

Balbina Herrera, Bobby Velásquez and other PRD candidates, without permission or an agreement to pay, annoyed Olympic long jump champion Irving Saladino's family by using the athlete's image in their primary campaign propaganda. But President Torrijos used the Colon athlete in another way.

On the morning of August 18, while the nation was watching Saladino jump for the gold medal, the president's Cabinet Council was approving two of the five "security decrees" that bring back many of the salient features of his late father's dictatorship. Torrijos declared a national holiday to greet Saladino on August 21, and while the country was celebrating it passed the other three decrees. The distraction was enhanced by Vice President Samuel Lewis Navarro's promise, made to the news media after the first two decrees passed, that the more controversial parts of the other decrees --- like the section quoted above --- would be submitted to the National Assembly for debate. With that assurance, the false impression was given that the other decrees wouldn't be signed.

Lest anyone minimize the president's intention to "cease any guarantee or individual liberty," one need only take a glance at the Inter-American Human Rights Court docket. While the decrees dominated the news here, in that court the Torrijos administration was defending the actions of the president's father, who in 1970 sent agents to abduct labor activist Heliodoro Portugal from the street outside the Coca-Cola Cafe in Santa Ana, had Portugal tortured to death and buried under the parking lot of an infantry barracks in Tocumen.

Although there are indications that next year's elections will be rigged Noriega-style in favor of the PRD --- the purge from the voter rolls of some 100,000 people, the condonation of the use of public funds to promote the political fortunes of Balbina Herrera, the arrest of members of the Vanguardia Moral de la Patria party for signing up members in Colon, the example of the 2006 referendum campaign, for examples --- the PRD's support is down to its basic loyal one-third of the electorate and any election theft would likely have to be too blatant to avoid setting off years of unstable illegitimate government.

However, some observers expect that things will fall apart for Torrijos's party sooner rather than later. Former La Prensa publisher I. Roberto Eisenmann Jr., who was driven into exile during the dictatorship but who later supported Martín Torrijos, opined in his op-ed column that by imposing the decrees the president didn't take into account "the political suicide that it means for his own party and for his own political future."

The leaders of the late 80s Civilista movement have been holding a series of modest protests, and the left, which is concentrating on economic issues at the moment, has also had some nasty things to say about the security decrees. All mainstream media other than the ones that the PRD controls are also denouncing the measures.

You'd expect that Dr. Mauro Zúñiga, who was kidnapped and tortured by G-2 agents during Noriega times, would complain that the decrees legalize "death squads." But now the complaints and denunciations are coming from many other quarters and the PRD is increasingly isolated as a result.

In a press release, the Kiwanis Club weighed in: "From a simple analysis of the proposals you can deduce that their only objective is to militarize the country's public safety structures, which is not permitted by the constitution."

Bishop Pablo Morales, president of the Ecumenical Committee of Panama, told El Panama America that the decrees were "dangerous," and that "the government's decision wasn't the most correct one, because the decrees aren't going to restrain crime in the streets."

But the Presidencia's website argued that public objections were taken into account by excluding from the decree creating the SENIS secret police "articles that make reference to fundamental guarantees." At the time that this article was written the final forms of the decrees had not yet been released to the public.