Students from the
Instituto Nacional march against corruption. Photo by LTS
Panama
in a slow burn
by Eric Jackson
Politics, as a practice, whatever its
professions, has
always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
Henry Adams
Mid-May has brought, alongside the
deepening Lavitola bribery scandal and the government's increasingly
belligerent tone toward all of its critics, multiple protests against
the government from many quarters. It is Ricardo Martinelli's great
luck that no single alternative to him and his project for the nation
has grabbed a hold on the public imagination, but by many polls about
the president's credibility, whether people would vote for his party in
the next elections and support for his actions and policies, Martinelli
and his followers now have the support of less than 20 percent of
Panamanians.
The president is trying to destroy the sole constitutional alternative
to himself, the elected vice president. He had demanded Juan Carlos
Varela's resignation and that has hardly any support beyond the small
Cambio Democratico base, but he has convinced the eminently
blackmailable former President Mireya Moscoso --- she, who spent a bit
more than $1,000 per day of public funds during her five-year
presidency to buy clothing and jewelry for herself --- to join in his
criticisms of the vice president. This has prompted private jokes from
Panameńistas who held high posts in her administration about her
switching parties and running for her old job on the Cambio Democratico
ticket. There are surely more politicians in the opposition parties to
be bribed or blackmailed into switching sides, but unless it's cash out
front or a "get out of jail" card Martinelli's sinking fortunes give
him ever less to offer to someone who wants a political future.
Meanwhile, people who in many cases are barely on speaking terms with
one another are moving separately in one general direction, against
Martinelli:
The PRD, of course, looks at this point to be what comes
after Cambio
Democratico. They are fighting among themselves, now in the form of a
race for delegates to a national convention. Former Panama City Mayor
Juan Carlos Navarro is the front runner for the 2014 presidential
nomination and also wants to be elected party secretary general. The
"TOCONA" --- everybody against Navarro --- alliance of all other party
factions looked so petty and obnoxious that they changed their name to
TOCOMA (Todos en Contra de Martinelli, reduced to its acronym). But
TOCOMA did not field a unified slate of candidates for party convention
delegates, and if they still may do well enough in party elections to
deny the secretary general post to Navarro, at this point they don't
seem to have a coherent and viable alternative to offer. But while they
fight each other, all PRD factions are systematically blasting
Martinelli for corruption, his labor practices and his environmental
policies.
The Panameńistas have taken severe losses from defections,
but polls
indicate that those politicians who have jumped to the Martinelista
camp have not taken their rank-and-file followings with them. In fact
the party switchers are overtly disliked by well over 80 percent of the
electorate and unless there is severe fraud few of them will be back
after the next elections. However, the party has never fully recovered
from the disastrous Moscoso administration and carries the baggage of
their support for unpopular Martinelli policies for the first two years
of the current administration. Martinelli's attacks have helped,
though. His turn against Bosco Vallarino moved about 1,500 political
patronage jobs from Panameńistas to Cambio Democratico, but they have
also liberated Varela's party from the terrible embarrassment that was
Bosco the Clown. Now the president has sued the vice president for $30
million for repeating charges of corruption that have been made by
Italian prosecutors and Varela has the opportunity to turn the lawsuit
into a media circus in which the allegations that Martinelli took
bribes from Italian companies via Valter Lavitola might be ever-present
in the news until the lawsuit has run its course. It remains to be seen
whether Varela is audacious and creative enough to use such tactics,
which were most famously pioneered in the United States by the late
Abbie Hoffman, when the Nixon administration accused him and seven
others of having crossed state lines to incite a riot at the 1968
Democratic Convention in Chicago.
Former Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez is taking a
higher public
profile of late and is not ruling out an "independent" run for the
presidency. There will be one or more small parties looking for a
standard bearer in a year when hatred of standard politicians will be a
major political factor, and if it is unlikely that anyone will get on
the presidential ballot as an independent, she would be an attractive
option for the Partido Popular or, if it is wrested from Martinelli's
control, MOLIRENA.
The leftist Broad Front for Democracy (FAD), a project
arising from the
labor/left umbrella group FRENADESO, is about one-fifth of the way
toward signing up enough members to gain ballot status with more than
12,000 members so far. At the current pace they probably will not reach
their goal, but events could quickly change that equation. FRENADESO
will be holding a "unitary" march against Martinelli's corruption on
May 24, but has not reached very far to make any alliances for the event
or in general.
On May 19 the 80 or so "civil society" groups in the
Asamblea Ciudadana
issued a blistering manifesto that demanded an explanation from
Martinelli about the Italian prosecutors' charges that he and people in
his administration took large bribes, and rejected the president's
responses to date as an "accumulation of lies and evasions." Many of
these same civil society groups will be staging a protest march on May
22.
Unions in the health care sector went on strike on May 14,
with the walkout only partially successful but growing day by day to
include different groups. After several days of the strike, the
government agreed to church-moderated talks, but then announced that
there would be disciplinary action against strikers. One of the reasons
for the strike in the first place was the government's failure to keep
its commitment made last year to reinstate Dr. Guadalupe Reyes, who
was fired last year for telling the press and public about medicine
shortages in the Social Security Fund health care system. It appears
that the Martinelistas have sensed an opportunity to crush unions in
the public health care system, but their overt move to do so may
breathe new life into the strike.
Afro-Panamanian groups, largely as a repudiation of the
one black member of the Martinelli cabinet, Education Minister Lucy
Molinar, called for black girls to go to school with their hair in
braids --- something that the ministry forbids, at least for black kids
--- on May 21.
On May 19 a small group of anti-corruption activists, the
most notable being former Electoral Tribunal magistrate Guillermo
Márquez Amado, met to organize an effort to collect signatures and
force a referendum on the convening of a constituent assembly. There
would be a lot of elections to win in order to substantially change the
constitution, but the bet is that the Martinelistas could not win any
of them now or in the near future.
The government has reneged on its promise to establish the
facts about the Barro Blanco hydroelectric dam project that was part of
the agreement to end the Ngabe and Bugle disturbances of earlier this
year. Instead, there has been a steady stream of invective from the
Martinelli administration, and racist disinformation from the usual
far-right elements in this society about how indigenous people are
somehow being paid by unidentified environmentalists to protest against
the project. Protests against the project and others on the Tabasara
River have begun again, with the blessing of Cacique General Silvia
Carrera.
The hair protest,
aimed
at Lucy Molinar and Ricardo Martinelli
Signing up to put
the
leftist political party FAD on the ballot. Photo by FAD
Silvia Carrera
supports the Barro Blanco protests and calls on police to skip the
brutality. Video by Prensa En Resistencia
Riot cops move in on striking health care workers. Photo by ANFACSS
