The October 11, 1968 coup. People did die. A constitution based the division of political patronage spoils and impunity for the powerful was imposed. And we live under that constitution to this very day.
The absent story
by Miguel Antonio Bernal V.
Our history is like a huge puzzle with many pieces missing. We do not know what happened to us because there are very large gaps and there are many false pieces, that is, lies that have been put as truth.
Brittmarie Janson Perez, in Coups and Treaties (1997)
The failure of the Universal Canal Company that shocked France – in the 19th century — was known as “the Panama scandal.” It was neither the first nor the last. It was a link in an endless chain that continues today.
Alfredo Castillero Calvo collects many pages of the many scandals that surrounded the authorities during the more than three centuries of colonization. Panama was being configured – the foreign forces with their internal allies – to be, not a country but a business, as stated at the end of the 20th century, Noriega’s personal Israeli military advisor, Mark Harris (“Panama is not a country, is a business ”).
And so, from tumble to tumble, the multiple vastly unknown scandals that our Panama has lived and lives are collected one after another. The twentieth century began with the Thousand Days War and Bunau-Varilla. This latest scandalous treaty turned us into a territory of scandals and a country of treaties to be mistreated.
In these two decades of the XXI century there has been no lack of scandals, presided over by the so-called and well cared-for “Panama Papers.“ What is serious within this chain of scandals is the serious ignorance that the majority of the current population has about them. The rulers have been concerned that we are a rude and uneducated society, which takes pleasure in the ignorance of its history.
Thus, we see how the coup plotters of ’68 and their epigones, celebrated yesterday under massive confinement, one more anniversary of the chain of lies, blackmail, extortion, deceit, threats, beatings, torture, disappearances, exiles, murders, which began on October 11, 52 years ago.
For those who today forget, those who make us forget, and those who today prefer not to have memory, it is good to remind them that history (testis temporum) also has its reasons that reason does not know, because it is the true teacher of life.
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