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Take an officially approved tour of Panama La Vieja and the odds are overwhelming that the guide will not tell you specifically who built that city. The guide might tell you about Pedro Arias de Avila founding this first Spanish city on the Pacific Ocean, and might even tell you a little about the man's legend as "Pedrarias the Cruel." There is even a chance that you might hear that Pedrarias founded the city on the site of an existing indigenous settlement that probably went back 1000 years. However, it's most unlikely that you will hear that the old city was built primarily by African slaves, in many cases working from the designs of Italian architects.

Then you might hear either a true or embellished version of the old city's demise. Yes, the story you hear will surely link the city's abandonment to the arrival of one Henry Morgan. Usually, the man will be referred to as a pirate rather than the Right Honourable Lord Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica. Usually, you will hear of the destruction that Morgan's men wrought rather than of the scorched earth policy that led Spanish authorities to order the city burned and abandoned ahead of the British invaders. Rarely will the predations of Henry Morgan or the earlier attacks on Panama by Francis Drake be placed in the context of Europe's religious wars of the Reformation.

There is an official account of Panama's history, one that upholds the fame and grandeur of certain illustrious families and writes out major segments of society. There is a standard history that tells of the construction of the country's oldest church buildings, but is silent about what was there before the churches were built. There is the most important subject of all among the dominant elites, rabiblanco genealogy, but they don't teach the history of Panama's labor movement as part of the officially approved curriculum.

And so it was that at a city event at the Amador Cemetery that was attended by President Martinelli and Vice President Varela, the speaker chosen by the PRD-dominated city council was University of Panama international relations professor Julio Yao. The professor is not a member of the PRD, and actually was involved in a major row with the Torrijos administration with respect to the Petaquilla gold mine. He's the president of the Liberation Theology leftist Panamanian chapter of the Peace and Justice Service (SERPAJ). At the tomb of the Soldiers of Independence, Yao spoke about a different history, one that Martinelli and Varela didn't care to hear. The Spanish-language text of his discourse is published here.

Yao told of Quibian, who was taken prisoner by Columbus, escaped and led an army that drove the Spaniards and their Italian leader from the coast of Veraguas. He told of Urraca, the cacique who resisted the Spanish conquest of the Interior for as long as he lived, and of Victoriano Lorenzo, the Liberal guerrilla general who led his cholo army down from the hills of Cocle to take Penonome and was then betrayed and executed at the behest of the Conservatives. He told of a humble Chinese merchant's blood that was shed during the 1903 separation from Panama. He told of the unequal treaty that ceded control of the Canal Zone to the United States and the generations who fought to reverse what seemed like the perpetual facts of its provisions.

Yao denounced a "deforming vision of history that reproduces the ideology of the hegemonic sectors."

"Corruption devours 30 percent of the Gross Internal Product, but has metastisized throughout the entire population," Yao lamented. He spoke of a culture of betrayal that he notices among his students, and in the foreign policies of successive Panamanian administrations. He criticised the impending establishment, at the behest of and with the financing of the US government, of four new naval bases to fight drug trafficking and support undisclosed other purposes.

At which point Vice President Varela started shouting, accusing Yao of telling lies. "You, as a professor, respect me!" Varela demanded. Attacking something that Yao never said, Varela continued by declaring that he would "not tolerate a university professor or any other national or foreign citizen to tarnish the reputation of the government of Panama with insinuations that we are a state that supports terrorist practices." Martinelli maintained decorum during the ceremony but later defended Varela's disruption. Various cabinet members, most notably Education Minister Lucy Molinar --- a member of the right-wing Catholic organization Opus Dei, which is heavily committed to a certain rigid orthodoxy in how Latin American history is taught --- chimed in to support Varela.

Predictably, the next day El Panama America piled on with a racist cartoon attacking Yao for his Chinese ancestry.

But the orator for Colon's Independence Day celebrations, history professor Jorge Luis Macías, in the presence of top representatives of church and state, weighed in without mentioning Yao. "The oligarchic class has completely changed history for its own interests," he complained. He said that the current generation of youth has lost many of prior generations' civic values and argued that "you can't have consciousness about the country if you don't know history and its facts."

A few days later, President Martinelli put his positive spin on the historical debate at the inauguration of "Panameños Ilustres," a museum exhibition organized by Raúl Arango and Rolando Domingo. The display celebrates the lives of 120 Panamanians, most of them politicians, but also noted poets, clerics, athletes and businessmen. Working men and women need not apply.