Why complain about what’s likely to be a temporary insult?
At the bottom line, it’s about an expensive irrigation project that the Panamanian people paid for but didn’t get. Go one step deeper and it’s about an international financial crime that involved former Vice President Felipe Virzi and the now closed Banco Universal that he ran. Look at the threads and the individuals involved — more than 30 in this case alone — and you are led to the Financial Pacific stock swindle and money laundering combine, which in turn involves the disappearance and probable murder of Securities Markets Superintendency investigator Vernon Ramos and international networks of computer crime. The Supreme Court’s decision to reject the irrigation project fraud case as to Ricardo Martinelli, announced during Carnival so that few would be paying attention, was because some of the papers were said to be improperly collated and not dated correctly.
It is and was an easily fixable error, but in a political caste and among economic elites who disdain and just don’t do work, the decision to reject the case will be readily understood. To all of the rest of us in Panama — the great majority — it’s a slap in the face. They are using a holiday to hide things from us and that’s conduct unbecoming of public officials of any sort.
The case can and probably will be brought back with papers in order but between now and then the anti-corruption movement that has focused on Odebrecht and the executive and legislative branches of government ought to turn its attention for a moment to the courts. This sort of brazen insult at a time of a great moral crisis in the nation is a good indication of why the best way to get out of the predicament is by way of an originating constitutional convention, an assembly that assumes the powers of all branches of national government while in session, including control over the judiciary. The system is broken and we can’t allow magistrates who pull these sorts of stunts to interfere in its reconstruction.
Srinivas Kuchibhotla, an Indian engineer slain in the wave of racist hysteria whipped up by Donald Trump.
This past week in the USA
The brains behind the Trump White House, Steve Bannon, proclaimed a New Order.
Immigration cops burst into hospitals and dragged away seriously ill patients who were in the country illegally. Immigration cops held Muhammad Ali Jr., son of the great boxer, the son who was born in Pennsylvania, of a father who was born in Kentucky, to interrogate him about being a Muslim. Immigration cops barged onto a domestic flight, checking everybody’s ID to look for non-citizens.
A white supremacist opened fire on an engineer from India and his Indian-American friend, shouting that they should leave his country. Federal authorities wouldn’t call it either terrorism or a hate crime.
The Trump White House banned nine media organizations from its press conferences, including the British state-owned BBC. Two other media organizations, Time and the Associated Press, refused to participate under such conditions. Trump, meanwhile, berated the FBI for not issuing him an “all clean” certificate with respect to his campaign’s ties with Russia, and said that he intends to criminalize the use on confidential sources in news reporting.
A New Order? Join The Resistance.
Bear in mind…
The constant development of unprecedented problems requires a legal system capable of fluidity and pliancy. Our society would be strait-jacketed were not the courts, with the able assistance of the lawyers, constantly overhauling the law and adapting it to the realities of ever-changing social, industrial and political conditions; although changes cannot be made lightly, yet law must be more or less impermanent, experimental and therefore not nicely calculable. Much of the uncertainty of law is not an unfortunate accident: it is of immense social value.
Sonia Sotomayor
I studied all about Gauguin. He was a banker. He was a banker who — he used to paint on Sundays. And one day he hated himself for painting on Sundays.
Anthony Quinn
If anything could justify insurrection in a free and constituted country, it would be precisely the caprice of the legislators who don’t make necessary reforms, after great defects in the constitution are proven.
Justo Arosemena
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Originally called by scientists in the United States to protest against gag orders that ban references to climate change issued by the new Trump administration and by various state and local governments and school boards, the March for Science coincides with Earth Day and has blossomed into a worldwide event.
March for Science in Panama
Plans are still being made and the coalition is still assembling, but mark your calendars for Saturday, April 22 if you believe that science is something worth defending. Already scientists of various nationalities who are working in Panama, health care professionals, advocates of secular government, environmentalists and proponents of sex education in Panama’s schools have joined to call for the local version of the March for Science. Details of the hour and specific assembly place are still being worked out, as will be speakers and other activities. Much depends on who else joins and what they have to offer.
For information on the event that is being updated between now and then, visit the march on Facebook. If you agree, help spread the word by the means at your disposal.
The first aim of the march is to connect people in Panama with the advances in science that are ongoing here. The particular goals are to:
Emphasize science for the common benefit of society;
Advance the state of scientific education;
Have more open and honest public discussion about science; and
Have government regulations and policies that are based upon sound scientific evidence.
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Wanted by Panama and Switzerland, he’s being harbored by the US government. The lawyer who allegedly helped him hide the millions in bribe money is not so lucky. From an INTERPOL document.
Martinelli companies’ lawyer busted for money laundering
by Eric Jackson
Attorney Evelyn Ivette Vargas Reynaga was, as these words were written, being held in the DIJ jail awaiting a decision on whether she might get bail on money laundering charges. Ms. Vargas is the in-house lawyer for Ricardo Martinelli’s Ricamar company, which is mostly in the business of food packaging for items to be marketed at the former president’s Super 99 stores. (We might quibble about attributing ownership — said to have been transferred to other family members by the fugitive ex-president, Super 99 and other businesses were arguably the objects of fraudulent transfers to avoid justice and can arguably be set aside. It is a statement about the nature and motives of Panama’s executive and judicial branches of government that no serious move has yet been made to seize these assets.) On a Swiss complaint that Panama’s Public Ministry has embraced, Evelyn Vargas is accused of setting up transactions by which at least $22 million in bribes from the Brazilian construction-based conglomerate Odebrecht passed into the possession of the former president’s two sons, Ricardo Alberto Martinelli Linares and Luis Enrique Martinelli Linares.
It is said to have been a complex yet banal financial shell game. Constructora Internacional del Sur, a Panamanian subsidiary of Odebrecht, allegedly transferred money through another Odebrecht-owned company, Bakley Assets, into Swiss bank accounts in the names of two British Virgin Islands shell companies, Kadair Investment Ltd and Aragon Finance Corp, and a Bahamian shell, Fordel International Ltd. The recipient companies are said to be owned by the two Martinelli sons. Some of the transfers were said to be in US dollars and others in euros between 2009 and 2012. At current exchange rates they would be worth more than $23 million but that value has fluctuated over time. If they were actually conduits for the ex-president himself, any investigation into that would be outside of the jurisdiction of the courts and prosecutors handling this case, as the Supreme Court is the exclusive venue for any case involving the elder Martinelli.
Vargas is accused of setting up the Martinellis’ shells and signing some of the papers involved in the transactions. But she says that she was just an in-house lawyer for the Martinellis’ businesses — on the Ricamar payroll but also doing work for the former ruling family’s real estate company, Promotora Los Andes. She was arrested in Mexico on February 22 and without objection sent back to Panama to face legal proceedings. She had an INTERPOL “red note” arrest warrant out for her but she went to Mexico not to escape prosecution but to be at the side of her father, who was dying of cancer, and then making final arrangements after his death. Published reports, based on statements that lawyers for Vargas and the Martinellis have made to various media, have it that her defense is that her job was being given papers to sign by her bosses, which she signed but really had nothing to do. It’s a corporate lawyer’s version of the “I was only following orders” Nuremberg defense. Her defense lawyer also asserts that whether or not she set up companies, she played no role in actual money transfers.
During the course of three days of interrogation, police and prosecutors raided the offices of Ricamar and Promotora Los Andes. Documents taken in those raids are being compared with Vargas’s testimony and documents obtained from other jurisdictions before the prosecutors will make a decision about bail or preventive detention.
This case is one of at least six Odebrecht matters that the prosecutors of the Public Ministry are pursuing. In the event that they find evidence suggesting criminal activity by former President Ricardo Martinelli, they will have to hand that over to the Supreme Court and desist from any line of inquiry about his conduct. The cases against Vargas and the Martinelli sons, Attorney General Kenia Porcell has noted, relies in part from information obtained from authorities in Switzerland, Brazil and the United States. But legislator and PRD leader Pedro Miguel González says that the Odebrecht bribery inquiries with respect to Panama also involve information from Hong Kong, Andorra and Liechtenstein.
Following upon the recent money laundering arrests of attorneys Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca Mora, the Vargas case is part of a relatively new phenomenon of Panamanian lawyers being accused of complicity in financial crimes for which they set up the structures. It’s leading some legal professionals and many more of their clients to question to scope and value of attorney-client privilege in Panama. The norm in most countries is that the privilege ends when the attorney becomes an active participant in the crime, but that’s not always an easy distinction to make. Here lawyers have historically been unaccountable for most of what they do, whether for malpractice or for being accomplices in crimes. Even those caught, convicted and jailed for stealing from their clients generally do not get disbarred.
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El gobierno panameño se encuentra metafóricamente en manos de un equipo de neurocirujanos que intenta mantener al presidente Juan Carlos Varela con vida política. El mandatario panameño sufrió su primer derrame con motivo de las declaraciones de Ramón Fonseca Mora que lo asoció con el Grupo Odebrecht y los sobornos que la empresa brasileña repartió en doce países.
Fonseca Mora es el mismo abogado especializado en abrir sociedades anónimas en ‘paraísos fiscales’ bajo jurisdicción norteamericana y británica. Se hizo notorio el año pasado cuando un grupo de investigadores en la capital de EEUU, Washington, divulgó miles de archivos comprometedores de la firma Mossack & Fonseca. En la jerga periodística internacional, creada en aquel momento, el caso se denominó los ‘Panama Papers’.
Como fichas de un dominó, han ido cayendo, país tras país (un total de 12), como consecuencia del escándalo asociado a los sobornos del Grupo Obebrecht. Las declaraciones de Fonseca Mora en Panamá comprometen al presidente Varela. Según el antiguo ‘ministro consejero’ del gobierno panameñista, durante su campaña presidencial (2013-2014), Varela habría recibido dinero oculto de la constructora brasileña Odebrecht.
Era un secreto a voces que los tres últimos presidentes panameños recibirían sobornos de la empresa constructora. De igual manera, se beneficiaban de otros negocios turbios que las autoridades han sido lentas en investigar. Sin embargo, las declaraciones de Fonseca Mora obligan a las fiscalías a realizar una investigación prolija. La Asamblea Nacional anunció que harán una minuciosa pesquisa en torno a las donaciones recibidas por el mandatario. La Asamblea se pronunció después que el presidente Varela hiciera público su declaración de donantes.
Los otros ramas del gobierno
Fonseca Mora involucró en sus declaraciones a los diputados panameñistas José Luis Varela (hermano del presidente) y Valderrama. Igualmente, mencionó al presidente de la Corte Suprema de Justicia, José Ayú Prado, a quien caracterizó como ‘manipulable’.
Varela ha estado permanentemente negociando desde una posición de relativa debilidad para conservar su capacidad para gobernar. Al principio de su gestión (julio de 2014) logró reunir una mayoría de diputados en la Asamblea haciendo diferentes tipos de concesiones. Dividió el partido Cambio Democrático (del expresidente Ricardo Martinelli, autoexiliado en Miami, EEUU). También introdujo una cuña en el Partido Revolucionario Democrático (PRD), donde otro expresidente — Martín Torrijos — sigue con aspiraciones para repetir. La suma de su bancada (16 diputados) y las otras fracciones le garantiza una mayoría de diputados.
En la Corte Suprema de Justicia, Varela nombró dos magistrados que le dieron la mayoría para re-elegir a Ayú Prado como presidente. La Autoridad del Canal de Panamá (ACP), empresa que maneja presupuestos de miles de millones de dólares y los sobre costos de otros miles de millones, producto de la construcción de la ampliación de la vía acuática, genera dividendos cuantiosos. Incluso, Odebrecht tiene contratos de miles de millones aún vigentes.
Las familias
Varela, a pesar de sus debilidades en el frente político, contaba con un sólido apoyo financiero y económico. Detrás de su campaña política, que lo llevó al triunfo electoral en mayo de 2014, dicen que estaba el grupo económico que encabeza Stanley Motta. Cuenta con fuertes intereses en la Zona Libre de Colón, Televisora Nacional, Copa Airlines y el Banco General. Sin duda, el grupo económico se benefició de su relación con el gobierno de Varela, especialmente después de la larga ‘sequía’ (2009-2014) que representó Martinelli.
Se asocia al grupo Motta con el Movimiento Independiente (MOVIN) que utiliza Televisora Nacional como megáfono para hacer su propaganda en torno a los proyectos económicos, que incluyen el proyecto de Corozal (puerto en el Canal de Panamá) y la Caja de Seguro Social, entre otros. Hace pocos meses MOVIN se distanció del gobierno, creando un vacío peligroso para la estabilidad del gobierno.
El otro grupo económico, vinculado a MEDCOM (conglomerado de medios de comunicación) que cuenta con el expresidente Ernesto Pérez Balladares entre sus filas, sufrió recientemente una derrota política en las elecciones internas del PRD. A pesar de ser menos poderoso sobre el terreno financiero que el grupo Motta, cuenta con una base social más amplia y sectores vinculados a la diezmada industria.
Por último, la tercera fracción de la oligarquía panameña de principios del siglo XXI, encabezada por Martinelli, observa activamente los traspiés de Varela para ver como ‘pesca en río revuelto’. La bancada en la Asamblea de Cambio Democrático puede convertirse en una pieza muy útil para Varela en esta coyuntura.
Varela agotado
La crisis gubernamental panameña es difícil de resolver en la medida en que el sistema político está diseñado para que funcione una especie de ‘alternabilidad’. Fue creado por EEUU después de su invasión militar a Panamá en 1989. Se supone que las fracciones de la oligarquía son estancos cerrados y que deben reemplazarse cuando la oferta del gobernante se agota. El problema de Varela es que se agotó muy temprano: Apenas por la mitad del camino (dos años y medio de un total de cinco).
Lo políticamente correcto en un sistema montado por la oligarquía, en un caso como éste, es que el gobierno busque reforzamiento entre los partidos políticos de la oposición. La fracción oligarca gobernante tendría que compartir los beneficios de su gestión con la fracción que se pasa de la oposición a las filas oficialistas. Todo indica que esta solución no es viable en estas circunstancias. Es todo o nada.
Desde hace 27 años la oligarquía panameña ha gobernado alternando el poder y excluyendo a los sectores populares. Los primeros 10 años (1990-1999) fueron de ajuste económico (bajo el binomio Pérez Balladares-Chapman). Después siguieron ocho años (2000-2008) de crecimiento económico (sin desarrollo) como resultado del traspaso de la administración del Canal de Panamá y el incremento progresivo de los peajes del Canal. Los últimos ocho años (2009-2016) fueron marcados por los años de más crecimiento (ampliación del Canal) y el declive al final. El ajuste económico premió a la oligarquía — en su conjunto — y castigó severamente a los trabajadores. Estos últimos perdieron muchos empleos, vieron deprimirse sus salarios y desaparecer sus beneficios sociales.
Cada quinquenio presidencial es recordado por los enfrentamientos sangrientos entre trabajadores, empleados públicos, estudiantes, indígenas y las fuerzas del orden. La desregulación y la flexibilización, así como los tratados comerciales, han arruinado el agro y la industria. Los gobiernos oligarcas desde 1990 han pregonado la falsedad de que Panamá es un país de servicios y no debe invertir en el desarrollo económico del país. Con el discurso de la posición geográfica y ‘pro mundo beneficio’, la oligarquía cooptó a las capas medias del país y desorganizó a sectores importantes de los trabajadores.
En el período mencionado, la oligarquía panameña ha contado siempre con la permanente intervención de EEUU en los asuntos de gobernabilidad, así como en la política económica (neoliberal) del país. En 2009 intervino para resolver un pleito entre dos fracciones oligárquicas. En esta coyuntura la estructura gubernamental está tan debilitada que una intervención es muy tarde. ¿Qué puede hacer el neurocirujano-jefe (la Embajada de EEUU)? Las Fuerzas del Orden, también corruptas — parte de la estructura gubernamental — cuentan con dos destacamentos (Policía Nacional y Servicio Nacional de Fronteras) que pueden dar una sorpresa siguiendo órdenes del neurocirujano-jefe.
La crisis actual
En la crisis actual hay sectores de las capas medias (denominadas sociedad civil), con niveles de consumo más altos que los trabajadores, que demandan un alto a la corrupción y un cambio de la ‘vieja guardia’ política. Ideológicamente, están atrapados porque no pueden luchar por un retorno al pasado (militar) ni a los discursos liberales y conservadores (agotados por la corrupción). Tampoco pueden levantar un discurso hacia el futuro que ideológicamente no pueden formular. Las capas medias son prisioneras de las promesas de la oligarquía. Agotadas éstas, la sociedad civil sucumbe ante sus propias limitaciones.
La promesa de los trabajadores también ha sido golpeada fuertemente. Hay sectores que añoran el retorno al ‘torrijismo’ u otras formas de populismo. Como todo sueño basado en el pasado es inútil, las propuestas se agotan rapidamente. Los trabajadores y sectores populares que levantan banderas ‘progresistas’ también se ven en una jaula con paredes muy angostas. Debido a la incesante propaganda — por más de un cuarto de siglo — contra cualquier proyecto que implique la construcción de un futuro que garantice bienestar social para los trabajadores, no se han podido levantar consignas que entusiasmen a la juventud.
A pesar de ello, Panamá cuenta con FRENADESO/FAD y el MIREN que son dos organizaciones político sindicales con fuerte presencia, también en sectores de las capas medias. La oligarquía panameña está conciente de esta realidad y prefiere entenderse internamente antes de cederle espacio a los sectores populares. La crisis de la oligarquía no puede resolverse con parches. Tiene que cambiar totalmente las reglas que se impuso en el período 1990-2015 o colapsa. Las alternativas no son muy claras en este momento.
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Thought to be the front runners: former Labor Secretary Tom Perez and Representative Keith Ellison. There is a second tier of possible next DNC chairs. Montage by The Real News.
A choice in Atlanta, but Democrats
have even weightier decisions
In a few days we will know who will lead the Democratic Party for the next few years. The Democratic National Committee, an elite and discredited body, will be meeting in Atlanta to choose its next party chair. There is nothing particularly democratic about the process, even though it will be an election and most of those voting will have been elected in some sort of fashion. Party leadership selection processes have been rigged in state after state to give us the DNC membership, and much of the DNC membership cares infinitely more about “the donor base” than the party’s rank-and-file. But then, history has many examples of good leaders arising from bad systems.
In a way, we know who might be elected and which of their opinions and accomplishments have been recorded. Those might be predictors, but Americans are in a strange situation and we really don’t know where the new party leader may take the Democrats. The chair whose election some expected to be a disaster could turn out to be a remarkably great leader, or the opposite thing might happen.
The worst of all directions would be into a messy divorce from reality such as the Republicans have undergone. The pretense that greater prosperity for the wealthiest Americans would trickle on most Americans, the notion that picking a fight with Russia would be a wise course of action, the presumption that everyone shares the DNC members’ passions — these are all recipes for disunity, disarray and further defeats. Democrats face a period of legal and physical repression, vote suppression in many forms and venomous hatreds of many sorts being spat in many directions. A grab bag of identity politics will not substitute for solidarity. A legal strategy aimed at rigging the 2020 presidential candidate selection will not substitute for an across-the-board defense of voting rights in the courts and legislatures. Mimicry of the John Birch Society of old with specious accusations of treason will not give Democrats the patriotic credentials that only a wise and tenacious defense of the national interests can bestow.
The Democratic Party can’t go on as before. “Seasoned leadership” in the direction that the Clintons and their old Democratic Leadership Council took us is bankrupt. The vicious denunciations of the younger generations of voters — and non-voters — that we hear from some Democrats who fancy themselves leaders only mean that these people should be retired from any position of influence. Those who advocate purges of the Bernie supporters need to themselves be left out in the cold. Insurgents who think in terms of the wholesale dismissal of the party’s old guard not only won’t get that but shouldn’t want it.
The tensions between the party’s progressive and corporate wings will continue. They will have to be compromised on many fronts and tentatively decided until the next cycle on others. It’s akin to managing a coalition between liberal capitalists and democratic socialists in a fragmented multi-party democracy. Those sorts of balances are inherent in the US two-party system.
Just don’t wave a machete at him
President Varela, weak on the home front for many reasons, has been invited to meet with Donald Trump in Washington. It’s dangerous, because Panama’s chief executive will be meeting the leader of a far more powerful nation and his counterpart is either dangerously delusional or cynically playing fantasy cards for public consumption. Panama would be an easy demon for the United States to crush.
Trump is likely to make demands that Varela should reject. The only foreign cards that Panama would have to play in that case would be the solidarity of other Latin American republics and the still prevailing sense of decency among our neighbors to the north. Mainly, though, Panama and its president need to look to the Panamanian people for a common sense of purpose, dignity and resolve if we are to resist any unacceptable US demands.
Bear in mind…
Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
Eric Hoffer
When women are depressed, they eat or go shopping. Man invade another country. It’s a whole different way of thinking.
Elayne Boolser
Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down to the bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce of power it takes to win when the match is even.
Muhammad Ali
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I don’t usually begin a commentary this way, but — as a queer person and as a Jew who lost multiple family members to murder during the German Holocaust, I feel so furious that I am having difficulty finding the words. What I saw and heard far exceeds mere hypocrisy, but reaches into the inner depths of disgust, outrage, and contempt.
Vice President Mike Pence standing with the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, at a joint press conference at the European Council in Brussels, Monday, February 20, began his statements by relating how very moved he was on his recent trip (and obvious photo op) with his wife and daughter as they visited the first Nazi concentration camp, Dachau, constructed in 1933.
They walked under the gate with the heinous words “Arbeit macht frei,” (“Work sets you free”) and were joined by Abba Naor, a survivor of the camps, along with other officials. The Pences laid a wreath beneath the International Memorial at the camp, and witnessed the prisons’ barracks and the ovens inside the camp’s crematorium.
In Dachau alone, Nazis imprisoned and enslaved more than 200,000 and ultimately murdered approximately 40,000 people, and millions more throughout the Nazi realm that they defined as enemies of the state, race polluters, abject (cast off) “othered” bodies, those unworthy of life, many under the category of “inferior people” (Untermenschen): Jews, Slavs, non-Aryan emigrants, peoples of color, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma, Communists, people with disabilities, labor trade unionists, unemployed people (the “work shy”), people who performed abortions, and others.
I wonder whether Pence truly understands the events in Germany that led to the mass incarcerations and the genocide: the stereotyping of entire groups of people whom the Nazis scapegoated for causing the problems of the state.
I wonder whether Pence understands how his own administration, indeed, the Republican Party writ large has employed the tactics of stereotyping and scapegoating of the bodies of entire groups of people to use as stepping stones in their ascension to and maintenance of power: LGBTQ people, people of color, Muslims, immigrants, people with disabilities, feminists, pro-choice advocates, labor trade unionists who push for collective bargaining, those who understand the important role of government in health care and in maintaining a fundamental level of economic security, and yes, Jews.
Pence, as a member of Congress and later as Indiana Governor, has, first, not been a friend to labor unions. During the election, according to Brett Voorhies, president of the Indiana State AFL-CIO:
“Mike Pence has waged repeated attacks on working Hoosiers as governor and will without a doubt continue the attacks alongside his anti-worker running mate Donald Trump who is ‘100 percent right to work’ (anti-union and collective bargaining).'”
Trump figuratively spit in the faces of minoritized “racial” groups, in particular Mexican immigrants, during his off-scripted rambling announcement speech:
“The US has become a dumping ground for everyone else’s problems,” he said. “[Mexico is] sending people that have lots of problems, and they are bringing those problems to us. They are bringing drugs, and bringing crime, and they’re rapists.”
Trump eventually enlarged his dehumanizing representations to include people in all of Latin America and people in Muslim countries (except for those in which he has business interests).
Vice President Mike Pence, in his first congressional campaign in 2000, argued for public funding of so-called conversion therapy for LGBTQ people. On his website at the time, his disdain for same-sex attractions and sexuality stands out:
“Congress should support the reauthorization of the Ryan White Care Act only after completion of an audit to ensure that federal dollars were no longer being given to organizations that celebrate and encourage the types of behaviors that facilitate the spreading of the HIV virus. Resources should be directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior.”
Pence opposes marriage equality and LGBTQ non-discrimination protections, and helped to pass the so-called Religious Freedom Restoration law allowing businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ people. The state was forced to amend the law after experiencing serious political pushback.
Let us not repeat history
Though I rarely offer comparisons between events transpiring before and during the ascension to power of the German Third Reich with resemblances to contemporary United States — since to do so could result in trivializing one of the most horrific episodes in human history — nonetheless, I am haunted by certain parallels that demand attention.
I am troubled by multiple similarities between that time not so very long ago with the discourses expressed and events transpiring today. I want, therefore, to highlight, in particular, the parallels I see in Nazi portrayals and understandings of sex, sexuality, gender, and gender expression: a divisive and brutal program that was anti-feminist, anti-women’s equality, anti-women’s reproductive freedoms (anti-family planning, anti-contraception, anti-abortion), anti-lesbian, anti-gay, anti-bisexual, anti-transgender, anti-gender nonconforming, anti-sexuality education in schools.
For example, Alfred Rosenberg, one of the Nazi’s chief ideologues, directed his misogynist outrage by warning all women:
“The emancipation of women from the women’s emancipation movement is the first demand of a female generation trying to rescue nation and race, the eternally unconscious, the foundation of all civilization, from decline…. [O]ne thing must be made clear: Only a man must be and remain judge, soldier, and politician.”
The Nazis added Paragraph 218 of the German Penal Code to outlaw abortions and establish a national file on women who had undergone and doctors who had performed abortions.
In addition, the Nazis acted on and eventually extended Paragraph 175, the section of the German Penal Code dating back to 1871 with the unification of Germany:
“Unnatural vice committed by two persons of the male sex or by people with animals is to be punished by imprisonment; the verdict may also include the loss of civil rights.”
Nazi ideology rested on the assessment that homosexuals (males) lowered the German birth rate; they endangered, recruited, enticed, and corrupted youth; that a possible homosexual epidemic could spread; that homosexuals are “potential oppositionists” and enemies of respectable society; and that sexual relations between people of the same sex impairs their “sense of shame” and undermines morality, which inevitably will bring about the “decline of social community.”
While Nazi ideology and practice rejected lesbianism as well, they did not criminalize same-sex sexuality between women, as they had in Germany’s Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code, because they believed that so-called “Aryan” lesbians could produce Aryan children for the “New Germany.”
On the other hand, Heinrich Himmler, Gestapo head and chief architect of the Reich’s anti-homosexual campaign, justified his actions by arguing that male homosexuals were “like women” and therefore, could not fight in any German war effort. Subsequently, he conducted surveillance operations on an estimated 90,000 suspected homosexuals, arrested approximately 50,000, and transported somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 to several concentration camps throughout the Nazi dominion. Very few survived.
Hitler also proposed eliminating all sexuality education from the German school system and encouraged parents to take on the primary responsibilities for sexuality instruction within the home.
The Nazi regime connected multiple forms of oppression when Heinrich Himmler reorganized the Reich Criminal Police Bureau to centralize operations by creating a national file on male homosexuals, transgender people (referred as “transvestites”), what they referred to as “wage abortionists” (women and their doctors), and to monitor the production and ban the use of contraceptives to “Aryan” women.
Within this Bureau, they established The Reich Office for Combatting Homosexuality and Abortion, which in the single year of 1938 alone, conducted 28,366 arrests for abortion, and 28,882 arrests of male homosexuals.
The common thread running through Nazi ideology regarding sex, gender expression, and sexuality was their intense campaign to control individuals’ bodies and the bodies of members of entire communities in the attempt to control their minds.
Throughout history, examples abound of patriarchal domination over the rights and lives of women and LGBT people, whom they have been constructed as second-class and even third-class citizens not merely in Nazi Germany, but today as the current political climate indicates.
I wonder if Pence understands the irony, at best, in his journey through Dachau! If he sees the parallels of his own politics and the politics of the Republican Party, with those of the Nazis before they began their fanatical genocidal slaughter, then possibly something good may still come out of his visit.
Warren J. Blumenfeld is author of Warren’s Words: Smart Commentary on Social Justice (Purple Press); editor of Homophobia: How We All Pay the Price (Beacon Press), and co-editor of Readings for Diversity and Social Justice (Routledge) and Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in the United States (Sense).
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It is, after all, there. The Empire State Building is no longer the world’s tallest, but it’s still an icon and still a 1,576-step uphill climb.
Captain Huerta’s climb
an interview with Luis Huerta
Panama’s Luis Huerta recently ran up the stairs to the observation deck of New York City’s Empire State Building, in the 2017 version of the annual Empire State Run Up. He did it 21 minutes and 26 seconds, 24th in his age group and 143rd overall. The Panama News interviewed him by email, with our questions in italics.
Where do you live?
Panama City, Republic Of Panama
What is your occupation?
Panama Canal Pilot, a ship pilot.
Did you get into stair climbing as a sport or fitness activity in Panama? Are there many others who participate in stair climbing?
It started as a personal goal to run the most famous races around the world, and the Empire State Run Up is the most famous of its kind. I do not really know who does this as a personal sport other than fitness activity. Nevertheless, it is is an excellent tool for training for trail races in Panama where you climb about four times the Empire State height on a 50k race. Also for me it was the second time I did this race because it is simply amazing and challenging.
Have you climbed the stairs that start behind Mi Pueblito Antillano and go up to the top of Ancon Hill? If so, how would you compare that climb with the Empire State Building?
Yes I have many times, last time I did was on New Year’s Eve. The Empire Estate is way more challenging than Ancon Hill, it is because it is a vertical run. I would compare it with a hill called La Mesa or Cerro Gaital in El Valle, Panama — you just go 1000 feet vertical.
I have on occasion noticed various of Panama’s law enforcement agencies running people — generally cadets at the police academies — up and down the stairs at the Panama Canal Administration building. Have you done that? How does THAT compare to going up the stairs at the Empire State Building?
Yes I have done that, but still the Empire Estate is way more challenging. Nevertheless, training at the Admin Building gives you a beautiful view.
Have you had the opportunity to run up the stairs in any of Panama City’s tall buildings? Are there any buildings in Panama that you’d like to climb?
A couple of years ago there was a vertical race in Panama City at the F&F building (The Screw) but I did not participate. I would like to do the Platinum Tower in Punta Paitilla. I train on a 45-floor building in the San Francisco neighborhood.
Do you have a special training diet? If so, what is it? Which Panamanian foods do you really like but have to avoid while training?
When I am in running season I do keep a special diet, which is a low carb diet. Therefore, no hojaldra, corn tortilla or rice and beans for me. Lots of sea bass (corvina), greens and plenty of seafood soup, that latter I would not give up.
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Photo by the government of Brazil — even if its president might be the next criminal they take away in these handcuffs.
As Odebrecht collapses on many fronts, are it and its accomplices sealed off from consequences in Panama?
by Eric Jackson
The summit
Odebrecht is dominating the news across much of Latin America, but coverage blacked out in two of the places where the Brazilian-based company operated: Cuba and the United States. If one does not count money laundering jurisdictions, Odebrecht has operations, mostly construction but also petrochemicals and other businesses, in 26 countries. Top prosecutors from 15 of the jurisdictions, including Panama’s Attorney General Kenia Porcell, met in Brasilia on February 16 and 17 to share information and coordinate their investigations.
After the summit 11 of those who attended — Porcell and her counterparts in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Portugal and Venezuela — issued a declaration that they would establish “joint research teams, bilateral or multilateral, that allow coordinated research on the Odebrecht case” so that they could track down and recover assets. But the statement also acknowledged that each country has full autonomy and the extent of the cooperation was not made entirely clear. At least part of the vagueness was to be expected by the nature of an ongoing investigation and laws in several of the countries banning publicity in pending cases.
The scandal
The current series of Odebrecht scandals began to break as Brazil’s National Police embarked on “Operation Car Wash” — Lava Jato in Brazilian Portuguese — which was about bribery and kickbacks in the country’s Petrobras state-owned oil company. Information coming to light in raids and in questioning of suspects quickly involved Braskem, a chemical company partnership between Odebrecht and Petrobras, and corrupt Odebrecht contracts for offshore oil drilling rigs, tankers and oil and gas pipelines. It wasn’t long before CEO Marcelo Odebrecht was implicated and arrested — he’s now serving a sentence of more than 19 years, but talking to prosecutors in hopes of a reduction in that time. A plea bargain with Brazilian prosecutors likewise got the company to pledge full testimony and cooperation from 77 of its executives in exchange for reduced fines and no revocation the company’s corporate status.
What has come out are tales of systematic bribery in Odebrecht operations abroad, aimed at securing overpriced contracts with part of the proceeds kicked back to corrupt public officials. The company even had a dedicated bribe department, the “Structured Operations Section,” which handled complex money laundering transactions involving many jurisdictions, including Panama. Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca Mora, founders of the Mossack Fonseca law firm of Panama Papers notoriety, are now in a Panamanian jail awaiting trial for their firm’s alleged money laundering activities in Brazil.
There is a modus operandi in common with the various Odebrecht allegations that have come to light. There are more open payments made to politicians’ foundations and campaign committees — never publicized at the time, but generally a matter of public record somewhere. Then there are outright bribes, concealed through chains of shell companies and legitimate business, with the trail ending (or more likely being lost) with relatives of the public officials being bribed.
In the State of Florida, Odebrecht made a substantial donation to Jeb Bush’s foundation and later received large public works contracts from that state when Bush became governor. The donation was not made public until years later. Odebrecht also got major contracts with Miami-Dade County, and made donations to Miami Democratic party boss Xavier Suarez’s political action committee. In Brazil there were Odebrecht contributions to politicians of almost all factions across the partisan spectrum.
In Panama…
Here in Panama it is acknowledged that Odebrecht gave to multiple politicians’ campaigns, but the Electoral Tribunal is withholding the records of these, citing laws to protect Odebrecht’s privacy.
Did Juan Carlos Varela take money from Odebrecht, as the president’s now incarcerated erstwhile right-hand-man Ramón Fonseca alleges? So far there is no evidence for a direct contribution in the name of Odebrecht. But to the extent that Varela has released the records of the donations his campaign received, many are in the names of anonymous corporations, the principals of which and the provenance of the money donated cannot be readily traced. One donor company, an insurance company named Active Capital Holdings, saw some huge and unusual cash flows through it at the time of the 2014 election campaign and did have a business relationship with an Odebrecht front company called Sherkson. But so far the alleged record published in Ricardo Martinelli’s newspapers and La Prensa shows an Active Capital payment to Sherkson, rather than receipt of money from it. The principal of Active Capital is banker Juan Antonio Niño. Mr. Niño’s wife and one of the directors of Active Capital, Margarita de Niño, is the sister-in-law of President Varela’s brother, legislator José Luis Varela.
Attorney General Porcell is asking about the Active Capital connection, having been alerted a year ago by Swiss money laundering investigators’ letters rogatory. Martinelli’s El Panama America and La Critica are just a part step away from heralding what is known as proof that Varela took a bribe, but Mr. Niño and Mr. Varela deny any wrongdoing and the showing of various ties is not the same thing as proof of a causal relationship. Bribery is a very hard thing to prove — unless one of the parties to the transaction comes clean about it. The possibility of this happening from the Odebrecht end should not be discounted, but so far there is no public evidence of it.
Part of the information that is on the public record about the Odebrecht scandal derives from a plea bargain in a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act case that the US Department of Justice brought against Odebrecht and Braskem. Some $59 million in corrupt payments to Panamanian public officials are alleged in that case. The documents released suggest $4 million in bribes paid to former President Ricardo Martinelli via his two sons. But the attachments to those documents that contain the specific details of Odebrecht execs are being withheld from the public and the United States continues to harbor the Martinellis, fugitives from Panamanian and Swiss justice as they are. There can be various explanations of why this Martinellis continue to enjoy US protection.
Odebrecht’s economic implosion
When the Lava Jato scandal began to break in Brazil, Odebrecht had more than 128,000 people working for it. Now there are 75,000 to 80,000 and that number is rapidly shrinking. In Peru the government has seized some $61.5 million from eight companies implicated in Lava Jato, including Odebrecht and some probable Odebrecht fronts. Venezuela has frozen all of Odebrecht’s assets there. Three Colombian banks have taken the initiative to freeze Odebrecht assets in their country. Across the more than two dozen countries where the company does business, orders have been canceled, work has been halted and lines of credit have been withdrawn. Nowadays almost nobody wants to sign a new contract with Odebrecht and few banks want to be known for doing business with them.
In Panama Odebrecht, in a consortium with Spain’s FCC, got the contract for Line 2 of the Metro commuter train system in a controversial bidding process, and that work is underway. But its lines of credit, required under the contract with the government, were withdrawn. The suggestion that the state-owned Banco Nacional de Panama step in was not received and for several weeks Odebrecht continued work while failing to comply with the financing requirement. Now, however, it has been announced that two foreign banks have stepped in to provide the mandatory backing — but those financial institutions have not been identified. Odebrecht cites a confidentiality agreement and neither the Metro authority nor the Varela administration are objecting. Nor are any opposition politicians demanding the information. Now Panama has the precedent of private confidentiality agreements shielding the identity of those with whom the government does business from the public.
There are widespread expectations among anti-corruption protesters that Odebrecht will sign an agreement with Porcell, one of the effects of that being that the identities of those who took money from the company will remain secret. If that comes to pass the government may not fall — or it might — but there would be more political volatility and instability going into the next elections in a little more than two years’ time. Porcell is promising transparency and accountability, but at the moment she is in any case bound by laws that make the details of ongoing criminal investigations confidential.
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Comments that follow an El Siglo story about a Venezuelan woman who was stabbed to death in David.
It’s not OK
by Eric Jackson
Panama has been down this road before. Back in the 1920s a group called Accion Comunal — a splinter group from the Liberal Party of Colombian roots — used to dress up in Ku Klux Klan robes and agitate for the deportation of all residents of Panama of ancestry from the non-Hispanic Caribbean lands, all Asians, all Arabs and all Sephardic Jews. This movement came to power in the 1930s under the leadership of the Arias Madrid brothers. The younger of them, Dr. Arnulfo Arias, served just long enough as public health director to recommend, for Panama’s purported racial “health,” the sterilization of members of these racial groups. After having served as Panama’s ambassador to Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, Arnulfo came back to succeed his brother Harmodio as president and to sponsor the constitution of 1941, which stripped all Panamanians of the races he hated — it didn’t matter if they, their parents and their grandparents were all born here — of their citizenship. That racial experiment lasted but a few months, because the United States was edging toward entry into World War II by sending Lend-Lease aid to the British. This was often carried on ships coming through the Panama Canal from the US West Coast, to then run a gauntlet of Nazi u-boats lurking right off of the Colon breakwall. Franklin D. Roosevelt decided that he couldn’t tolerate one of Hitler’s friends as president of Panama and so organized an October 1941 coup to overthrow Arnulfo Arias.
Now we have a member of the legislature — whose maternal grandparents Arnulfo wanted to sterilize — railing against foreigners. Oh, is it just the criminals? Actually, she smears whole nations with her broad brush. Never mind that Zulay Rodríguez Lu was kicked off of the bench at the behest of the US Drug Enforcement Administration when she was a judge, for letting some suspected Colombian drug runners walk after they got nabbed in a DEA-assisted operation. Now that she’s a politician, she calls all Colombians “scum.”
Ah, what a nationalist. She copies Donald Trump. Like pitches of neofascists all across Europe, it gets couched in oh so reasonable arguments for immigration “reform.” But it’s all demagoguery, an appeal to base tribal hatreds of “the other” for political gain.
Now she, and an even more strident little xenophobe group, may show up at protests against the wholesale corruption of our government by Odebrecht. A foreign company bribing the president, so it is alleged, and those who want to ignore the falling out between President Varela and MOVIN can and do also blame it on “the Jews,” or at least the Mottas, Panama’s wealthiest family of Jewish extraction.
So when a xenophobe shows up with a few supporters carrying hate banners and waving a hangman’s noose in front of the door to the El Carmen Church, why did the overwhelmingly decent organizers of the anti-corruption protest hand the guy the microphone? They say it was to allow young people a “catharsis.” And Jim Crow laws and lynching were a catharsis for white people in the former Confederate states of the US South. Hitler was Germany’s catharsis. South African apartheid was an Afrikaner catharsis. The brutal occupation of the Palestinian lands is an Israeli catharsis. The Islamic State is the catharsis of a certain segment of Sunni Muslims.
Nobody should stand idly by when a hate monger waves a hangman’s noose in front of the door of a Catholic church, let along clap for the guy. Xenophobes should be obliged to organize their own events rather than glom onto those of other people who are pursuing honorable causes.
Enough of this. Enough of them. Hate groups are indeed gaining traction in Panama, including in some of our news media. But those people are them, not us.
Above, and below, hatred on display in front of the door to the El Carmen Church.
Ricardo Martinelli’s tabloid gets in the act with an insulting diminutive treatment of an American woman — an adult — who was strangled to death in Bocas. The people waving the hangman’s noose at the church complained on Facebook about the attention that this unsolved murder has been given.
It may have been a reasonable policy decision to exclude this young man from Panama, although it seems that he neither committed any crime here nor was wanted for a specific offense in his native El Salvador. But notice how Zulay uses the story and the image to cast aspersions upon all foreigners.
Was the guy a smuggler? Did he pay a bribe? Notice how the worst thing to this group was not some Panamanian official selling his or her country, nor even that the alleged payer was a criminal. It was that the guy was Venezuelan.
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