editorial preview

"No magic wand"

Well, now, Jimmy Papadimitriu --- you're telling us that there's "no magic wand" to deal with citizens' concerns about crime, that it's a problem that goes back many years so the current administration should not be held to account for the current crime wave. That may all be true enough, but in the campaign that you and your boss ran you pretended otherwise. Then, in the simplistic "get tough" legislation --- like trying 12-year-olds as adults --- you continued to pretend otherwise. Now your demagoguery has worn thin and you're complaining because people are unhappy that nothing that the Martinelli administration has done has reduced crime.

Meanwhile, you guys have trashed an already ailing justice system. You have dispensed with the constitution to get an obedient hack as an acting attorney general, so as to carry out a little "war on corruption" that deals with only those crooks in the opposition, not those in your coalition. You have ratified and continued the influx of foreign criminals into Panama, and allowed them to use this country as a base for their international schemes, under the pretext that the immigration of criminals is a "personal matter." (And so it is --- personal profit for the corrupt public officials who allow it.)

The worst of it, however, is the callous disregard that the Martinelli administration and its appointees and legislative faction have shown for the lives of ordinary Panamanians. So we have a hit-and-run driver who killed a little boy as a "human rights defender." So we have this country's real human rights defenders, who expressed their well-founded concerns for what's happening in our justice system, having their patriotism impugned by the Martinelli crowd. So we have the mother of and after-the-fact accomplice of the hit-and-run driver, whose nomination for a post on the Supreme Court was greeted by a tidal wave of public revulsion that led to her rejection by the National Assembly, now in a well-paid job with the high court. So we have the murder of a human rights activist, an ex-convict who campaigned against brutal and inhuman conditions in the nation's jails and prisons, and the television station of which the president is part owner insulted the man's family by running rank speculation about his sexual affairs, and the Minister of Government and Justice implicitly declared before anything was known that the man was a criminal whose past caught up with him.

This administration shows a disrespect for human life befitting the most vile Colombian politicians --- those who seek to be elected on the bones of the "false positive" innocent young men who were murdered to inflate alleged guerrilla body counts, those who were "elected" with the help of death squad intimidation.

Violent crime happens for various reasons. We will continue to see abnormally high levels of it so long as the people who are supposed to be our leaders divide our society into the privileged and everyone else and show wanton disregard for the lives and dignity of the latter. It's an ugly attitude that seeps down into every nook and cranny of society, with bitter results for all.

Martinelli buys a Trojan Horse

"Panama is investing in technology because it's the future of this country and this agreement with Microsoft will permit education to advance," President Martinelli declared at his Mexico City meeting with Microsoft general manager Steve Ballmer. The gist of the deal is that Microsoft will train 200 Panamanian teachers in the use of Microsoft programs, and these teachers will train the rest of the nation's teachers in the use of Microsoft programs, which the Ministry of Education will be committed to use.

But Microsoft software is horribly expensive, exceptionally vulnerable to electronic attacks, and possessed of a short useful life, as the company's planned obsolescence strategy means that those attached to Microsoft must frequently replace their software and computers. That's why Microsoft is rapidly losing ground to the open source movement. South American governments in particular are jumping on the open source bandwagon to cut their costs and boost their nascent software development industries.

The agreement with Microsoft may provide Ricardo Martinelli and Lucy Molinar with some photo opportunities about kids learning computer skills, but the reality of it will be that the kids and our public institutions will be shackled to more expensive, less useful systems.

When we hear business executives who get into politics tell us that they intend to run the government like a business, they usually actually mean that they will run the government for the benefit of a certain selection of specific businesses. When we hear right-wing politicians extol the virtues of private property, usually they mean certain people's property and not others, and certain kinds of property and not others. In the halls of the US Congress and the European Parliament, Microsoft attacks open source as a form of piracy. At the same time, Microsoft is glomming onto open source programs, tweaking them slightly and essentially claiming them as corporate property. The most backward Latin American governments buy into Microsoft's convoluted ideological arguments to the detriment of the people whom they are supposed to serve.

Get beyond all the hype and ideology and weird Panamanian ideas that the more complex and expensive a technology, the better, and the bottom line is that Martinelli has made a bad deal for this country. We should be educating the kids with open source programs, not Microsoft's.

Bear in mind…