On Strike! --- a note from the editor

Construction workers' union leader Saúl Méndez, driven underground

When they say it's settled...
photos by Eric Jackson

Let's get this right:

The president announces that nothing will change with Law 30;

The president's man announces an agreement with the president's selected leader that will end the strike in Bocas by suspending some of Law 30's effects for three months;

The president's cops arrest dozens of labor activists, and the president's man says that there are warrants out for 17 more labor leaders, on unspecified charges;

The president's woman says that it was a mistake to surround the Hotel Soloy and demand the surrender of labor activists meeting there;

The president's cops invade Santo Tomas Hospital and drag away eight Bocas del Toro labor activists who are being treated, having been sent there by doctors mostly for shotgun pellet wounds to their eyes, and after several hours of harassment in police custody it is found that there are no charges against them and they are taken back to the hospital --- but nobody at the Presidencia says that it was a mistake, let alone a crime, to invade a hospital in this fashion;

The president's cops take a 70-year-old journalist to jail for something that he wrote years ago in a small-time newspaper about a development project within a national park;

The president's immigration people detain a Spanish national journalist for La Prensa whose columns are critical of the president, and confiscate his passport, then give at least three widely conflicting and demonstrably false explanations of why they did it;

The president's cops arrest a photojournalist for El Panama America and oblige him to stand in his stocking feet in a cell where the floor is covered with urine as they mock him;

The president's cops kill at least two people in Bocas del Toro, and blind dozens of others with birdshot aimed at their faces;

The president's cops fire tear gas indiscriminately in residential areas of Changuinola, affecting infants, senior citizens and others not in any way involved with the strike;

The president's cops round up young men and boys in Changuinola largely on the basis of a profile, rather than for anything that they actually are known to have done;

The president, having unilaterally breached all labor contracts with dues checkoff provisions, intervenes in the ensuing labor negotiations, has his labor minister fine companies that are negotiating with their workers, and has his cops fire workers who have gone on strike;

The president blames the trouble on the left, then he blames it on the PRD, then his minister blames it on disinformation in the media;

AND NOW, citing an agreement with one person, the president's mouthpieces say that everything has been settled, and that there's no reason at all for the general strike that has been called for Tuesday, July 13.

NOTHING is settled. Don't go to work tomorrow. Don't open your doors for business. Do not buy anything or conduct any business tomorrow.

Today, tomorrow and on the days that follow, don't shop at the president's Super 99 or Mega Depot stores and don't buy the Varela brothers' Ron Abuelo or their other liquors.

ON STRIKE! SHUT IT DOWN!

Seguro Social workers' union leader Priscilla Vásquez, arrested without charges


Veraguas teachers' union leader Juan Ramón Herrera, hunted by police