La oligarquía panameña y sus maniobras

por Marco Gandásegui, hijo

La presidencia acusada

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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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…
 

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Pence at Dachau: not merely hypocritical

by Warren J. Blumenfeld — Tikkun

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’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.

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