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Volume
15, Number 10 |
Also in this
section: How
many more times?
by Eric Jackson One sunny afternoon a few years ago, I was sitting on my sister's balcony in Las Uvas, overlooking the Gulf of Panama. A fishing trawler came by, much closer to the shore than they tend to come. A bundle was thrown into the sea, and two men in a cayuco dashed out from the beach to fetch it, then returned to land. A few minutes later a police boat slowly navigated essentially where the trawler had gone, without stopping. I didn't call the cops, and it turned out that my hesitation was well founded. A few months later the captain and a bunch of cops at the San Carlos station, where I would have called, were arrested for having been involved in drug trafficking. They would seize drugs landing on the coast and sell them to their own network. I wouldn't have been surprised if the whole series of events was about a war between rival drug cartels being fought out within the ranks of the National Police. Fast forward to May 19, 2009. Several young men from the impoverished La Chorrera neighborhood of Playa Leona were out in their fishing boat, the Niña Evy, trying to catch a living from the sea. Off of the Panama City neighborhood of Boca La Caja, a strange launch appeared and the men aboard it hailed them, claiming to be police and ordering them to stop. But this crew knew that maleantes frequently pose as cops and rob fishing boats. The cops that Panama puts on the water are rarely there to protect those who make their honest livings from the sea from the criminals who prey upon them. So they fled, and the men in the launch opened fire with automatic weapons. Two brothers, Dagoberto and Rigoberto Pérez, aged 16 and 18 respectively, were slain. Two other young men, Domingon and Manuel Ábrego --- cousins of the Pérezes --- were seriously wounded. The cops tried to make it look like they had busted fleeing drug traffickers. Finding no contraband, they planted an Uzi aboard the Niña Evy, but prosecutors quickly discovered the fraud. The Public Ministry had reason to know that something was weird right away, because if there is an anti-drug operation at sea, the prosecutors are supposed to be in on it, as they were not in this case. Plus, only two of the six cops involved were part of the anti-drug unit and according to police records the launch wasn't supposed to be out on the water at the time. One might make some reasonable guesses about what the cops were actually up to in the launch, but as far as the prosecutors are concerned, National Police Major José Castro, two sergeants and three corporals are under criminal investigation for two counts of murder, two counts of attempted murder, the planting of fake evidence in order to obstruct justice and possession of illegal weapons. So can we say rogue cops? Can we say underpaid, undertrained and scared cops? Right now we should say "alleged." But let us not be so blind as to treat this as another isolated incident. It may be a piece that fits perfectly into the mosaic, or a freakish combination of circumstances that doesn't fit any pattern, but the context is there for all to see. To wit:
But the "War on Drugs" is a failure. Plan Colombia just drove much of the drug production to Peru and changed the configuration of which gangs, insurgent groups and corrupt politicians receive the proceeds from the risky but lucrative illegal drug trade. Mexico's government is impotent against the cartels first because it's the illegitimate product of an election fraud with no moral authority and second because the very police and military forces that are supposed to be getting funds through the Merida Initiative and save the Mexican state from collapse are infiltrated by the drug cartels. It's like Chicago during Al Capone's time, but then Mexico, and even little Panama, are bigger than the Windy City was in the Roaring 20s. Capone, of course, was removed from the scene by way of a tax prosecution. But that didn't break gangland's grip on Chicago. And forget that overblown TV stuff about The Untouchables. What turned the tide against the mobsters in Chicago was the end of Prohibition. And what's going to clean up our police force is not more military training at Fort Benning. What's going to impose peace and order in our territorial waters is not another photo op where the American ambassador delivers equipment to fight the War on Drugs.
The
change that has to come, but can't come in time for the
Pérez
brothers, will, like the end of Prohibition, come from Washington.
Chicago wasn't a country unto itself, and traditional thinking in the
United States is that Latin American nations aren't either. The United
States staged a
major invasion and killed hundreds of innocent Panamanians in part to
make
the point that this country has to do what Washington tells it to do
about drugs, absurd as the orders might be. The change that has to come
from the north is the end of drug prohibition and its replacement with
a more
sensible system of regulation, one that emphasizes a public health
rather than criminal justice approach to the problem of addiction. Also in this
section: News
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Panama
Hotel:
Luxury apartment rentals in Casco Viejo, Panama City |
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©
2009 by Eric Jackson email: editor@thepanamanews.com or phone: (507) 6-632-6343 Mailing
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