El
Pixvae in the Las Palmas district of Veraguas. Photo by Almanaque Azul
A
disorderly mind and odd behavior in paradise
Ricardo Martinelli is feuding
with La Prensa, so take that daily's versions with a little grain of
salt if you must. But they are not the only ones reporting stories that cast the president in an unflattering light, even if they have broken some of them.
Over Easter weekend the president made a surprise visit to the
communities of El Pixvae and Bahia Honda in Veraguas, and although
there are different versions of what exactly was said, he did tell
long-time residents who are disputing ownership of land with
French-Italian billionaire Jean Pigozzi that he would have them thrown
in prison if they did certain things in their land dispute. By one
account Martinelli said he would have them sent to La Joya if they
touched Pigozzi's fence. By another account he said he'd have them
jailed if they did not desist in their property claims.
Pigozzi is the son Henri Pigozzi, who founded the French auto company
Simca, and he's a noteworthy art collector, conservationist and booster
of environmental research. He has bought a vast tract of land, and
nearby islands, in southern Veraguas province. The terms by which he
has acquired or sought to acquire much of this property are
controversial, some as a matter of public policy about selling islands
and large parts of the mainland to foreigners, some as a matter of law
about the rights of people who owned the land by constant occupation
for decades (squatters' rights, to use the popular term for its
approximate Common Law equivalent) or by rights of possession that are registered or are implied by law. There are some folks whom Pigozzi claims that he
bought out and who say that this is not so.
So is this a matter of a president just using thuggish threats to strip
people of modest means of what little property they do own? Or is it
just a matter of a president warning people that the law will be
strictly enforced?
Whichever it is, it's about a president usurping the role of the
courts, which are the proper places to decide such land disputes.
Martinelli has no business threatening people with prison. If there is
a criminal trespass or vandalism of a fence, whether those who do that
are jailed, fined or made to perform community service is a matter for
prosecutors and judges. Arguments about land titles, squatters' rights
and rights of possession are civil matters, not criminal ones, and
issues for civil courts, not presidents, to judge.
Martinelli's unpleasant visit to Veraguas over Easter weekend was but
one instance of his increasingly erratic behavior:
Also on Easter Sunday, he sent out a pseudo-religious Twitter tweet implying
that only those who never make mistakes should be able to criticize him.
He fired a notary in Colon while she was on pregnancy
leave. Whether or not one wants to believe claims about political
motivations, corruption and whether the stresses that Martinelli
imposed on the woman caused the loss of one of her twins, it was
illegal of him to fire somebody while on pregnancy leave and the
president has just presumed that the country's labor laws don't apply
to him and proceeded to vilify those who correctly maintain that they
do.
After IDAAN told people in Colon who have been without
running water since January that the money was in place to do the
necessary repairs, Martinelli announced that these would only happen if
he got to sell the land in the Colon Free Zone --- not to
the businesses that are there, but to a new landlord --- in a
ludicrously bad deal that has both rich and poor out in the streets of
Colon protesting.
The traffic and public transportation messes in the metro
area are worse and worse, and Martinelli is unable or unwilling to
impose any sort of order. In one of the more recent chapters of this
saga, it was announced that the SACA bus drivers' cooperative that has
for many years served the Pacific side of the former Canal Zone will be
replaced by the new quasi-national Metro Bus system. This announcement
was made without the SACA drivers/owners having been bought out and
without the replacement service having been put in place. So now SACA
drivers are looking for and taking other jobs, nobody is joining a
doomed cooperative, and the government is complaining about how the
remaining SACA drivers are not working hard enough to fill in for those
who have taken other jobs.
Martinelli's attack on La Prensa is about his desire to
stifle unfavorable news reporting, but he bases his argument on some
new interpretations of old tax laws. He's claiming that the golf course
at the Coronado Resort and the nearby Coronado Equestrian Club have
improperly received the tourism development tax credit, and that the reason La Prensa publishes ugly stuff about his administration is that its former publisher is co-owner of those properties. Set aside the fact
that these tax exemptions have been allowed for many years. Set aside
Martinelli's failure to press this claim against similar facilities
receiving the tourism tax credit. Set aside the fact that the tax law
specifically exempts the golf courses at hotels. Set aside the
circumstance that Martinelli is sending out an ex post facto bill for
alleged back taxes instead of changing the tax laws. Look at the
changes that Martinelli just made to the tax laws: he has created a new telecommunications tax, and at the same time
he reduced taxes on slot machines. It actually is true that the tax
laws have long favored the wealthiest families, but picking an argument
with Bobby Eisenmann instead of just revising the tax laws does not
address that situation. Nor does creating a new tax break for casino
owners. The phone and pay TV tax, which is bound to be unpopular, is
just gravy.
So is the president REALLY concerned about the nation's
finances? You can't tell it by his spending binges. You particularly
won't notice it when he promises a totally nonsensical Cinta Costera project for the City of Colon.
And then there was the president's bizarre and incoherent partial veto of the animal
cruelty law. Doesn't he have anyone in his inner circle willing to tell
him that it's not very smart to veto criminal penalties for bestiality?
International Jazz Day! This is something that
came from UNESCO in Geneva, but I think it's a good idea and I wonder
how Panama's jazz scene will respond to it on relatively short notice.
I post a lot of things about upcoming cultural events in the pages of
The Panama News, but many things come on just a few days' notice and
these I tend to post on The Panama News Facebook Page. I think that it is
now the most complete guide to cultural events here but it's nowhere
near "complete." You folks in the music, theater, art gallery and other
cultural scenes can get the word out for free by dropping me a line by
email or Facebook.
*
* *
The rains have come and I am harvesting and
processing the fruit that's coming early from the mango trees, and
transplanting coffee bushes that I have raised from seeds in pots. I am
about to try my luck growing cacao. But alas, my potted vegetable
garden is doing badly and I was wondering what kind of insect damage it
is. Then I saw the juvenile iguana casually munching on my baby green
bean plants. I need to find a good pollo de palo recipe.
*
* *
In the Gringo community here in
Panama as well as in the USA, we are into a presidential election year
and all sorts of games are being played. Wannabe fuhrers coming from
their heavily guarded online Fourth Reichs to other people's email
groups to demand that people who don't share their ideas be expelled,
Tea Partiers and queer-baiters complaining that Democrats have
politics, the constant recycling of usually false and often racially
inflammatory email chain letters, organized trolling --- yep, we have
all of those games here, too.
Remember two things:
Freedom of expression is a valuable but two-edged sword:
it also includes the right to make an ass of yourself; and
After all of the other games are played the important one
--- the voting --- happens in November. If you are a US citizen living
abroad you need to get your act together before then to re-register and
order your ballot. The laws are different this time, so you may want to
go online to the non-partisan Overseas Vote Foundation for answers to your questions, or you may want to
contact the US consulate here, which is also helping people to vote.
*
* *
President Martinelli,
right, taking advantage of his opportunities in Colombia. Photo
by the Presidencia
We shall see, but
the
things of importance that come out of the Cartagena Summit of the
Americas will mostly not be any official things that are done or
jointly said. But times are changing in the Americas, Washington has
long been behind the times with respect to the region and at the
summit many of the old clichés
are showing to be simply untenable. Note these things:
In Washington the preferred narrative
about the host country, Colombia, has been about this heroic democratic
ally that's a bastion of anti-communism and something of a platform for the projection of
US power and influence against leftist "dictatorships" in the region.
But its elected President Juan Manuel Santos has eased relations with
his elected counterparts in Venezuela and Ecuador, Hugo Chávez and
Rafael Correa. This has both helped him on the domestic front by
increasing the FARC rebels' isolation and raising Santos's profile in
South America, where his country is now participating in the joint
defense plans of the UNASUR group that's specifically averse to South
America being a platform for outsiders of any description and is rather
clearly an alternative to the role traditionally played by the US
Southern Command.
Ecuador's president is not attending
because Cuba is not represented, and Santos has announced that this
will be the last such summit without the Cubans. On his way to
Cartagena Barack Obama played to Florida's Cuban-American vote with
tough words about the Castro brothers, but meanwhile even long-time
champions of "free trade" and "the Washington Consensus" are saying that
Washington's approach to Cuba has degenerated from the merely
ineffective into an obstacle to good US relations with the rest of Latin
America and the Caribbean.
Guatemala's right-wing president, one
of those quaint conservatives who doesn't believe in spending a lot of
money on things that don't work, is calling for an end to the "War on
Drugs." Presidents Obama and Martinelli are among the hemispheric
leaders expressing shock, dismay and hardcore opposition to any such
departure and have kept serious discussion of drug policy off of the
summit agenda. But politicians from across the ideological spectrum are
no longer afraid to criticize a "war" that all serious analysts have
known was lost years ago. This failed effort may have the momentum to
keep it going for years to come, but it no longer serves as a
centerpiece for US policy toward the region.
Was Rafael Correa's protest a failed
attempt at boycott by the leftist governments? He says that he didn't
intend to organize a boycott over Cuba's exclusion, and in any case,
the other leftist governments each had their reasons to attend. For
Hugo Chávez, whose cancer now appears to be far more serious than the
world had been led to believe, every opportunity to be seen on the
regional or world stage may be his last. But to the extent that
Chávez's most strident critics gloat about his poor health, they boost
him in the polls for next October's Venezuelan elections and come
across as terrible ghouls, and not only to people who like Chávez.
The
rules of the game are clearly changing, and whoever wins the US
presidential election in November will necessarily have to make
adjustments. But those adjustments could vary widely, from falling in
line with the neighborhood consensus to going to war with the rest of
the hemisphere. It will probably be somewhere in between those
things, but changes will come.
*
* *
Get back! Back to the heyday of the
Combos Nacionales! Back to when Francisco Greaves was "little!"
Do
not suffer under the misconception that life is highly valued in
Arizona. On Easter Sunday, people in paramilitary camouflage uniforms
opened fire on a pickup truck full of illegal immigrants, killing two
of them. There are concerns
that it was the work of one of Arizona's vicious right-wing militia
groups, but along the border there are also violent criminals with
other sorts of motives. Were it two white Americans who were
killed along the border, you can bet that legendarily demagogic
Governor Jan Brewer would
be stirring up lynch mob passions about it. So far the lives of two
border crossers, one known to be Mexican and the other believed to be
Guatemalan, have not moved the governor to say very much about the
crime. But she is apparently concerned that somebody might kick one
of the militia men in the nuts and murder an unconceived fetus.
*
* *
We're going to have a bit of baseball reporting from New York this season. This
year's Panamanian contingent in Major League Baseball includes Yankees
closer Mariano Rivera, Houston outfielder Carlos Lee, Philadelphia
catcher Carlos Ruiz, Kansas City starter Bruce Chen, Mets shortstop
Ruben Tejada and reliever Manuel Acosta, and the (for the time
being) Atlanta fifth starter Randall Delgado. Delgado would have
started in the minors but Braves starter Tim Hudson had a back injury.
When Hudson is healthy the 22-year-old Delgado will probably go back to
AAA.
There are a
number of Panamanians in the minors who stand a reasonable chance of
being brought up to the big leagues during the season. Maybe the top
prospect for that is Manny Corpas, a relief pitcher currently in the
Cubs organization. It is expected that sometime toward the middle of
this season there will be an announcement from Mariano Rivera, now 42,
about whether he will retire at the end of this baseball year.
*
* *
One of the
unfortunate things about American politics, which is hardly unique to
the United States, is the political compulsion to vilify and suppress
news media that report inconvenient facts or in which opinions that are
considered politically incorrect are expressed. In the United States
this comes in the context of a relentless downsizing and dumbing down
of the corporate mainstream media, and with the rise (once again, if
you know the history of US journalism) of the most scurrilous
propaganda masquerading as news. I am not talking about media with biases, because every individual has his or her personal point of view
and inevitable bias, and every communication medium comes out of a
cultural context and that, too, imparts a bias. I certainly don't
pretend that I'm some sort of recently arrived space alien with no
opinion about inter-human dealings. You can read this page and pretty
much know where I'm coming from.
However,
while taking it as given that everything has a bias, truth still is the
first principle of journalism. Publish according to the "if it bleeds
it leads" editorial policy and I will think that you have a warped
sense of the human condition, and you may say that I'm soft on
crime for my different take. Treat crimes against Americans as
particularly newsworthy and those against Panamanians as generally not
news and I will consider that a form of racism and you might consider
my attitude a form of anti-Americanism. But start reporting deaths that
never happened, start accusing people of crimes that they did not
commit, start inventing or repeating elaborate fictions to excuse the
acts of people whom you support and then it becomes not a matter of
different points of view but a violation of journalism's first
principle.
Al Jazeera,
an Arab news organization founded by veterans of the BBC, has been
terribly vilified in the United States and was treated as a military
target by the Bush administration and certain foreign governments
following its lead. Bush led Americans to a ruinous war in Iraq on the
basis of lies, and Al Jazeera reported the truth of the matter all
along. US-based corporate mainstream media feed the public such news of
Afghanistan as reporters embedded in the US forces are allowed to
report, while Al-Jazeera has consistently broadcast a more complete
story. As American news corporations closed foreign bureau after
foreign bureau, Al Jazeera expanded its scope of reporting and its
English-language operations. These days in Panama we see Al Jazeera
people far more often than folks from US-based networks. And anti-Arab
stereotypes, bigoted religious slurs or faux patriotism do not provide
an acceptable response to their excellent coverage of a story that the
US networks missed:
* * *
Finally, what should you do
when the major TV networks and the corporate newspapers are either
oblivious or unwilling to give sensible coverage of a place that
matters to you, when Google News skews their algorithms to screen out
news about Panama in favor of stories from Panama City --- Florida ---
and when the half-dozen or so conglomerates who dominate the radio feed
you the narrowest of commercial music formats rather than things that
interest you?
You head for an oasis of truth and good taste, of course:
I spend more than full time
on The Panama News, and José Ponce spends a lot of his time working for
it --- and would spend more if we could get him some new cameras and
regular cellular Internet access to report from the remote boonies. And
then there is this much larger crew of people who send articles they
write or photos they take; do corrections, editing or translating;
provide computer services and so on. This is a community news medium
rather than a media corporation or a translation of corporate
mainstream stuff , and your participation strengthens us.
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The
Panama News Editors
Editor
& Publisher - Eric Jackson
Contributing Editor - Silvio
Sirias
Contributing Editor - José F. Ponce
Copy
Editor - Sue Hindman (1944-2010)
