One child’s story of the search for treatment for kidney disease: Seham undergoes dialysis at a WHO-supported hospital in Sa’ada. Photo by Sadeq Al-Wesabi/WHO Yemen.
Seham’s struggles
by the World Health Organization
Seham was just six years old when she was first diagnosed with chronic kidney disease.
Together with her parents, she traveled hundreds of kilometers in search of diagnosis and treatment, from her home in Razeh District in Sa’ada governorate in Yemen’s north, to Hajjah and Sana’a in the country’s west.
“She was in a coma when she started her first dialysis session in Sana’a” said Seham’s mother, Um-Seham. “We couldn’t afford the cost of living in Sana’a so we decided to return to Sa’ada. We had to move from our village to Sa’ada City, renting a one room apartment near the hospital.”
Now 10 years old, it is not only the kidney pain and gradual loss of vision that make Seham’s life challenging.
“Because of this disease, I had to stop going to school,” said Seham. “All I want is to be free from this disease and to go back again to my studies.”
Accessing dialysis has always been tricky in Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East. But the conflict has created additional challenges, with health facilities facing a shortage of dialysis supplies and travel complicated by checkpoints and insecurity. In the midst of an economic crisis, many patients complain that they can barely afford the cost of transportation to and from the health centers for the multiple treatment sessions they need each week.
Seham is one of more than 5,000 kidney patients in Yemen who struggle to access regular dialysis sessions. Treatment for non-communicable diseases in general –- a category which includes illnesses such as kidney disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and cancer –- are available in few health facilities (about 20 percent).
Ongoing conflict, high levels of poverty and the collapsing health system have left thousands struggling for access to the care they need to stay alive. Non-communicable diseases are now killing more people than bullets or bombs, accounting for 39 percent of all mortality in Yemen.
Seham is one of the luckier ones. This week, the World Health Organization (WHO) transported 100 tonnes of supplies provided through a private-public partnership between Yemen and Germany to the dialysis center she regularly attends at Al-Jumhoori Hospital in Sa’ada.
But the need for dialysis supplies remains high across Yemen. In some parts of the country, dialysis sessions have been reduced from three sessions per week to one session or less due to a lack of supplies. When there are not enough supplies in the hospitals, patients are required to purchase their own dialysis set (filters, tubes etc) for around $40 per session -– a cost that is impossibly high for many patients.
WHO and partners are supporting the local health authorities to provide health services across Yemen, including care for non-communicable diseases.
The Organization is calling on parties to the conflict and their allies to facilitate the safe and unimpeded passage of life-saving medicines and supplies to people in need across Yemen.
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There are regular procedures for those who threaten a prosecutor. Photo by the Policia Nacional.
Say WHAT, Señora Porcell?
Attorney General Kenia Porcell, seeing obviously guilty public figures from the old regime walk because they ran out calendars on the statutes of limitations, complains that more high profile cases may be lost because powerful people, including some who apparently control news media, are threatening the prosecutors of the Public Ministry that she heads.
Does she expect any understanding, or any sympathy? To get any real understanding she needs to name the people who made threats, identify any news media involved, say what these threats were, and name the people who were threatened. Sympathy will be harder to come by, as there is a worldwide norm for people who make threats against those charged with enforcing the law in order to thwart the rule of law. Ordinarily, people who do that get taken to the guardhouse in cuffs.
Dreamers
Taking advantage of a Labor Day weekend, a lot of public incomprehension, some attitudes that in some but not all cases operate by multiple standards about the rule of law, the resentments of many Americans who are financially ruined and large dollop of ordinary racism, Donald Trump has announced that he will end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA, or Dream Act) policy. This could mean the deportation of some 800,000 people who came to or stayed in the United States illegally as children. Mostly Mexicans or Central Americans, the United States is the only country that many of them know. Some have served honorably in the US Armed Forces. Many have studied hard and excelled in various fields, to which they are contributing to the fabric of the American culture and economy. Mr. Trump says that he will delay action for six months to allow a Congress to review the situation, but knowing well that this Congress is unlikely to act.
Set aside all of the usual arguments. Social Security is not about to go belly-up, but it does have a longer-term demographic problem. The US birth rate isn’t high enough to grow enough contributing workers to keep the system healthy throughout the rest of this century. We need immigrants working and contributing to the system to do that. It just makes no economic sense to deport the Dreamers.
Bear in mind…
The most dangerous strategy is to jump a chasm in two leaps.
Benjamin Disraeli
Man can now fly in the air like a bird, swim under the ocean like a fish, he can burrow into the ground like a mole. Now if only he could walk the earth like a man, this would be paradise.
Tommy C. Douglas
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Eleanor Roosevelt
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Wouldn’t you expect PRD deputy Zulay Rodríguez to accuse the Varela administration of bringing in foreign professionals who don’t meet local qualifications, in order to take jobs from Panamanians? That’s the insinuation on her Facebook page.
Has the Ministry of Commerce and Industry
invited foreign professionals to work here?
by Eric Jackson
Back in 2007, the Torrijos administration passed a law to encourage multinational corporations to establish their international or regional offices here. It was partly aimed at luring companies that were already coming here in a big or bigger way because of the canal expansion project — firms like Caterpillar. At the time it was especially aimed ay companies that were abandoning Caracas as their regional headquarters — companies like Proctor & Gamble. The law was modified in 2012, by the Martinelli administration. There was some success, and it boosted much of that part of the upper end real estate business here that isn’t about money laundering.
But with the new multinational offices came allegations that they paid their foreign employees more than Panamanians, or wouldn’t hire local people at all. Help wanted ads that were not by these companies, specifying for example that they were hiring Venezuelans only, actually did appear and became part of the legend and litany of those who would like to throw as many foreigners as possible out of Panama. Were more of the xenophobes more literate in English they would have noticed American citizens, especially on the social media, posting similar stuff that on its face engages in employment discrimination against Panamanians. But the big influx of foreigners trying to make a living here came from troubled Venezuela and those are the people subjected to the most criticism and abuse.
At the end of August the Ministry of Commerce and Industry publisheda resolutionmaking some changes in the regulations that implement the corporate headquarters law. Now they want a company to show $200 million in assets or a work force that in the various places where it operates employs 2,500 people with university degrees in its offices.
Almost immediately there arose a hue and cry from two directions whence a person who follows the politics here would expect it: Ricardo Martinelli’s newspapers and legislator Zulay Rodríguez. As the former president whiles away the minutes, hours and days in more or less incommunicado custody — he can get things out via his lawyers in Miami but has no direct access to his Twitter feed — his daily newspapers La Critica and El Panama America raised the alarm that persons who “have the credentials to practice in their country can practice in Panama.” Of course, the resolution doesn’t say that, nor has the prior influx of corporate offices allowed, for example, foreign lawyers to practice in the Panamanian courts. For Zulay, who shortly after being elected to the National Assembly stepped into international notoriety by a broad-brush characterization of all Colombians as “scum,” that was an opportunity to attractive to pass up. “The Ministry of Commerce and Industry opens the door so that foreigners can practice in Panama with a university degree from their country and without passing by our technical boards.” Not that the resolution says that or can be reasonably interpreted to say that but hey, what does the truth matter when one is playing that kind of politics?
An indignant Vice Minister of Foreign Commerce, Néstor González, called a press conference to complain. He said that the ministry intends that all companies that come here will be obliged to follow Panamanian labor laws, and that in the decade of the law’s existence this has been the case. The changes, he explained, were because after 10 years the licensing committee that passes on applications to establish foreign corporate offices here thought that a review and some changes were needed. Why that was, he didn’t say.
When one looks at the regional economy, cherry picking more companies from Venezuela will certainly not be the reason. That tree has been stripped bare for a long time. Maybe companies that work out of troubled Brazil? But do they really want to switch from Portuguese to Spanish around the office? If it is presumed that the changes are being made with some company or set of companies in mind, there are some situations that perhaps come to the head of the line:
Panama has just established full diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, which is investing in Latin America in a big way when most other powers are not. Could there be Chinese companies about to establish Latin American regional offices here?
The rancor between the United States and Mexico seems to get worse every other time that Donald Trump opens his mouth or plays with his Twitter feed, and meanwhile the polls suggest that violence-wracked Mexico may go to the left in its next presidential elections. So might some US companies be ready to move their Latin American offices from Mexico City to Panama? Or for that matter, given the general problems for multinational companies getting visas for their employees to work in the United States these days, might Miami become less of the financial and corporate capital of Latin America and Panama pick up some of that business?
When Latin America was booming it was because of good commodity prices, particularly for minerals. But now prices are down and several countries are eliminating or restricting mining because of the environmental damage and because the companies habitually cheat the countries out of what they owe in taxes, extraction fees or profit sharing. So will mining companies that are or feel unwanted elsewhere be moving their Latin American offices here?
Stay tuned.
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California’s US Senator Kamala Harris says that she will co-sponsor a “Medicare for All” single-payer health care system proposal with Bernie Sanders. Photo from her Vimeo channel.
What Democrats are saying
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Speaker of the House Paul Ryan says that he disagrees with President Trump’s pardon of former Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Photo by Gage Skidmore.
What Republicans are saying
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Judge Edwin Torres opined that “we find only that there are reasonable grounds to suppose him guilty of all or some of the offenses charged. As a result, good faith to the demanding government requires his surrender.”
What next for Martinelli and CD?
by Eric Jackson
On August 31, in a decision that was delayed for a little more than a week due to last-minute supplemental briefs filed by Ricardo Martinelli’s Miami lawyers, US Federal Magistrate Judge Edwin G. Torres slapped down the fugitive former Panamanian president’s pleas as most legally educated observers expected. Martinelli threw up all sorts of arguments but his central plea was that the 1904 US-Panamanian extradition treaty didn’t contemplate illegal eavesdropping cases and that the amendment to this treaty that arguably cures that was not adopted until after Martinelli’s alleged crimes. But among the particulars of the extradition request were that Martinelli stole expensive electronic hardware and programs that were used for that surveillance, and theft very specifically is included in the original treaty.
Martinelli’s team says that they will now file a habeas corpus motion in the US District Court in Miami and there would be weeks, months or perhaps years until that comes to trial, time that Martinelli will spend behind bars. On another legal track, he has a request for political asylum pending before the US State Department which, however, had already assented to prosecutors’ move to extradite him. If that petition for refugee status — based on an alleged well-founded fear of political persecution — is denied, then Martinelli might send in the lawyers for an appeal of that administrative decision.
It perhaps depends on the whims of Donald Trump, who put his name on a hotel in a former mangrove swamp here and was furious at Martinelli and Panama that the 2011 opening of the Trump Ocean Club took place amidst knee-deep flood waters on the surrounding streets. The US president is also known to have vulgar and abusive things to say about Latin Americans and Spanish speakers in general.
Presuming that the Martinelli cases will take forever in the United States and that he will remain incarcerated while they unfold, he is still likely to maintain a facade of a political career. In intra-party elections likely to happen this year, Martinelli wants to run for re-election to his post as Cambio Democratico’s president and likely he will be, even if his jailers don’t allow him out to campaign. Speeches by telephone or recorded statements would be in the realm of possibility for a federal prisoner, but then such political activity would also be a classic violation of political asylum and might be used to deny Martinelli’s attempt to get refugee status.
Martinelli also says that he wants to be the Cambio Democratico candidate for mayor of Panama City in 2019. As a candidate for party president, or a candidate for mayor, he would have immunity from investigation or prosecution, which could be stripped from him. The process of lifting his immunity, however, would eat up time and perhaps allow statutes of limitations to run in the process. That, we have seen in a recent decision to throw out charges in the flagrant Finmeccanica radar, helicopter and digital mapping graft case, is a strategy that Panama’s Supreme Court will happily indulge. Whether the national or municipal electorate would be so forgiving is another question.
So where does that leave the Cambio Democratico Party?
Uniting the party by standing up for those in disgrace, while maintaining a distance from Ricardo Martinelli — that’s the position that Roux is trying to take.
It’s actually a slight exaggeration, if one counts everybody who was briefly a government minister during the five years of the Martinelli administration. Still, it is commonly said that all but one of the members of the former president’s cabinet is in jail, under house arrest, or out on bail with travel restrictions for this or that crime.
Why the big scandal, or bundle of smaller ones? Primordially it’s because virtually every government contract during those years was overpriced, with kickbacks in the equation. Some of the proceeds may have been diverted to individuals’ pockets but as a grand strategy that money was used to buy votes in the 2014 elections. Martinelli was just too crude, and his proxy slate of the empty suit José Domingo Arias and Mrs. Martinelli were just too clearly unqualified, for it to work.
Of the four important contenders for the 2019 CD presidential nomination, three — former labor minister Alma Cortés, former public safety minister José Raúl Mulino and former economy and finance minister Frank De Lima — are behind bars or have been in jail on various charges. The fourth contender, corporate lawyer and party secretary general Rómulo Roux, has not been prosecuted. He presents himself as the clean candidate after having served as canal affairs minister, Panama Canal Authority board chair and minister of foreign relations before quitting his public posts in 2013 to unsuccessfully seek the CD nomination for president.
There are people in the party who despise the photogenic corporate lawyer — perhaps former civil service director Mariela Jiménez chief among them. In his role as an attorney, Roux is likely to face some hard questions about his role advising HSBC in the tax-subsidized sale of Banistmo to that British bank, about his work with US-based energy company AES and about work for companies contending for canal expansion contracts that he later oversaw as canal affairs minister. He may get away with all of that, especially as the Panamanian people in poll after poll rank the Panama Canal as a shining success and the canal affairs minister as the most popular cabinet member.
In any case, with Roux and the top of the ticket and Martinelli running for mayor of the capital city — or whatever combination may emerge — CD is going to come out not only disgraced by scandal and fighting among themselves, but shrunken from factions splintering off.
Legislator José Muñoz was the first to officially go, having gathered more than 30,000 signatures to put a new party, Alianza, on the ballot. Does it stand for anything? This will be the fourth party in the legislator’s career — he started out with Solidaridad, then went with the PRD, then switched to Martinelli’s party — and when he talks to the press about that for which Alianza stands, it’s invariably in terms of “my aspirations.” A new vehicle that stands for nothing in particular may be quite popular for politicians who sell for what the market bears and ditch any brand that begins to go south as CD has.
There is an Evangelical political party gathering signatures — the Partido Alternativa Independencia Social or PAIS — and they are expected to gain ballot status. They are set to take both some of the religious zealots and the crudest and most profane politicians ever to hide behind a cross out of the CD legislative caucus into that formation.
Perhaps, however, the new parties might yet ally themselves with Roux or whoever gets the CD nomination for a united presidential ticket in 2019. The chances of that will be better known as the 2019 elections and the deadlines for alliances approach. Barring a new wave of Martinelli nostalgia — despite everything — it looks as if CD will revert to small party status in a contest that may be as fragmented as the one in 1994. But back then the PRD, disgraced by Noriega and ousted by the 1989 invasion, managed to win that year’s contest with a little more than one-third of the vote. One big difference, though, is that in 1994 Manuel Antonio Noriega was neither anywhere on the PRD ticket nor among that party’s leaders.
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