editorial

When will we get an intelligent debate about Panama’s fisheries?

Oops! he said --- President Torrijos “by an oversight” signed legislation that repealed regulations against purse seining for tuna, including in the protected waters around Coiba Island. We were assured that the mistake would be fixed, but commercial fishing interests have intervened through their pawns in the National Assembly and that correction has not been forthcoming.

We now have a Panamanian Aquatic Resources Authority, but it seems that their only function is to see how quickly they can allow foreign business interests to strip us of our dolphins and other marine wildlife.

On the land, there are plans to dam virtually every river and stream in Panama, thus disrupting the spawning of those fish species that come in from the seas to reproduce; and developers are and have been trashing the mangrove swamps where many important marine species breed in order to make way for tourism developments, many of which will never actually come to fruition.

So what do we hear from the presidential candidates, and the legislative candidates in coastal circuits, about Panama’s most ancient and still important industry, the fisheries? They’re not talking about the subject.

Maybe they think that in times of unusually high employment (by local standards, which count the guy who sells tangerines at a traffic light, the woman who does someone’s ironing a couple of days a week and the fisherman whose catch barely covers the cost of the fuel he uses as “employed”) that the jobs inherent in rebuilding a coastal fishery are unimportant. There are artificial reefs and new oyster beds to be created, mangrove swamps to be replanted, hatcheries to build and operate, fishing laws to enforce, sources of ocean pollution to curb through the building of small town sewage treatments plans and so on, and all of these activities create jobs.

Try to find corvina in the supermarkets, and when you can, notice the price. See the price of tuna, and the price and availability of sardines and anchovies. World fisheries are collapsing and even if Panama isn’t as far along that path as a lot of other places, we are affected and the international fleets that have depleted other fishing waters are now turning their attention toward ours.

Panama’s fisheries need to come front and center in this election season’s national political discourse. “National security” starts with a country’s ability to feed itself, and Panama has traditionally done that in large part with the food it harvests from the sea. The loss of our fisheries is a far more urgent national security threat than the one posed by armed Colombians on our borders.

 

Third term ambitions

Bad for Chávez, worse for Uribe, not so hot for Bloomberg either

There is an ego disorder that good people who are democratically elected to public offices frequently catch. They blur the distinctions among themselves, their offices and the people whom they represent. Then any selfish ambition or political power grab can be justified as “for the people” and any criticism can be dismissed as an attack “on the people.” In the most violently paranoiac cases of this malady, woe to the person branded as an “enemy of the people.”

The late Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev described how bad it could get:

Stalin originated the concept enemy of the people. This term automatically rendered it unnecessary that the ideological errors of a man or men engaged in a controversy be proven; this term made possible the usage of the most cruel repression, violating all norms of revolutionary legality, against anyone who in any way disagreed with Stalin, against those who were only suspected of hostile intent, against those who had bad reputations. This concept, enemy of the people, actually eliminated the possibility of any kind of ideological fight or the making of one's views known on this or that issue, even those of a practical character. In the main, and in actuality, the only proof of guilt used, against all norms of current legal science, was the confession of the accused himself, and, as subsequent probing proved, confessions were acquired through physical pressures against the accused.

History has given us many a right-wing mirror image of this communist abuse. Recent events will go down in US history as an infamous period in which a person could be called an “enemy combatant” and subjected to torture (even to the point of death), indefinite detention with no due process of law, the most scurrilous types of vilification and conviction by fabricated evidence --- without exception but for the bravery and integrity of a relatively few politicians, chaplains, attorneys and judges, the most valiant of them all being a group of US military lawyers and judges who put the rule of law before the results that their superiors wanted.

Is Hugo Chávez as bad as either of these horrible examples? No way. He’s neither a Josef Stalin nor a George W. Bush. He’s just a Bolivarian who believes in Latin America for the Latin Americans, and who can get incredibly long-winded, fairly pompous and insufferably petty. Most Venezuelans think he’s doing a reasonably good job as their president, but a large minority can’t stand him. Those who call him a tyrant who muzzles the press may have a shred of credibility if they have been truly systematic and even-handed in their criticism, but most will have to explain why they single out Chávez for criticism while US forces under George W. Bush have imprisoned, tortured and killed journalists and nothing like that has happened in Venezuela; and while much smaller Panama has many more journalists currently facing criminal charges than does Venezuela.

Nevertheless, not all of the bad press that the Venezuelan president gets is unfair. When Chávez puts great emphasis on clearing the way for his election to a third term, he hurts the movement that he leads. He retards the development of a next generation of Bolivarian leaders and he gives his opponents a chance to avoid debate about the directions in which Venezuela and the region ought to go by reducing everything to an argument about one person. Given the scope of what Chávez is trying to do, there are many important jobs other than president of Venezuela that he could take up to advance the cause. He should end the uncertainty about succession by abandoning his drive for a third term and let new leadership arise in Venezuela and his movement.

And isn’t it ironic that among certain circles in Washington and Miami, Chávez is a sick villain for persisting in his pursuit of a third term, while Colombia’s President Uribe is doing the same thing but gets treated as a hero deserving of unconditional support?

Let’s be clear on this point: Álvaro Uribe is no Hugo Chávez.

Chávez is a sometimes indiscrete and occasionally heavy-handed left-wing politician. Uribe is a corrupt right-wing politician with long-standing paramilitary ties. Offend Chávez and you may never hear the end of him ranting about the injustice of it. Offend Uribe and you may get a visit from a hit man.

Just like Josef Stalin, Álvaro Uribe has a penchant for accusing his political adversaries of nefarious plots. They and international human rights observers who criticize his practices get falsely accused of having guerrilla ties, and of course the Uribe plan for dealing with guerrillas and their actual or alleged sympathizers is annihilation.

More than 50 members of Uribe’s faction in Colombia’s legislature have been charged by prosecutors with crimes arising from their associations with paramilitary death squads. The courts have found that Uribe maneuvered around a constitutional ban on re-election to a second term by way of bribery, and he is a suspect of direct involvement in a paramilitary massacre while he was a governor. (Believe or disbelieve the key witness, but then there is also far more solid proof that the Antioquia government that he controlled provided a helicopter used by the AUC paramilitary in that attack on El Aro, wherein 15 people were tortured and murdered in front of terrorized local residents and another 30 people just disappeared.)

Chávez’s re-election might harm Venezuela’s democratic institutions, but Uribe’s re-election might well finish the process of killing what’s left of Colombian democracy.

And by the way, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s maneuvers to change the law so as to allow him to seek a third term weren’t very pretty either.

American democracy does not ride on whether a big city mayor gets to arrange things to be boss for life. Presidential and mayoral re-election and term limits are separate questions, even if in both cases ego disorders are an important issue. But isn’t it ironic that a Republican mayor (or rather, an ex-GOP independent now) would be the one to take New York on that step back toward the days of Democratic Tammany Hall machines?

 

Bear in mind...

 

America cannot have an empire abroad and a republic at home.

Mark Twain

 

Imagination is the only key to the future. Without it none exists --- with it all things are possible.

Ida Tarbell

 

When the anchorman is wearing a colonel's uniform, it tells you something.

Linda Ellerbee