With more foreboding than hope

In Panamanian history? We had Noriega times. We had Arnulfo Arias’s short-lived racist 1941 constitution. We had the Conservatives in Panama City during the Thousand Days War, who allowed massive famine and prohibited publicity about those who were dying of starvation. Way back when we had Pedrarias The Cruel, who killed Vasco Núñez de Balboa and then took his reign of terror to Nicaragua. We had the brutality of the Spanish Conquest of indigenous Panama. We had the centuries of slavery here. And then we have had awful kleptocracy since the bloody 1989 US invasion.

The Nito Cortizo years will be remembered as times of massive theft that left the government unable to pay its bills, setting off two huge national strikes. Bad enough to rate truly awful, but does it take a history major to look askance at the superlatives?

Let’s not hear that “He stole but he got things done” stuff. Martinelli stole tens of millions and was properly tried and sentenced to prison for it. His continued presence as a prominent factor on our political scene would be toxic to Panama’s international relations. Including with the United States, whose State Department has branded him a crook, and whose justice system jailed his two sons for laundering their father’s Odebrecht bribes. Including with Spain and through them the European Union, where he is suspected of corrupting the police and using illegal electronic surveillance to spy on a former mistress.

We get an alarm from an interview that President-elect Mulino did with Andrés Oppenheimer of The Miami Herald:

And how would Mulino go about ditching the protection of Panama’s neutrality, which is designed to avoid the temptation of any foreign power to attack us and our canal? “Today, the US border isn’t in Texas; it’s in the Darien in Panama,” he told Oppenheimer. That’s a dangerous thing to say. As in, nearly a quarter-century after the last US military bases here closed with only semi-covert “forward operating locations” left behind, leave it to US forces to seal our border with Colombia and the US treasury to fly would-be migrants back to their countries of origin. Stated with the servile omission of any suggestion that Washington should stop the economic warfare against Venezuela that’s driving most of this migration, of course.

We’ve had an outgoing PRD government that looted Panama to the point that our government couldn’t pay its bills, generating a mostly nonviolent national uprising, and posited as its “solution” the recolonization of the isthmus by selling large parts of it off as a foreign mining colony. Is it now to be replaced by a Martinelista government that proposes to recolonize Panama by bringing back the Southern Command?

‘Don’t be alarmist,’ some might suggest. But to seal off the border with Colombia would be a huge, expensive and perhaps impossible undertaking. Panama is well nigh broke and faces severe austerity, without any proposal coming from Mulino about how we are to mobilize Panamanians to meet such a daunting challenge.

The US border does not run through Panama. We are an independent country, nobody’s “back yard.” The US “lot line” is far to our northwest, largely along the Rio Grande. Suggesting otherwise to a great power that can be and has at times been belligerent at Panama’s expense is irresponsible.

A US “technical solution” with electronic sensors in the jungle like the ones along the network of trails through Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia that were supposed to win the Vietnam War for Washington? How about our own economic and technical approach, where people living along the border all have their cell phones and laptops connected to the Internet, so that they can call the police if they see a group of foreign intruders in their neighborhood? How about better cooperation with our closest neighbors there, the Colombians?

Looking farther afield for international help with a serious problem of ours can be reasonable enough. A mainstream political culture in which rival establishment parties push different versions of selling off Panama as a colony is only reason for despair. People died, people fought uphill battles over their long lifetimes, for something better than this for Panama.

There are certain toxic thoughts that are the bane of Panamanian history. “What’s in it for ME?” is one of those. So is “Let the gringos solve it.”

The US system has a backup if a president becomes disabled

Set aside a rush job rerun of primaries, all the possible intra-party chicanery, exaggerated ambitions, celebrity politics. We have our stand-in, if need be, and she’s very well qualified.

Bear in mind…

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