May Day is Labor Day in Panama and Chiriqui’s labor movement gathered to show the flag in David that day. The construction workers, the brewery and soft drink workers, the teachers and others were all out. In Chiriqui it is perhaps more visible than elsewhere, but one does not understand the grim determination and fierce passions of so much of Panamanian labor if one does not recognize that it is largely a movement of dispossessed rural people – folks who were forced off of farms by economic forces, people whose fishing villages were razed by developers, villagers who depended on a river for drinking water and fish during hard times who had their river privatized and made inadequate or useless for their needs by dam concessionaires, ancient nations displaced by a continuing conquest that began some five centuries ago. They had to go out and get jobs in someone else’s economy but they took their cultures, their memories and their attitudes with them. Those who don’t understand what has happened to rural Panama will have a hard time understanding Panamanian workers.
[Editor’s note: Apologies to José for the delay in publishing this, part of which had to do with a prolonged Claro wireless Internet outage.]
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A neighbor is clearing away the vegetation in a traditional and illegal way, by burning. The smoke and ashes are the minor part of the problem. Photo by John July.
Another burning season
photos and video by John July, note by Eric Jackson
It’s burning season, a tradition that goes back thousands of year here. Go chopping through the red clay in many a place that has been inhabited off and on for a very long time and you may encounter one or more thin black layers in the soil. Those are the marks of burning seasons long ago.
Why? Swidden agriculture worked well in a Panama that was not heavily populated. Slash away a part of the jungle, set it on fire and the ash provides fertilizer that allows a season or two of crops in the not so nutrient-rich red clay (or sandy white) land. After a couple of seasons the paractice was to abandon that place to the jungle and cut down a new patch to farm. It worked reasonably well in its time.
Had the heyday of slash-and-burn come and gone before the Spanish Conquest? The isthmus supported a much larger population shortly before the Europeans arrived, with their guns and horses and attack dogs and deadliest of all, their diseases. From studies of forestation, deforestation and archaeology as well as the Spanish church and governmental records we know that there was a great reduction in the population following the conquerors’ arrival. The details are emerging and such lines of inquiry as DMA research, folklore in indigenous languages, explorations of old sites with ground penetrating radar, the analysis of old garbage dumps and so on are giving us ever more detail on what happened. When the Spaniards arrived there were little warring territories and that may have been about competition among groups that had exhausted their lands by too frequent slashing and burning. After the conquest forests grew back in many parts of Panama where they had been cut down.
Those who would build fertile soil by adding compost to infertile fields should not burn anything. The fire not only depletes the carbon that enriches the soil but also kills the worms and microbes that help make the soil fertile.
In any case, in the 1950s the old Panama Canal Company sealed the fate of swidden agriculture and the natural regeneration of forests with a monumental environmental blunder. To shore up the banks of the Panama Canal’s Culebra Cut, they imported Vietnamese elephant grass —paja canalera or Saccharum spontaneum — and it became the most prolific of invasive weeds. Slash and burn a patch of forest and what grows now is this stuff, grass that cows and horses won’t eat. The grass must be aggressively eliminated before there can be a new generation of trees.
So why, other than an ignorance beyond traditionalism, would someone burn their land in a place like Coronado? So many of the people there, Panamanians and newcomers alike, put a high premium on cutting labor costs. The law requires that people periodically clear their fence lines of vegetation. It is cheaper to burn it than to hire somebody to cut it.
Such burning is also illegal. Breathing in the smoke is unhealthy. Sweeping away the soot and ash that falls on the neighborhood is another household chore imposed from without. And then, as happened here, the fire can spread beyond the property of the one doing the burning. As it turned out, spreading to burn a neighbor’s casita and down a utility line. The bomberos who were called to the scene were surely not amused by the time, labor, expense and risk involved to them.
Why would off-duty members of the National Police’s ecological unit have joined a protest in Parque Urraca to press for the new penalties that just went into effect? Some of these men and women also have beloved animals in their lives, but mainly it’s because part of their job is protecting the national parks, in which a common crime is the abandonment of unwanted pets — monkeys, birds, snakes, dogs and cats. The animal so abandoned rarely knows how to hunt for a living and more likely starves or ends up as prey. Those that do successfully make the transition become exotic invasive pest species that disrupt ecological balances in the parks. Archive photo by Eric Jackson.
Animal cruelty can now lead to jail time
by Eric Jackson
As of May 2, Law 70 of 2017 went into effect. This was an amendment to the 2012 animal cruelty law, which provided fines of up to $1,000 for mistreatment of animals. Back in 2012 that law was controversial in various ways, and was in its first version vetoed in its entirety by then President Ricardo Martinelli. (Including the part that made bestiality a crime.) The ex-president wanted Spanish-style bullfighting in which the bull gets killed, which is not part of the Panamanian culture. (Our sort of bullfighting is a drunken Interiorano tradition in which the bull is far more likely to win — the poor beast is put in a small corral with wooden rails, on which people sit and occasionally jump into the ring to slap or otherwise harass the bull. The pain of getting trampled or gored generally sets in gradually as the effect of the seco wears off.)
In any case, a slightly tweaked law was passed in 2012 notwithstanding the president’s initial objections. It did not legalize Spanish bullfighting but to the chagrin of some it also did not ban the cruel blood sport of cockfighting. However, not long after the original animal cruelty law went into effect dog lovers led a protest joined by cat fanciers, television personalities and members of the National Police to demand the possibility of jail time for serious offenses and a clearer statement of jurisdiction so that the corregidores (now justices of the peace) and judges would not hold that it’s not within their powers to do anything about maltreatment of animals.
The amendment they demanded passed last year and just went into effect. If you abandon or mistreat a dog or a cat you may end up behind bars for it, up to thee years if the animal dies from what you did to it.
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It started in Chicago in 1886, with working men and women demanding an eight-hour work day.
May Day: labor’s 132-year international tradition
On May 1, 1886, working people in Chicago — folks of various trades, ideologies and national origins, not all of whom spoke English — gathered peacefully to demand an eight-hour work day. The rally was attacked by police. Three days later anarchists gathered to protest the police brutality, and as the police moved in to break up that protest someone set off a bomb that killed several of the officers. Men identified as anarchist leaders, none of them ever shown to have anything to do with the bomb, were charged with murder and several were hanged, the rest sent away to prison.
The movement was suppressed in the USA, although organized labor did come back and win the eight-hour day many years later. Meanwhile the tradition caught on across the rest of the world, and now May 1 is celebrated as Labor Day in most of the world, including in Panama.
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A decade ago, many Colombians living in Panama registered their objections to the FARC guerrillas. It was their right. Those who brought warfare spilling across our border, on the other hand, had no such right. Archive photo by José F. Ponce
We should not allow a Venezuelan exile court here
Panama has been a place to which people flee from dreadful condition in other lands all though its recorded history. Archaeology, paleoclimatology, ethnobotany, DNA and tribal lore will likely combine to show that this was also the case in the preliterate cultures before the Spanish Conquest, but certainly most of the Spaniards who came were not only looking for gold or other riches, they were fleeing a ruined Iberian Peninsula, its soil eroded and its people exhausted and treasuries depleted by generations of war. Economic collapses, persecutions and wars have brought many waves of immigrants to this isthmus, and if we care to look closely at what happened here between the end of the great Spanish trade fairs and the California Gold Rush, Panama has also seen great emigrations due to hard times.
Some people fled and then went back, some passed through, and many stayed and wove themselves into the fabric of what this country is. Panama is the better for it. But we are Panama and not a department of Colombia because we decided not to let conflicts elsewhere rule our fate. Panama gained control of the canal in large part by an understanding with the rest of the world that the conflicts of others would not play out here in political decisions about who gets to use the canal and who does not.
So much of the story of Colombia’s civil conflict remains shrouded by the secrecy of several governments. At US urging, did we lean toward the right-wing paramilitaries at one point? That did happen and some organized Colombian criminals that we have here are one of the legacies of that. But most of the Colombians who came here due to the breakdown of public order in the locales from whence they ran settled in and made positive contributions to Panama. If at key moments much of that community took to the streets to say that they didn’t like the guerrillas or the war, it was their right. So is it tolerated and a useful social safety valve when Colombians go to their consular voting stations in Panama and cast their ballots. With a few exceptions, Panama’s large Colombian community is not a problem. Of course among those who fled the violence there will be people who participated and who can’t off turn the violence, the hatreds and the racketeering lifestyles those bred. Panama has to look out for those relative few.
Now from Venezuela, with its ruined oil economy, its ultra-violent capital and its dysfunctional politics, has come another wave of immigrants. We don’t have the resources to take everybody who wants to come and we need to discard the bad apples, but the Venezuelans are not a big problem. They add more than they subtract and when things calm down in Caracas some will want to go back while others will have established new lives here.
The Venezuelans who are here nearly unanimously dislike the present government in Caracas. They have a right to say that.
What should not be allowed, however, is the establishment of an opposition Venezuelan supreme court in exile here. The Venezuelan opposition has asked Panama for permission to set up that exile body here, and unfortunately the Varela administration appears receptive.
That would drag Panama into somebody else’s conflict. It could make us the target for attacks. Do we have creditors here with claims against Venezuela? Are we annoyed that their disorders are sending people fleeing in all directions including our own? Sure, Panama has some differences to negotiate with Venezuela but not such that we should allow an opposition government in exile to operate from here.
Ford ends production of sedans
Ford Motor Company has decided to end production of Fiesta, Focus and Taurus sedans, keeping the Mustang muscle cars but shifting its focus to sport utility vehicles and trucks. It was reportedly decided after another disappointing earnings report. Let us not, however, just pass it off as a brilliant or erroneous bean counter move, although it may have been one of those things as well.
Henry Ford was in so many ways a miserable creature, but early in the 20th century he combined a few key ideas. He would incorporate existing mass production ideas into a moving assembly line, not only speeding up production but allowing it to be done by a mostly unskilled work force. His company would pay its workers enough so that they would be able to buy its cars. The first Ford cars were made easy to repair and maintain, so that anyone with a bit of mechanical reasoning and a few tools could do that.
By the time that Franklin D. Roosevelt forced the old man out of the company’s management because he was one of Hitler’s friends and the company was needed for war production, new ideas were growing in the industry he created. Wartime worked delayed the implementation, but afterward cars were intentionally made less durable, with model changes that among other things within a few years made parts hard to find and people who could fix cars less common in the labor market. As in “planned obsolescence,” something underway today in both the hardware and software sectors of the computer industry. Later came shareholders demanding profit maximization – more so in other companies that the family-controlled Ford – and competitive drives to reduce labor costs by automation, out-sourcing and assembly in cheap labor countries. The concepts of simplicity, durability and an American working class that provided a good market for things that its members produced were all abandoned in favor of short-term profits.
Now climate change and new technologies are leading toward the end of the internal combustion engine. Asian competitors having long since beaten Ford in terms of both quality and price. Inequalities in US society are now returning to what they were in the Gilded Age before Henry Ford began his social experiment. A business empire is in its decline.
Franklin D. Roosevelt knew what Ford had, and what America had, when he drafted the company and the nation into the Second World War. That industrial might was the key to the Allied victory. But where is the industrial basis for US military, economic, political and military might now?
Bear in mind…
Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge’s chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.
Lillian Hellman
It is said that power corrupts, but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.
David Brin
Ignorance of certain subjects is a great part of wisdom.
Hugo De Groot
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Students and professors from the University of Panama head down Via España. Photo by Kermit Nourse.
Labor unrest spreads to the education sector
photos by Kermit Nourse
On Friday, April 27 most of the nation’s teachers’ union called on their members to cut classes and march over various grievances. Here students and professors from the University of Panama, many but not all from the education department, join in the protests. The SUNGRACS construction workers’ union is out on strike and there is also labor unrest among Panama Canal workers.
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Central characters still at large: the Martinelli Linares brothers, Ricardo on the left and Luis Enrique on the right. They were friends with the owners and creators of the Financial Pacific brokerage firm, Iván Clare and West Valdés. Being sons of the now jailed former President Ricardo Martinelli, all sorts of opportunities opened around them. The brothers are accused of laundering millions in Odebrecht bribe money, which ended up in Switzerland and was frozen by authorities there. Photo by the Presidencia.
Odebrecht and Financial Pacific cases restart with a bang
by Eric Jackson
On Wendeday, April 25, two long-delayed criminal investigations went back into motion. The Odebrecht bribery probe and the prosecution of people in connection with the Financial Pacific brokerage firm that served as one of the clearinghouses for many other crimes got back underway on the same day, having been delayed by motions and lower court rulings that they were not complex cases and thus that the investigation of these matters had not been finished in time. Lawyers for several of the defendants responded with motions designed to start new delays.
In the Odebrecht case prosecutors have one more year to investigate and bring charges. They have information provided by the governments of Brazil, Switzerland, the United States, Antigua and Spain, plus have already taken the depositions of nearly 100 people and institutions. The Public Ministry promises that more defendants will be implicated in the Brazilian company’s bribery, kickbacks and money laundering operations, and that more searches, seizures and asset freezes are underway.
Perhaps the most newsworthy new Odebrecht development is the arrest order for one José Porta Álvarez, who was the 2014 campaign treasurer for the Cambio Democratico ticket of former Housing Minister José Domingo “Mimito” Arias and the first lady at the time, Marta Linares de Martinelli. Nobody doubts that this was an operation totally controlled by former President Ricardo Martinelli Berrocal, but the ordinary courts and prosecutors would not have jurisdiction over him — only the Supreme Court has that.
In the Financial Pacific case there are 18 new defendants, many of them already implicated in other cases.
When the Securities Markets Superintendency shut down Financial Pacific, one of the allegations was that it was a money laundering center for criminal organizations of several other countries — but they never did say which organizations and which countries. Perhaps we shall see some of that. We already know of several international operations with that connection.
Ricardo Martinelli senior is in a Miami jail fighting extradition to Panama on illegal wiretapping charges. The Israeli equipment and Italian software for that operation obtained via Caribbean Holding Services, a company owned by the ex-president’s brother-in-law, Aaron Mizrachi. Caribbean Holding had an account at Financial Pacific which has been under investigation as a possible conduit for the proceeds of various criminal enterprises in which Ricardo Martinelli was allegedly involved. Mizrachi is a fugitive with a Financial Pacific related warrant out for his arrest. His son, Mayer Mizrachi, is out on bail under charges of having defrauded the Panamanian government on the sale of computer software.
The elder Ricardo Martinelli allegedly ran a pump and dump stock swindle scheme that in part relied on insider information and a hidden stake in Petaquilla Minerals and its environmentally notorious Petaquilla gold mine. Petaquilla Minerals was a Canadian company and the illegal trades in shares registered on the Vancouver stock exchange were conducted via a Danish bank largely through a stock exchange in Germany, with proceeds going to a “mirror company” in South Korea with a name similar to one of that country’s industrial giants. Two Financial Pacific accounts allegedly controlled by the ex-president, High Spirit and Jal Offshore, are suspected of further laundering the proceeds of the insider trading, with Jal Offshore notably being used by a number of alleged participants in Martinelli administration corruption to invest in shares of Facebook stock.
One might well say that if Financial Pacific was the brokerage financial clearinghouse for Martinelli era corruption, the bank associated with those operations was Banco Universal, which was liquidated over corruption charges. Its principal figure, former Vice President Felipe “Pipo” Virzi (who served in that post during the 1994-1999 PRD administration of Ernesto “Toro” Pérez Balladares) is related to the Martinellis by marriage and has been ordered to come in for questioning on new lines of the Financial Pacific investigation. Virzi, one of the original financiers of Financial Pacific, is out on bail with respect to a number of other charges. Another Martinelli insider, Riccardo Francolini, who had served as head of the state-owned Caja de Ahorros bank during the previous administration, has also been ordered to come in for questioning. Francolini is out on bail on a number of charges, including a role in the elder Martinelli’s purchases of media properties using funds ultimately derived from the Panamanian government.
The Financial Pacific probe is of activities during the Martinelli administration and shortly thereafter. The Odebrecht probe goes back to the firm’s arrival here to do business during the Martín Torrijos administration through the second year of the Varela administration, roughly 2008 through 2016. That time frame would encompass the Brazilian company’s large payments to current President Juan Carlos Varela’s political operations, but ordinary courts and prosecutors have no jurisdiction over Varela. The power to investigate, prosecute and try him lies with the National Assembly.
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