opinion

The ancient Greeks famously observed that those whom the gods intended to destroy, they first drive mad. Setting aside the implicit pagan theology, it's a bit of wisdom that has stood the test of time, with many a modern variation.

Wasn't the fall of Manuel Antonio Noriega one of these variations? His mentor elder brother died in 1985, and thereafter the strongman was surrounded by yes men (and a few yes women, one of them one Balbina Herrera) who out of fear or opportunism only told him what they thought he wanted to hear. That's a classic pathology of political self-destruction.

Another bit of political madness in a related vein is, based on a rationale that those who are not loyal friends are disloyal enemies and thus passively or actively lashing out at the independent press. In the former case it's refusing to talk to those whom one does not control, in the latter moving to silence critical voices.

Lately more than one mainstream reporter has commented to me that the Torrijos administration or the Panama Canal Authority has cut them off in the wake of some insufficiently grovelling report.

And then there's the Latin America Advisor, a newsletter published by the centrist, business-oriented Inter-American Dialogue. This outfit has an advisory board that includes folks like the government ratings directors for Standard & Poors, the regional director for Hewlitt-Packard, the top emerging markets analyst for JP Morgan Chase & Co., and so on. Occasionally they ask me to comment on Panamanian affairs, along with two other people. And so it was that I was asked to give 225 words or so in answer to these questions:

Civic groups and opposition legislators in Panama decried a decree last month by President Martin Torrijos that gives the government extended security powers and creates a national intelligence agency. What is behind the new security reforms? Will they help reduce drug-related crimes in Panama? Do the new measures signal a return to the country's military past?

Leave it to me to question the fundamental assumptions of the questions that were asked. I guess in the original Latin version of the concept, that's the "radical" thing to do, but I really wasn't posturing when I replied that:

Mostly what is behind the security decrees is best answered as WHO is behind it --- this clique of old Norieguistas, veterans of the old Panama Defense Forces, leaders of the Dignity Battalions goon squad and so on, that surrounds President Torrijjos.

The War on Drugs is a US fantasy imposed upon Latin America, replete with racist stereotypes with double standards about how Latin American public officials are corrupted by the drug lords --- but not their US counterparts. The wars for control of the racket supplying the US drug market are being fought among rival cartels, mostly Mexican, in Panama as in other places. These laws will have little impact on that. Nor will the creation of the SENIS secret police, a border force or a merged air and naval force or the imposition of military culture on the cops on the beat do much to stop the muggings, “express” kidnappings or home invasion robberies.

These decrees may mark the return of military power and influence, but they more likely will lead to the Democratic Revolutionary Party’s defeat in next year’s elections --- if fair elections are to be allowed. However, a change in government by those elections is unlikely to resolve the chronic malaise that allows foreign criminal organizations large and small to buy protection from our public officials.

So one more issue of the Latin America Advisor where Eric Jackson is the skeptical contrarian among the three commentators?

Well, a few days after the original deadline,  I got a note from the editor, telling me that his attempts to get comment from someone in the Panamanian government had been fruitless, and that he was unable to find someone to offer a comment in favor of the decrees, and asking me if I had any suggestions.

I had a few ideas, but apparently they didn't suffice. When the newsletter appeared there were three comments --- mine, those of American Chamber of Commerce executive director David Hunt, and those of Joaquin Jacome, who served as Mireya Moscoso's Minister of Commerce and Industry. All of us opposed the decrees. (Finally, Dave Hunt and I agree on something!)

That they couldn't find anyone outside of the PRD orbit to support the decrees did not surprise me. They are that bad of a political blunder.

That the PRD is boycotting Inter-American Dialogue is, however, shocking. Quite frankly, it reminded me of Richard Nixon's final months in office. (The "lessons of Watergate?" First, if you try to shake down America's corporate elite like a crooked New York vice cop collecting from a small time drug dealer, and if you subject the Democratic Party's offices to the same sorts of invasions that J. Edgar Hoover ordered against the Communist Party's offices, the ladies and gentlemen of Capitol Hill and the Supreme Court will think that you're a thug. Second, if you treat everyone not subservient to yourself as an enemy, you will have way too many enemies.)

Notice several things that have been happening on the local media scene as well. The spectacular show of media control during the 2006 canal expansion referendum brought all sorts of ad revenue into the mainstream media, but several of them lost readers or viewers and the problem has been aggravated with the passage of time and events. People stopped watching MEDCOM news shows and reading La Prensa. MEDCOM cut back its news departments. La Prensa, having seen La Estrella / El Siglo and the ragtag online press steal a march on it via more independent relationships with the government, has moved outside of the PRD orbit.

It's smash and grab looting time for the PRD. They're acting as if there's no tomorrow and that can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. One of the principal beneficiaries of the PRD's predations is the Bern family's business empire, which, along with the Club de Yates y Pesca, is getting something awfully close to a five-finger discount on a big chunk of the Cinta Costera landfill for which the all the less privileged neighbors are expected to pay via a special property tax assessment.

La Prensa has been hammering away at the Cinta Costera project, which is and ought to be controversial from several angles. Herman Bern has been especially strident in his attacks on that daily's Mónica Palm. La Prensa has also been publishing a lot of other investigative pieces that make the government look bad.

And then the weekly El Periodico (circulation about 20,000) went further still, and published a purported tax return that indicated Herman Bern reporting an annual income of some $39,000.

(I am not a sophisticated businessman, but it doesn't necessarily follow in my mind that this is a gross falsification by Bern. A very rich developer can be invested to the hilt in real estate projects at a time of a deflating speculative bubble and consider himself to be lucky to finish the year that far in the black. But neither does the story on its face appear to be a lie published by editor Omar Wong --- I just don't know. And then publishing information about a person's tax return is another matter, something that's considered an invasion of privacy by many in this culture.)

On another story, La Prensa published a document alleged to be a 2007 letter by the president's own pilot that recommended that helicopter SAN-100, which crashed on Avenida Central, killing several top Chilean and Panamanian police officials, was not in good enough condition to be safely used for such purposes. Then the government produced another purported version of the document which was not so categorical, accused La Prensa of forgery and filed a criminal charge. La Prensa denies forging anything, and I believe them.

I recall when La Prensa, which was onto a tale of international hoodlums bankrolling the 1994 PRD presidential campaign, was fed a forged check about a prominent drug suspect giving money to the attorney general at the time. They asked him about it, got a threat instead of a forthright denial, published it, and saw a number of their people charged with criminal defamation.  I have long been conviced that the forgery was a trap, planted by the government, probably through an unwitting source whom the government could reasonably expect to pass said document onto La Prensa. (And think of the probable surveillance of the press and its sources that such a plot would likely entail.) It killed La Prensa's investigation and set the stage for some particularly ugly xenophobic attacks on all foreigners working in the Panamanian media.

Did La Prensa walk into an old-fashioned trap here? Did they get the genuine document, and was the paper that the government produced the altered one? I don't know, but if you take the government's version of the document at face value and know that this was withheld from prosecutors investigating the SAN-100 crash, the Torrijos administration doesn't come out looking like the innocent victim of yellow journalism here. Certainly that's not the way the story is taken in Chile, which lost the chief of it Caribineros militarized police when that chopper went down. Now Chile is calling for a joint investigation, having concluded that the Torrijos administration is not allowing an impartial probe.

And El Periodico? Well, Herman Bern just got judge María Cedeño to issue a pretrial court order to sequester all of its assets and Bern's people swooped in and stripped the small weekly's offices clean. I hope it doesn't stand, and will offer what assistance I can to get a fellow small publication back up and running.

That a rich businessman with notorious government ties --- for example, giving his business empire the ability to improperly (as far as the Supreme Court is concerned) acquire the land on which the Playa Bonita resort is built --- can shut down a publication without the accused having a day in court is an ominous step toward totalitarian rule in Panama.

But you know, just like the deal with the Cinta Costera, just like the renting out of Playa Bonita for convicted fraud artist Mark Boswell alias Rex Freeman's "investment" brainwash seminars, just like the crooked deal by which the concession for Playa Bonita was obtained, the attack on El Periodico is a display of power that will entail long-term costs. The Berns haven't bought and can't buy everyone, and if they treat every news medium that they haven't bought or intimidated as an enemy, all of their businesses are going to suffer in the long run. Take your pick of religions or philosophies: "as ye sow, so shall ye reap;" the immutable wheel of karma, "what goes around comes around" or whatever.

But meanwhile it would be naive to treat Bern's assaults on freedom of the press as unrelated to the Torrijos administration's attitudes. He has been one of the president's more influential unofficial advisors and what he has done is but one more indication of increasing isolation and intolerance in that crowd. Were the ancient Greek philosophers here to see this, I think they'd recognize it for what it is.