editorial

Martinelli's election to lose in a system that has hit rock bottom

Ricardo Martinelli, barring an accident, an amazing gaffe or election fraud, is going to be Panama's next president. His double-digit lead over Balbina Herrera will allow many voters who had been considering a "lesser of evils" voting strategy to cast protest votes with the assurance that they won't be contributing to a grand national disaster.

Martinelli is a conservative businessman who studied hard at the University of Arkansas, kept his eyes open and learned something while working for Wal-Mart as a young man, and came back to Panama to use his relatively modest fortune to build an immense business empire. He's a capable man, and has some very capable and honorable people around him.

One problem that the future president has is that not everybody in his entourage meets high standards or even ordinary ones. Martinelli has built his political movement with the cast-offs of a broken and unsustainable system. Sergio Gálvez, the legislator with the very worst attendance record, is his Cambio Democratico party's star candidate for the National Assembly and it says terrible things.

That Martinelli and Gálvez have both waged these patronizing campaigns in which they distribute goodies in search of votes is also reprehensible. The Martinelli crowd deserves criticism for this even if what they do is not nearly so bad as the PRD's use of public funds --- and also, apparently, funding from Colombian organized crime --- to wage the same sort of campaign.

But warts and all, Martinelli it will be.

A poll of Latin American countries by the Gallup organization found that Panama, which depends on international trade for its living, has one of the most capitalistic populations in Latin America. Unfortunately, it doesn't mean that we are a place where ordinary people frequently exercise their freedom to take private initiatives. What Gallup found was that for every 87 Panamanians who say that their basic economic orientation is socialist, 100 say that theirs is capitalist. In most other Latin American countries, a majority describe themselves as socialists.

The gap between Martinelli, the hardcore capitalist candidate, and Herrera, the candidate of a PRD that belongs to the Socialist International, is greater than the one between capitalists and socialists that Gallup found. You just won't be able to understand Panamanian politics if you take a spectrum from another place and try to superimpose our candidates and parties upon it.

Although people on one side or the other of the divide will often deny it, not all capitalists are the same, nor are all socialists the same. Here we have capitalists by vocation who are socialists by conviction, planning to vote for Martinelli because Balbina's party has a habit of killing leftists; and union members who nevertheless espouse capitalist ideologies and plan to vote for Herrera out of loyalty to the PRD political patronage machine. Our political life is a blend of many such peculiarities and subtleties.

What's not subtle in this race is the left's absence. Yes, we can blame the Electoral Tribunal for ruling that economist Juan Jované has no right to run for president as an independent. However, that would have been a moot point had the Panamanian left set aside its petty bickering and registered an inclusive labor/left alliance as a political party. A united left --- and here we are not talking about the PRD, which despite its affiliations is by and large a collection of opportunistic political chameleons from the dictatorship --- would need about a week to gather the signatures needed to establish a political party. Had Jované been running at the head of a leftist slate of candidates he would not be a strong contender for the presidency but there would be a strong left contingent in the National Assembly that could effectively demand and get key changes in order for any significant legislation to pass.

Those who would cast protest votes have many options, the worst of which is to just stay home. That's the worst because the Electoral Tribunal, with no basis in law to sustain it, has adopted the practice of canceling the voting rights of people who don't vote. Stay home to protest this year, and next year when you get a constitutional referendum or a compelling candidate you may find yourself disenfranchised for not voting.

Depositing a blank ballot in the box is also a dumb idea. That creates an opportunity for some crook working at the polling place to mark the empty ballot for the candidate of his or her choice. The PRD will not win this year without fraud, but don't forget their history, and don't ignore the fact that this party treats the last beneficiary of a presidential election fraud, Nicolas "Fraudito" Ardito Barletta, as an honored elder statesman. The blank ballot is an irresponsible temptation to fraud and even worse horrors.

There are some people who will vote for Guillermo Endara because they like him or because he's the preferred vehicle for their protest against the two main candidates. He will not, however, get many votes from disenchanted leftists.

The proper way to reject every presidential candidate on the ballot is to cast a write-in ballot, which counts as a "voto nulo" in the current system. The FRENADESO people who have had their falling out with Jované have their own set of heroes and martyrs to write in, but Dr. Jované really does deserve the write-in protest votes.

For one thing, Jované and Martinelli both served as Seguro Social director and, despite his vilification and termination, Jované did a markedly better job than Martinelli did. (One of the truly sad things about the current election is that because of all the scandals, Balbina Herrera's odious record and Jované's exclusion from the ballot, Martinelli's record in public life has had little public scrutiny even though it contains many things to criticize.)

Jované is also more attuned to developments throughout the Americas, where the left is increasingly ascendant and democratic elements are increasingly dominant within the left. Even in that great bastion against the left, the United States, the mainstream of public opinion now runs closer to Jované's economic philosophy than to Martinelli's.

Vote for whom or what you believe in for president, and after the change of administrations give Martinelli his chance to pleasantly surprise us.

Dr. Mengele and Mr. Bush

The International Committee of the Red Cross secret report on the torture of CIA detainees during the Bush administration has leaked out. It's a damning indictment, the stuff of which criminal prosecutions can and should be made.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the report:

[T]he ICRC received allegations that health care personnel were directly involved in monitoring the health effects of ill-treatment. In some cases it was alleged that, based on their assessments, health personnel gave instructions to interrogators to continue, to adjust, or to stop particular methods. As with other personnel within the detention facilities, the health personnel did not identify themselves, but the detainees presumed from their presence and function that they were either physicians or psychologists.

The report goes on to detail a gruesome process of experimentation, wherein doctors and psychologists refined torture techniques on hapless CIA captives. It was a pattern of unethical conduct that the world should have abandoned after the horrors of Dr. Mengele's experiments on Nazi concentration camp inmates were revealed. That George W. Bush brought back this sort of thing surely seals his reputation as the worst US president ever.

It's time to set aside all "national security" and "protection of sources and methods" dodges. The public interest in being protected from the Dr. Mengeles among us trumps all of that. The torture doctors and torture psychologists need to be identified by name, stripped of their licenses to practice anywhere in the world, held up as public objects of scorn and disgust, and be obliged to learn the realities of life in a prison cell from the other side of the bars.

And what to do about the CIA after this scandal?

The CIA should go the way of the World War II-era OSS, for many of the same reasons.

Yes, the American people need a competent and finely tuned agency to observe, analyze and report the relevant facts to those who are elected to make and those who are appointed to carry out the foreign policies of the United States. But the CIA was designed specifically for the Cold War and has not adequately adjusted to current needs and reality. Its reputation for bribery, assassination and torture prevents good people who would otherwise be sympathetic to the US point of view from cooperating with it.

The many agencies of the US intelligence community should not be given a new organization chart, but should be smashed into a thousand pieces. Some of these pieces should be incorporated into a new mosaic, a new intelligence organization that reflects the concerns and values of the American people and that has the capability to find out what the US government needs to know. The US government has an historical precedent for this sort of thing, the dismantling of the World War II Office of Strategic Services and its replacement by the Central Intelligence Agency. It can't be an overnight process, but the Red Cross report reminds us that such a change shouldn't be delayed.