“There is no scientific need to create a law that seeks to give an identity to the babies that die in their mothers’ wombs. The statistics of these cases are already kept. Behind this proposal are ideological and religious concepts, to say the least.” Eduardo Flores, rector of the University of Panama, on his Twitter feed.

A move to reverse the verdict
of more than a century ago

In the period when Panama was a part of Colombia, the country was wracked by a succession of civil wars between Liberals and Conservatives. There were various other issues – Liberal merchants and industrialists against Conservative landowners and such – a persistent reason for the wars was that Conservatives intended to make Catholicism the state religion and Liberals were against having an official faith.

But for a few pockets where big Conservative landowners held sway, Panama was mostly Liberal turf. But at the outset of the 1899-1902 Thousand Day War, a Liberal battlefield blunder – foolish men trying to prove their bravery by charging into machine gun fire at the Calidonia Bridge – left Panama City in Conservative hands. There, over the course of the war and afterwards, the Conservatives presided over mass starvation.

Yes, ultimately is was a Panama Railroad Company and Conservative Party coup, backed by the US Marine Corps, that separated Panama from Colombia. Why did Liberals accept this? It would be a good subject for a doctoral dissertation, but surely at the top of the list was that Panamanians of all stripes were sick of Colombia’s never-ending wars.

When it got around to writing a constitution, some compromises were made. It was acknowledged that most Panamanians were Catholic and that catechism would be taught in the schools. It was stipulated that there would be freedom of religion. Priests were forbidden to hold public office. There was a tacit agreement not to teach or discuss a long history of religious persecution and warfare that dated from the time of the Spanish Conquest.

And the party of an official religion? Within a decade of Panamanian independence the Conservative Party was moribund and soon died out entirely.

Now we have a religious fanatic movement imported from abroad – from the neofascist-connected CitizenGO network based in Spain and from the end times Evangelicals of the United States – seeking to impose its religious dogmas through a law that would create an inquisition aimed at women and girls who have miscarriages or whose babies come out stillborn, and in a constitutional amendment that they want which would require a referendum that would override any legislation or court decision or treaty provision on any subject that fits the international religious right-wing network as a “family issue.”

In our own way, imperfectly as it may have been done, Panama decided long ago that we didn’t want government-imposed religion. And it’s worth mobilizing and putting up with a lot of defamation and grief to uphold that early 20th century verdict. The European goose step and North American end times fantasies have no place in Panamanian public affairs.

Don’t send guns or troops – let the oil economy go!

Saudi Arabia and a few allies, backed by the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel, have carried out an atrocious Sunni jihad against Yemen, which they want to spread to Iran.

Has five percent of the world’s oil reserve gone up in smoke from the Yemeni counter-attack? The Saudis deserved it. Moreover, with the ongoing calamities of climate change the rest of the world should have long since taken the hint to end the petroleum economy.

Are there financial, industrial and human resources just lying around to be used in a US war over Middle Eastern oil? They should be dedicated to the USA getting by without oil instead.

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Short of constitutional change…

The PRD deputies in the National Assembly are putting on an ad campaign starring themselves, with online ads promising everything from a better life to getting climate change under control with a set of constitutional amendments. That wordy document never had anything to do with those things. It was proposed by business lobbies to freeze the economic order that favors them into place and is now being modified by the legislators into more durable licenses for themselves to steal.

A fairly obvious structural change to Panama’s constitutional system would be to have more frequent elections. Perhaps the presidency should be a once in a lifetime six-year term, but to make legislators’ and local officials’ terms two or three years and stagger the elections such that every year or two years at the most people go to the polls would diminish the hubris of those like Colon’s mayor who figure that they have five years to do whatever they want. It would also cut through that desperate feature of our political culture that leads people to believe that their only recourse with an unresponsive government is to block the roads. But the only traffic about which the deputies are truly concerned is smooth running for their personal gravy train.

Their constitutional gravy train might still carry them into the unforeseeable future. They intend to spend a ton of money on slick advertising for the YES campaign only, hire a bunch of party activists whether or not their services are needed and whether or not they can do the specified job, just so long as the work on the referendum campaign and – it may still not pass. Loot the public coffers and call anyone who questions it an envious queer and you might be surprised how many people will take it out on you, your party and anything that your party proposes or supports.

If President Cortizo had any sense he would discipline party members who sneer at the public in such fashion. Maybe he will but it looks doubtful. If there is to be no constitutional salvation from a mayor giving himself a raise that makes him better paid than the president, under the present system the nation’s chief executive could just ask a rhetorical question: “You pulled that stuff and NOW you expect money from the national treasury out of me?”

The guy doesn’t know how to deal

When the end of a long, ruinous and stalemated war is being negotiated, the violence typically does not end before a deal is signed. Then, once the deal is made and the belligerent forces are each in their own countries, there is very often some violent retaliation within those countries.

En route to closing a deal, it’s fairly standard for one or both of the warring parties to launch offensives to gain bargaining advantage or just to emphasize a point. The usual thing in that case is for the other party to retaliate, maybe proportionately, maybe more than that, and then at a certain point the talks resume.

Compare and contrast what Donald Trump and the Taliban are doing.

Were there secret talks? They should have been kept that way, especially when knocked off track by a Taliban bombing. Instead Trump took that attack – an awful one but par for the course of an awful war — as an opportunity to break secrecy and announce an end to the peace process. Perhaps it was a gesture by a president who can’t and perhaps never intended to make peace to show people that he tried. His core supporters will eat it up but few others will be convinced.

The war in Afghanistan is a long-running atrocity that needs to end. The forces on the ground say that when the US and allied forces leave the Taliban will dominate the country, for better or worse.

A US government with any sense of honor and any hope of getting people in other places to work with it will take a lot of Afghans who worked with the Americans to the United States for them to avoid the postwar retaliation. Bigots, racists and xenophobes will hate it, but that’s what America should do. Looks like it will have to be a Democratic president who does it.

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