opinion

Does Bobby use the right hairspray, and other burning questions of the political moment

The PRD primaries
by Eric Jackson

The Panameñistas had a hard-fought but generally civil primary. There has been substantially less passion in the nominating processes of all the other opposition parties. And now the ruling Democratic Revolutionary Party is into the home stretch for its September 7 primary and this involves not only a number of hotly contested races but also a few outright brawls.

Most famously, we have the rumble for the presidential nomination.

I really don't want to leave Nito Cortizo out of this because the things that the former Minister of Agricultural Development has to say about the Torrijos administration's economic policies need to be said and this appeal has struck a chord in many rural areas. However, the best he'll do is a distant third.

This race is between Panama City Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro and former Housing Minister Balbina Herrera. It has been very imprecisely characterized as Navarro on the right versus Herrera on the left, or as the Norieguista hard core backing Balbina against younger and more moderate party factions in Juan Carlos's camp. The truth is that there's nothing particularly leftist about Balbina Herrera, that both she and her principal opponent have notorious Norieguista thugs on their slates, and that on the key economic issues that Cortizo is raising there's little difference between the two main candidates' positions.

Two major issues divide Herrera and Navarro in their public discourses. He wants the possibility of life imprisonment for murderers and a no-exceptions guarantee that juvenile killers are locked up, while she would keep the recently amended criminal and juvenile laws as they are. She is the beneficiary of and participant in most of the election rigging tactics of Noriega times, and he's quite scornful about this.

Balbina in many ways sounds like someone caught in a mid-60s US liberal time warp when she talks about how we need to understand and address the causes that make kids into killers. Well, there is value in all that but understanding the origins of criminal behavior and trying to address root causes should never be confused with excusing criminal behavior. Navarro talks indignantly of punishment, but especially when dealing with kids that consideration should also be beside the point. The real point is that when gangs of 15-year-olds shoot it out for “turf” in the miserable slums of Curundu and a two-year-old is killed in the crossfire we have two gangs of teenagers --- and not just the boy who fired the fatal shot --- who need to be removed from public circulation for several years as a practical matter of public protection. Getting as dispassionate as one might possibly get about cold-blooded murder, one might even like the kid and oppose his brutal treatment, but the teenage hit man has to be locked up for a long time for everyone else's sake. It may be a demagogic play to inflame passions on the mayor's part, but on the substance of this issue most voters both inside and outside of the PRD will agree that killers of any age should be locked up for a long time. The arguments about treating juvenile offenders as adults and life sentences rather than the 30-year maximum need to be addressed separately and on those points Balbina's criticisms of the mayor's stands are a bit more reasonable.

The Electoral Tribunal's order for Navarro to pull his ads criticizing Herrera for going back on her word, and the fine it imposed on Navarro for publishing a poll that showed him nipping at Herrera's heels as of the middle of last May, and the tribunal's de facto legalization of Herrera's use of Housing Ministry funds to promote her personal political ambitions are all disturbing signs that we don't have impartial election authorities. But then we all knew that from the way they behaved in the 2006 canal expansion referendum. Navarro complains now, when he's the victim, but he didn't complain about the massive illegal use of public funds to promote the “yes” campaign back then or the arrest of people for passing out “no” leaflets back then. It's hard to say whether there is a real disagreement in principle between the two front runners on this issue, but the legitimacy of the next government may be at stake here.

The largely undiscussed but quite important difference is that Navarro's a rich kid, the rabiblanco scion of the Tropigas family fortune and married into the ad agency cartel, while Balbina's a chola from the slums who may have become rich in public office but not rich enough to pay for her own presidential campaign. Throw whatever identity politics spin on that one that you prefer, but the bottom line is that Balbina is financing her political fortunes with the support of the developers to whom she sold out as housing minister and that series of sellouts was particularly odious. She supported the bulldozing of national parks for plasticine housing tracts, the destruction of historical sites, the wholesale violation of zoning laws that have greatly contributed to our broken-down water and sewer systems and traffic woes and the Panama City luxury housing speculative bubble that's currently bursting. Navarro is generally unassociated with these abuses and in several instances specifically opposed them.

The years of differentiation between Housing Minister Herrera and Mayor Navarro also shine a light on the race for the PRD mayoral nomination. Again, this is a multi-candidate race but really a contest between two major hopefuls, businessman Noel Riande and Ken doll Bobby Velásquez.

Noel Riande as in Hidroelectrica San Carlos, as in an attempt to dam the Teta River in San Carlos in order to provide water for a golf course, without submitting to environmental regulations. He attempted this through a transparently bogus pretense that this was a small hydroelectric generation project and as such exempt from the environmental regulations. Balbina supported this, and supports Riande for mayor, while Navarro opposed Riande's dam. Former Vice Minister of Public Works Grettel Villalaz --- mayoral candidate Miguel Antonio Bernal's running mate --- is an attorney whose husband is a surfer and downstream Rio Teta property owner with concerns about the dam's environmental effects, and her research and advocacy resulted in ANAM taking jurisdiction over the matter and stopping Riande's dam project.

So Riande is the candidate who stands for the private appropriation of public water resources and deceptive posturing to evade environmental laws. He's also the owner of RCM television, having bought the channel during the middle of the canal referendum campaign and immediately taking all voices from the “no” side off the air. So he's the candidate of yellow journalism, of corporate and political censorship of the news. Doesn't it just figure that he went on to hire Toro Pérez Balladares's press flack Dorita de Reyna as his news director?

And against Riande, apparently running well ahead of him in the primary race, we have Lipstick Bobby. So what does Bobby Velásquez stand for? Well, he looks so cute on all those billboards --- every hair perfectly in place, those lips colored just the right shade of light pink. He might just breeze through the primary and win the nomination without saying anything at all.

Come the general election campaign, it may not be be so easy. Inquiring voters may insist on the truth about matters of great importance. Like, is Bobby using the right hairspray to project a mayoral image?

Nobody other than the president and vice president (there will be only one VP this time next year) has as large a constituency as the mayor of Panama City. There are thousands of legislative and local candidates in the PRD primaries, and it's hard to concentrate on many of them in the clutter. A lot of them are identifying themselves with either Herrera or Navarro, and some of these alliances defy the stereotypes. Expect that a lot of the ward heelers seeking re-election as representantes or small town mayors will get through their primaries, and a bunch of current members of the widely discredited National Assembly will not.

One legislative primary to watch is in the Chame - San Carlos area of Panama Oeste, where the well-known local activist Kike Florez is taking on the well connected and well financed outsider Franz Wever, who has decided to run in the Interior instead of his old Panama City constituency, where the circuit has been redrawn and where he probably owes his 2004 re-election to fraud and vote buying in the first place.

So has Wever proven himself a clever guy by his crotch grabbing and insult hurling display at the Beijing Olympics? Well, surely some PRD voters get off on that sort of thing, but the day after that show Florez put out a new batch of signs that promised dignified representation. 'Nuff said for most area voters, but the primary is not among most voters but among PRD members.

If Florez wins, figure that the opposition parties may come to their senses and run a single candidate against the PRD, while if the PRD chooses Wever a gaggle of candidates will figure that he's a pushover and split the non-PRD vote so that he in fact wins.

But will the "opposition" candidate be incumbent Arturo Araúz? It shouldn't be. Young people in this area have been robbed of a university education by Araúz, who championed an English requirement to get into the universities but didn't get sufficient English teachers for the public schools in his area for the young people to pass those tests. Yes, Araúz sponsors an admirable New Year's muñeco contest, but that in no way makes up for what he has done to his young constituents who have talents that should be honed by a higher education but who have been relegated to a life of low-paid menial labor. Forget what the dogmatic campus radicals say about boycotting the elections --- if ever there was a need for a youth movement expressing itself at the polls, it's in Chame and San Carlos this time around.

 
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