Panama's socially accepted anti-Chinese racism

Socially accepted racism

When President Martinelli announced that there would be a special requirement that Asian visitors only would be obliged to post a large sum of money in the Banco Nacional de Panama to enter Panama, there were few protests about racial discrimination outside of the Chinese community.

In fact, the corporate mainstream media lent themselves to many expressions of anti-Chinese attitudes, from the basely racist to the sort of pseudo-erudite legal sophistries that would be the hallmark of someone who couldn't even get into law school in many other countries.

As usual, one of the worst offenders was El Panama America, which ran the above cartoon. That newspaper's late founder, Harmodio Arias, was once president of Panama and before that was a leader of a group called Accion Comunal, which dressed up in Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods and advocated the expulsion of all persons of Asian, Afro-Caribbean or Middle Eastern ancestry.

Cartoon by El Panama America, used without permission as fair use of a brief example of a newsworthy event

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