Protesters gather on Via España, ready to refight an old battle in anticipation of Marco Rublio’s visit. They, and everyone else, should pay attention to new threats to Panamanian sovereignty. Photo from the Claridad Panama X feed.
Rise to Panama’s defense!
Punditry is sometimes limited by military secrets. We do not know, for example, whether China has developed a human teleportation system, with which a woman who apparently works in a mini-super in downtown Colon can walk into the Port of Cristobal, whip out her cell phone, click on a few buttons and promptly be joined by a fully armed regiment of China’s People’s Liberation Army, assembled on the docks and chanting “A quick but agonizing death to the imperialist reactionary business administration majors!” (Perhaps with a whisper of discontent among the ranks, as the ultra-left deviationist element mutters its amazement and disgust that the running dogs and lackeys are not included in that revisionist sentence.)
It’s probably not within the realm of China’s capabilities, but we mere journalists are unlikely to know that for sure.
One thing that IS known is that within the city limits of Colon, not counting the US-based AES company’s fuel loading facility at Bahia Las Minas, The United States of America and the People’s Republic of China each have one major port, which if refitted as a military base might be pressed into service to shut down the Panama Canal.
Donald Trump’s envoy Marco Rubio came and saw the old Miraflores Locks (‘See what we gave them!’) but didn’t bother to visit the Museo Afroantillano, nor, when in the USA, visit the display in the Iron Workers headquarters in New York, to learn about the Mohawk union members who were among the small American minority of the mostly West Indian work force that actually built those locks. Heaven forbid that he should visit the newer and larger Cocoli Locks, built and paid for by Panama since the transfer of the American-era canal. Nor did he go to Rio Indio in Colon province, where a newer phase of Panamanian construction, a new dam for a new lake to assure water for the gravity-fed canal to function, is a hot topic for local residents.
Rubio came amidst a stream of palpable lies directed at Panama and to his credit President Mulino politely declined to even discuss that stuff. But he also came in the context of an offensive for imperial business expansion directed against China, for sure, but also against the American people. Yes, and a menace to Panama too.
Are you a gringo who’s not off the grid? Elon Musk now has not only the data that Twitter has collected about you over the years, but also such financial and other data that the US government had about you. Is it now a race among a handful of US-based billionaire surveillance capitalists and their possible counterparts given the Chinese system to know your government ID codes, your banking information, where you go and how you get from place to place, where you are or were at any given moment, your medical history and which prescription medicines you are taking, which disgusting sorts of raunch you find interesting, which dining establishments you frequent and what you usually order, your religious faith and political opinions, who your friends are and which people have committed crimes against you?
‘Hey, welcome to the modern world’ you may say in resignation as America becomes the land of the incarcerated and the home of the wimps, as ‘e pluribus unum’ morphs into ‘the more bread you got, the less shit you eat.’
But you know what? Egregious domestic offenses aside, all those notions deeply offend the Panamanian national culture of giving great deference to people’s privacy.
If the first century of independent Panama’s history was marked by a zig-zag and sometimes violent campaign to unify the country, to eliminate this ten-mile-wide US colony that cut the country in half and regain full sovereignty over our principal industrial asset, will this century of Panama’s national liberation project be the struggle to withhold information from tech moguls who fancy themselves as supra-national and more powerful beyond the dreams of any mere Russian czar or commissar?
For those of us who are Panagringo dual citizens, one of the moguls now has such data as Washington had on us. La Resistencia Panameña is about preventing and rectifying such offenses against Panamanian individuals and institutions.
Yes, and Donald Trump the individual? Don’t obsess too much on this con man and his lies. The often-gone-bankrupt man is a cut-out figure, a ridiculous bully who’s beholden to interests more powerful than his, whose bombastic executive decrees at the outset of his second infestation have quickly and spectacularly failed. Now Canada gets its orange juice from South America rather than Florida and bourbon is disappearing from Ontario liquor store shelves. That guy will be lucky to serve out his term, given his age and displays of end-of-life dementia.
He won’t get Greenland, but will he get Panamanians’ data for his donor base?
Don’t fear or revile the man so much as refine your martial arts and sciences to fend off what he represents.
Fry’s portrait of Dame Sitwell in 1915.
I am patient with stupidity, but not with those who are proud of it.
Edith Sitwell
Bear in mind…
Lack of education is an extraordinary handicap when one is being offensive.
Josephine Tey
Great saints have often been made out of great sinners, but not one was ever made out of a wimp.
Peter Kreeft
Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
Mark Twain
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