Agreement ends a long week of confrontations

Many things that used to be in a Panama News Briefs feature of the website have now migrated to our constantly updated Facebook page

"Bloody Sunday" in San Felix: against powerful foes, the sacrifices
that people made to defend Ngabe and Bugle land and resources

Silvia Carrera emerged as a national leader with whom to be reckoned while Ricardo Martinelli was in hiding

A truce, hold the dinner and drinks

by Eric Jackson

Silvia Carrera is serious about the job she was elected to do, and when Ricardo Martinelli denied the existence of last year's agreement on mining and water resources in the Ngabe-Bugle Comarca, as its general cacique she
defended the people whom she represents, leading them in more than a week of confrontations that began with a six-day blockade of the Pan-American Highway and escalated into nationwide disturbances after the police moved in to clear the road. On February 3, two days before the police attacked, Martinelli invited Carrera to the Palacio de las Garzas for "a good meal and a good drink." But the supermarket baron president found that the general cacique, a farmer without much formal education and no wealth to speak of, was not only unimpressed but insulted. Martinelli has been able to purchase politicians in the comarca, generally very cheaply, but she wasn't one of them. The offer, she complained, was "a lack of respect for my authority.... If he has people, I also have people."

Her people are different. Martinelli controls the legislature with people who take bribes and succumb to blackmail. Carrera defends the comarca at the head of people who are willing to die for the cause. Many of the 20 percent or so of Panamanians who would give Martinelli's party another term in office were terribly annoyed by the disruptions caused by the Ngabe road blockade. Many of the 80 percent of Panamanians who are against strip mining anywhere in the country were inspired by the courage and dignity with which the people in the comarca insisted that Martinelli honor his commitments.

When on Sunday, February 5, Martinelli resorted to force, his riot police were able to clear the road as expected. Unexpectedly, however, he found that Panamanians are not, after all, a nation of wimps. A man used to buying and bullying his way out of everything found that he was not, after all, the president of a nation of people who are out for themselves and their families and otherwise devoid of principles. HE may have wimped out and made himself scarce, but in a thousand different ways the nation that elected him president exploded. It was a rejection from which he and his party are unlikely to recover.

On February 6 new road blockades popped up here and there across the country, every other indigenous group in the country sided with the Ngabe-Bugle Comarca, militant labor unions began to take strike votes and there were pitched battles between protesters and police in several places around the country. In El Volcan a crowd of some 7,000 Ngabe blocked the road, ran the police out of town, and burned the police station and the corregiduria. Others held concerts in solidarity with the comarca, held candle light vigils, filed lawsuits or criminal complaints against government officials, passed resolutions in their civic and professional groups and in public and private expressed their annoyance with the government.

February 7 opened with the death of Mauricio Méndez, a learning-disabled 16-year-old, part of whose face had been shot off by a midnight shotgun blast that must have been fired from close to point-blank range near his home in David's Las Lomas district. Family and friends blame the police, the police deny that it was them, and there seems not to have been any eyewitness who can identify a shooter. The police say that in the car where they encountered Méndez when they came to investigate a blast they heard they found gasoline and the remains of spent firecrackers. Neither of these would be entirely unusual for a young man who helped with family expenses by cutting grass in the neighborhood, but the police inferred something to do with molotov cocktails and notwithstanding the awful photos and the metal pellets found in the wound right-wing gringo propagandist Don Winner invented the story that Méndez had died from the explosion of a homemade rocket launcher. The accounts of the claimed indigenous eyewitnesses also seem sketchier than one would expect. The teenager died from a shotgun blast which if it came from the police was probably fired against orders, and the possibility that it was accidentally fired by a would-be comrade-in-arms can't be entirely ruled out either. Codes of silence and mistrust between indigenous people and government authorities, plus the difficulty of proving the provenance of a shotgun blast from ballistic evidence, may well leave this case unsolved.

The sun rose with the Bocas banana workers on strike, indigenous protesters still barricading the roads in Bocas and on the Pan-American Highway at the Bayano Bridge and east in to the Darien, SUNTRACS members blocking roads in several places during rush hour before going to work, and a march by indigenous people from the capital's eastern corregimientos, San Miguelito and points east moving down toward the city center. People of all races cheered, provided water and food, and sometimes joined in as the march proceeded. Around 10 a.m. in San Lorenzo, Chiriqui, a government team headed by Minister of the Presidency Jimmy Papadimitriu sat down with an indigenous team headed by Silvia Carrera for peace talks.

As the day went on, marches and other protests in favor of the Ngabe cause proliferated, and the government agreed to a separate set of meetings the following day with Kuna, Embera and Wounaan representatives about land grab issues in eastern Panama's Chepo district, the Kuna comarca of Madugandi and Embera and Wounaan communities outside the Embera-Wounaan Comarca and along the Pan-American Highway.

Finally, with the sun about to set on what would be a night with a full moon, the parties at the talks in San Lorenzo announced an agreement. The deal leaves issues to be resolved, but unless President Martinelli is so reckless as to start up this confrontation again count it as a victory for the comarca. The accord provides for:

The release of all people jailed in the protests.
Compensation for the families of those who died.
An end to persecution or prosecution of Ngabe-Bugle Comarca officials and protest leaders.
Restoration of cell phone service to the comarca and surrounding areas.
The withdrawal of riot squads and police helicopters from the comarca and adjacent areas.
Continued mediation by the Catholic Church, with observers from the United Nations, Evangelical churches and the University of Panama.
The indigenous side in further negotiations will consist of Silvia Carrerra and her aides and the Coordinadora por la Defensa de los Derechos Naturales de los Pueblo Ngäbe Buglé y Campesino --- that is, the government will not have the option of choosing puppet indigenous "representatives."
The government will ask the legislature's Committee on Commerce and Economic Affairs to reconsider the controversial Law 415 mining bill, including the Section 5 on mineral and water resources in Ngabe and Bugle areas whose elimination sparked the conflict.
A request for unspecified human rights groups to investigate the deaths, injuries and arrests during the course of the conflict.
Full publication of the entire agreement.
The demobilization of all protesters and their supporters from the points of conflict.
Further medical attention and follow-up, under the observation of a committee of indigenous physicians, for those indigenous protesters who were injured.

The February 27, 2011 agreement on which the ill-fated Section 5 of the proposed mining law was founded was quite explicit about no mining in the comarca or adjacent indigenous communities, but it was vague in its promise that Ngabe and Bugle water and environmental resources would be "protected." The record of the National Environmental Authority (ANAM) under the Martinelli administration does not instill confidence that it will protect any resources, and before the full moon set on the evening that the agreement was announced, Martinelistas were declaring that an ANAM-approved environmental impact statement is protection enough when private companies come in to expropriate indigenous water resources. But former ANAM director Gonzalo Menéndez pointed out a section of Law 41 of July 1, 1998, which created ANAM, provides that indigenous communities have a right to traditional uses of their water resources and a share of the benefits of any project that makes use of these. But those are dead letters to Martinelli, whose relatives the Virzis own interests in dam concessions both within and outside the Ngabe-Bugle Comarca. Also of vital economic importance to the hardscrabble comarca communities is the provision that "environmental resources" will be protected --- for example, fish that migrate upstream into the comarca and provide part of the local food supply. Look for continued battles over dams.

However, disputes over water resources are unlikely to resume in precisely the same fashion because this confrontation has surely weakened Ricardo Martinelli's political standing. His avoidance of public appearances during the crisis and the multiple lies in which he and his top people were caught will surely be reflected in opinion polls and now the non-Martinelista press is paying closer attention to the dams issue. Claims about energy and economic needs and questions about Martinelli's familial and possibly personal interests in dam projects are now the subjects of corporate mainstream media attention.

The crisis with the comarca broke out during a crisis over the composition of the Supreme Court, which will resume. The government attack ads, the racist remarks by members of Martinelli's party, the "anonymous" desparaging Martinelista videos and the organized "call center" comments by Martinelli operatives appended to online newspaper stories all continue. However, during the course of the crisis the talking points turned out to be lies time and again. Not only is that propaganda increasingly questioned, but there has been an increase in the amount of anti-Martinelli propaganda. Just before the crisis Labor Minister Alma Cortes announced the beginning of Cambio Democratico's 2014 election campaign. The opposition political parties have stepped up their response, but aside from that various independent, leftist, environmentalist, labor and indigenous voices have been raised against Martinelli and these have been particularly prominent on the Internet. The arrays of contending forces may be more or less the same, but the crisis over the comarca has altered the political landscape on which they will continue to do battle.

Silvia Carrera signs and calls upon the nation to be her witness.
Photo by the Presidencia

The police suppression of the roadblocks in Chiriqui set off a storm of protest across
Panama, including this march from the capital's eastern outskirts to the city center.

A post-blockade protest march in Chiriqui. Photo by FRENADESO

Marching into the older city neighborhoods. Photo by the Liga de Trabajadores Hacia el Socialismo

An "anonymous" Martinelista propaganda video, with the
trademark taunt about PRD leaders' phones being tapped

This anti-Martinelli propaganda video comes not from a political party but from
the left, which is renewing calls for a boycott of the president's supermarket chain