Change in Puerto Rico

by Nils Castro, translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop

There are times when it looks as if nothing is happening and then suddenly new events are unleashed; but while the in-depth situation makes a turn-around, even the best analysts may take time to notice it. And when their appreciations are absorbed by routine, even the left fails to escape from this trend. This is the case of what is happening with Puerto Rico now, where reality has created a dynamic that is entirely new in quality, but which even certain anti-colonialists have yet to notice.

This is reflected in the declaration of the recent 22nd meeting of such a worthy organization as the Forum of São Paulo, celebrated in San Salvador at the end of June. A usual, they repeated that “we support the heroic struggle of the Puerto Rican people for its independence and the just claim of Argentina for their sovereignty over the Malvinas Islands.” In spite of the good faith of this phrase, its scantiness makes for deficiencies. The most simple is that between the immobility of the Malvinas and the present situation of Puerto Rico there is no similarity beyond the geographical accident that both are islands. If it is related to being colonial regimes, then Aruba, Martinique and other possessions in the Caribbean should have been included.

The second error is that in the case of the Malvinas there is a question of territorial integrity, but not of self-determination of peoples. Great Britain took this land from Argentina and replaced its small population with some colonists brought from England. If their descendants were to vote on sovereignty, their choice would be for London. Puerto Rico, on the contrary, is a historic nation, where some four million people defend their own culture, which is of a purely Hispanic-American and Caribbean strain. The question here is to recover the conditions necessary in order for this people to freely decide their own destiny. This is radically distinct from the case of the Malvinas. So to put them side-by-side –- while omitting the other Antillean colonies -– creates more confusion than solidarity.

But the main problem is elsewhere. It is the omission of that fact that ten years of recession and an unpayable debt has made Puerto Rico a headache for the US government as well. This has created a crisis within the colonial political system and its parties. In face of Puerto Rican non-conformity and complaints, and the pressure of Wall Street creditors, the US authorities arrived at two definitive decisions that have annulled the regime of the so-called Associated Free State (AFS).

The first is that the US Supreme Court decreed that the island has no sovereignty, and that this pertains exclusively to the Congress in Washington. The second is that the Congress then agreed to create a Fiscal Control Board whose members will be named by the White House, which will not only manage the fiscal affairs and budget of Puerto Rico, but will reorganize the administration of the country over and above the government elected by the Puerto Ricans, in order to ensure that the vultures of Wall Street collect the enormous debt, at the expense of the people who live on the island. This converts the governor of Puerto Rico into a simple ceremonial rag doll.

The two parties that defend the colonial system — one annexationist and the other autonomist — whose inefficiency and corruption as governors of the country accumulated this debt, have lost their capacity to neutralize the population politically. In order to defend their worn-out privileges they direct their complaints and claims against the new board, but the greater part of the population already sees clearly that the cause of their social and economic drama, their unemployment and poverty, and of the discredit of the political regime, is the colonial system. The same one that, faced with the deterioration of the panorama, calls for creating this new instrument of authoritarian domination.

This in turn has brought the pro-independence party and organizations not only to their moment of greatest political growth, but also to that of the greatest progress in the construction of their unity. This means that Latin American solidarity with the independence of Puerto Rico — and the support for its actors and struggles -– needs to go beyond the usual phrases and calls for new analyses and initiatives in tune with the present demands and possibilities of the situation.

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A Trump presidency: what it would mean for the USA and for Panama, part 1

Climate change

In Cleveland this week, Republicans gather for their national convention in air-conditioned splendor while across much of the country people sweat out a severe heat wave. Inside the convention hall a bizarre discourse will unfold, one part of which is an argument promoted by oil and coal companies that climate change is a politically motivated hoax. It’s an argument that permeates US society and the social media. It even makes its way into high places in Panamanian public institutions.

Think of the enhanced climate change disaster that a Trump presidency would be for the United States. The national embarrassment of having the only leader of an industrialized country who denies that the climate is changing would be the smaller part of it. The US status as a leading scientific power, nurtured by the polymath geniuses Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson from the time that the republic was founded, developed since 1846 by the Smithsonian Institution, popularized among the middle class by the middle and late 19th century legislation that established free public schools and the land grant universities, mobilized for US industry in times of war and peace, bolstered by generations of noteworthy scientists immigrating from other lands, shared with the rest of the world via the Fulbright grants — all of that would be diminished and endangered. The nation’s public infrastructure defenses against rising seas, devastating storms and severe droughts would be compromised. Weird religion and greedy business practices would appear together in US courts when liability for foreseeable environmental damage that could have been reduced or prevented is attributed to God. All of the social dislocations, wars and mass migrations that climate change is already causing and which will get worse would be explained by crude ethnic and religious stereotypes, and the world would see Washington engaged in immigrant-bashing instead of joining in a well informed and well coordinated international response.

Also, think of what climate change denial in a Republican White House that’s supported by a Republican Congress would mean for Panama. Surely there would be less funding and more political interference for that leading outpost of international academia on the isthmus, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. When people are forced by rising seas to abandon their homes on low-lying islands in Guna Yala or Bocas del Toro, or when traditional agricultural uses of parts of Panama become untenable, or when Panamanian water systems become even more dysfunctional, Panamanians could expect lots of derision rather than much in the way of US technical help. A US government that deserts the front lines of climate change response means US citizens living in Panama being blamed by some of their neighbors for policies coming from Washington.

The American people, including those of us living in Panama, don’t need this nonsense.

For more information on Democrats Abroad Panama — the local branch here of the Democratic Party in the USA — including about our stands on issues and our efforts to register and mobilize US citizens (including Panamanian-US dual nationals) to vote in November’s US elections, contact our interim acting chair, Phil Edmonston, by email at lemonaid@earthlink.net.

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Speaking of import restrictions…

Are there some gringos who are so upset by the Varela administration’s decision to prolong the ban on private importation of firearms into Panama that they have decided to leave? For all of the economic hit that this could mean to the national economy, we should consider that a blessing.

There are a few other import restrictions that ought to be considered at the same time.

Panama rarely admits it, but we do have race relations problems here. What we don’t have in any substantial supply is the US obsession about race. Racial hatreds of any sort and the practice, preaching or preparation for racial violence are worse than any drug that might come into our territory.

The Panamanian government should take more care to exclude these things. Isn’t “Wild Bill” a former vendor of white supremacist materials who took his crime spree to our shores? Isn’t there a strong racial component to the “sovereign citizen” pretension about how the US Constitution is invalid because the amendments passed after the Civil War — banning slavery, establishing US citizenship for everyone born in the USA and so on — and haven’t we had people who preach that stuff colonizing here for years? Isn’t there a section of Panama’s gringo community that considers George Zimmerman’s vigilante patrols and killing of Trayvon Martin to be proper models of conduct in society? Panama already has laws against foreigners preaching intolerance, and while these could be twisted into something quite oppressive, we should at least bar entry to members of known racial hate groups that are clearly identifiable as such.

Panama has freedom of expression, which is a good thing. However, we tolerate too much in the way of false advertising — how else could fraud be a national sport? Gun sellers’ propaganda, quite often spread as undisclosed advertisements embedded within Hollywood entertainment shows, aims to convince people that having a gun in the home or on the person makes a person safer. This is demonstrably untrue, and until recently we had this stuff repeated by a member of President Varela’s cabinet. That wiser heads in the government prevailed is a relief, but that there was little argument against gun seller’s advertising in high places coming from the general public ought to be a matter of concern. That easy acceptance of a fraudulent pitch was in part the influence of imported culture.

Certainly we should do more to promote Panamanian culture and encourage a wider selection of international culture to reduce the saturation of such messages. We should also think about what we might do to limit the exposure of children to such stuff. A US ratings system that approves sadism for the whole family surely does not serve Panama very well, but then the subjectivity, biases, prudishness and opportunities for political censorship or ordinary corruption implicit in any ratings system ought to caution us about any effort to develop one of our own. However, short of setting themselves up as censors there are things that opinion leader can do. Media critics, politicians, educators and clergy ought to be in the forefront of those calling out works that would introduce weapons fetishes and the glorification of violence into our culture.

The gun sellers’ systemic failure

It won’t look like a failure when the week’s sales figures are in. A wannabe hero who was kicked out of the US Army killed five Dallas cops who were doing their jobs in honorable and exemplary fashion, and now hordes of frightened white folks will descend upon gun shops to tool up just in case there is a race war that brings some black kid armed with iced tea and skittles walking through their neighborhood. Massacres are sales bonanzas for the firearms industry.

Can we just drop the pretenses about what the NRA and its mouthpieces in government are? They are advertising proxies for weapons merchants and their arguments should always be evaluated in that light.

But what did the recent spate of racially charged killings tell us?

That racism thrives in the USA, such that black lives don’t matter as much as other people’s lives as far as the practical effect of the law’s application goes, is an ugly fact. Yeah, yeah — the GOP talking points say that it’s racist to say that. In November we shall see how emphatic non-white voters, and a lot of white ones too, can be in the face of a race-baiting major party candidate for president.

But take climate of fear and hatred that as a momentary given, and focus on the “historical” arguments made in favor of an unrestricted and enhanced arms race in the homes and stores and on the streets of the USA. Is it, as the gun sellers’ front groups say, that people need to have guns so that they can rise up against an oppressive government?

The original Constitutional Convention happened in large part because those who had led the United States to independence from the British Empire were terrified and appalled by the prospect of that sort of thing. With the just-ended Shays’ Rebellion in their minds, they gathered in Philadelphia not to celebrate but to suppress such insurrections.

So did somebody object to that effort to restrict the possibility of armed uprisings? Indeed, many did. Their most outspoken leader was Patrick Henry, who objected that the state and local militias would be suppressed under the new constitutional order. And what was the militia in his home state of Virginia, and in other southern states? It was patrols by white men, known to blacks as the patterollers, to keep black people off of the roads so as to inhibit slaves from escapíng to freedom or going from plantation to plantation to organize revolts. On the western frontier the militia was about white people being ready to resolve land disputes with established native communities at the point of a gun. Thus the Second Amendment: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

What is a “militia,” who or what are “the People,” what is the meaning of “well regulated” and what “a free State” is are all questions whose answers might be surmised by reference to what existed at the time. Back when the US constitutional order began, states could and did ban private possession of cannons or possession of any sort of firearms by black people whether enslaved or emancipated. But now the arms merchants have convinced a lot of Americans and some members of the Supreme Court that the Second Amendment references to anything beyond a notion that anyone gets to have any weapon she or he can afford to acquire are words to be ignored as if they were not there. And the gun nut shills for the firearms industry assure us that this is because we may need to violate Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, that bit about how “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.”

So how well did the Bundy family’s war against the United States go? How successful was Micah Johnson’s war against the Dallas Police and the DART transit cops? Do we hear tales of a hideous government conspiracy to kill one of the Bundys’ armed acolytes in flight after the raid? Do we see YouTube videos about how the slaying of five police officers by a fanatic was a hoax by the mayor of Dallas? Do we hear the police criticized for ending the armed standoff with Johnson by sending in a robot with an improvised bomb.

In the real world governments and their officers sometimes do abusive things, but taking up arms against governments is usually a good way to get crushed like a bug and left in a pool of blood. But hey, Nancy Lanza was a good customer when she was making her doomsday preparations, and if her particular doomsday came at the hands of her equally crazed son Adam, that’s just business for the arms merchants. We can also be sure that Micah Johnson was somebody’s profitable customer.

The sales pitch used on Nancy Lanza got a bunch of little kids and some of their school’s teachers and its principal and psychologist killed. The sales pitch used on Micah Johnson got five police officers killed. The fallacies made the sale, but while the atrocities that were sparked boosted gun sales, now those sorts of pitches annoy rather than convince most Americans. They still do a brisk business, but the gun merchants’ propaganda campaign has failed.

What any society’s weapons laws ought to be is a complex matrix of considerations. Delusions and fake history are properly excluded from the factors that are taken into account.

Bear in mind…

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