Panama's President: Trying on a Strongman Role?

[Judi Lynn]

Panama's President: Trying on a Strongman Role?
By Tim Rogers Saturday, Oct. 23, 2010

When supermarket tycoon Ricardo Martinelli was running for president of Panama in 2009, he cleverly embraced the nickname his critics had given him — el loco (the crazy man) — and spun it into a campaign slogan: "We crazies are the majority!" By claiming ownership, Martinelli disarmed some of the less than flattering stories about his temperament and was swept into office with a convincing 60% of the vote.

But a year-and-a-half after Martinelli took office with promises to make Panama a first-world country, critics claim el loco is living up to his billing. Opponents claim the grocer-turned-president is becoming increasingly authoritarian and arbitrary. His alleged abuse of the separation of powers, disregard for labor rights and the environment, and intolerance toward protest have some analysts wondering if Panama's young democracy is sliding back toward its strongman past.

The president's management style was evident with the passage of a controversial reform to the labor code that included a slew of other legislative odds and ends — an over-stuffed document that was appropriately dubbed "The Sausage Law." At Martinelli's direction, the bill, which was packaged as a measure to develop commercial aviation, was rammed through the congressional sausage grinder without any serious debate during an extraordinary weekend session held last June while the rest of the country was distracted by the World Cup. Confusion and labor unrest followed the ratification, leading to a 10-day labor strike by banana workers in the western border region of Changiunola who feared it would limit their right to organize in unions, bargain collectively and protest. Police clashed violently with the mostly indigenous banana workers, leaving at least two dead and more than 100 injured.

"After the elections, Martinelli started to show his claws," says Mitchell Doens, secretary-general of the opposition Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD). "He thinks he can run the country like he runs a supermarket. But it's one thing to govern a country, and it's another thing to order people around in a supermarket." The criticism is ironic because the PRD produced anti-democratic military leaders Gen. Omar Torrijos and Gen. Manuel Noriega. But, says Doens, Martinelli is like Noriega because he "doesn't respect constitutional guarantees and doesn't respect the rules of democracy.

More:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2026938,00.html?xid=rss-world&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+time%2Fworld+%28TIME%3A+Top+World+Stories%29

[Peace Patriot]

1. Someone here suggested that the U.S. troops massing in Costa Rica would be used to

put down a labor strike in Panama that involved Canal workers, to keep the Canal open (at the cost of labor rights and repression). Can't remember who it was. DUer posting in the L/A forum. The comment was intended to counter my argument that the Pentagon is surrounding Venezuela with war assets in an arc stretching from Colombia through Honduras and El Salvador to the Caribbean including the US 4th Fleet in the Caribbean and the Dutch islands right off Venezuela's Caribbean oil coast. While I agree that this could be an alternative explanation for the U.S. massing troops in Costa Rica, both things could be true--that the Pentagon is looking for an excuse to assemble more troops in Panama, that Martinelli is a U.S. tool (very likely) who is pressuring labor for this very purpose (wants to cause a general strike, to invite U.S. troops in) and that control of the Canal would be quite important if and when the Pentagon makes its move on Venezuela.

Martinelli seems to be a typical U.S. "free trade for the rich" tool--like Garcia in Peru and Uribe/Santos in Colombia (not to mention Oscar Arias in Costa Rica--former president, architect of CAFTA, aider and abettor of the U.S. coup in Honduras; also the current president). All three (Panama, Colombia, Honduras) require Pentagon (U.S. taxpayer) dollars to prop them up because U.S. "free trade for the rich" is BAD for most of their people, really bad. In Colombia and Honduras it means death squads murdering trade unionists and unrelieved, vast poverty. In Peru, I haven't heard that it's gotten to the point of death squad murders yet, but poverty is widespread (the "trickle down" only helps the elite few, as is always the case with U.S. "free trade for the rich"), U.S. "security" dollars are propping up the state, Garcia has something like a 25% approval rating and an outright fascist is waiting in the wings to be "made" by the CIA.

I DO think that the Pentagon sees this region just like it sees the Middle East: source of oil for its great war machine, and essential region for U.S. imperial control of trade and policy on behalf of multinational corporations and war profiteers who have loyalty to no one. (And, quite frankly, I've begun to wonder if the Pentagon--large aspects of which have been "privatized" by multinational corporations--can even be said to have loyalty to us--to "we, the people" of the U.S.--any more. They are a country unto themselves, and their constituents operate outside of our borders while sucking on the tit here.) (The construct of a "nation," upon which the construct of democracy is dependent, is a very fragile notion these days.)

Anyway, I thought I would bring all this up because Martinelli seems to be deliberately aggravating the trade unions in Panama. I wouldn't expect Time magazine to see (or to reveal) the real reason for this. They would play along with whatever narrative the CIA suggested (i.e., Martinelli has "strongman" tendencies, labor trouble coming in Panama, and--later--need for U.S. troops, etc.).

[Judi Lynn]

2. You have to wonder about any organization which implements "back door drafts"

and keeps reassigning soldiers to war areas who just completed a tour there, recycling them again and again until they are emotionally destroyed, and suicidal. That doesn't seem like any group concerned about the well being of the country's people.

And they did this knowing fully well there wasn't a legitmate reason for the Iraq war.

Any organization placing absolutely no value on human life needs serious attention.

There are Peruvian death squads in the past, used when Fujimori was the President, and Garcia used conventional soldiers to massacre people his first term, so Peru is no stranger to wanton massacres of its citizens. Probably a whole lot more has happened than has made it to our own corporate media's treatment of human events.

The worst government ennacted depravity I ever heard was during Fujimori, I believe, when the troops went into the mountains to a community, told them the government was going to give them a lake and stock it with fish for them, but the men had to dig a large area first. The village men dug until they had hollowed out a large area, then the military shot down everyone there and threw them in the hole which became their own grave instead of their fishing pond. Savage, and evil, meant to terrorize anyone who heard of it who might have been sympathetic to the Sendero Luminoso.

Here's an article which says: ....Over 69,000 people died in Peru's dirty war, and EPAF is striving to improve communication between forensic anthropologists and judiciary agents in their joint work in the forensic investigation of human rights violations. As the Fujimori trials continue, and the number of disappeared continues to rise, the search for retributive and restorative justice will continue.

When asked whether another massacre(s) will happen again in the future, Baraybar responds sharply.

"Things have not changed…people feel that all they get from the state is repression," he said. "Putis is not one place. There are many Putis in Peru."
More:
http://www.iar-gwu.org/node/46

Wiki on the Putis massacre:

.....According to a 2003 report by the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the guerrilla group Shining Path was very active in the Huanta Province since the start of the Internal conflict in Peru in 1980.<2> During 1983, Shining Path murdered the lieutenant governor of Putis, Santos Quispe Saavedra and carried out similar acts of violence in nearby towns; as a consequence, the inhabitants of Putis were forced to seek refuge in the nearby mountains.<3>

To parry this threat, the Peruvian Army established a military base in Putis in November 1984 and called on all refugees to return to the town.<4> Upon their return, on December 1984, the military ordered the men of the community to dig a pit, then gathered the local population around it, executed all of them with gunfire and buried them in the excavated pit.<5> It is believed that the reasons for these executions were suspicions that the inhabitants of Putis were sympathetic to Shining Path and a desire to steal and sell the cattle of the community.<6>

The total number of victims is estimated at 123 men and women from the towns of Cayramayo, Vizcatánpata, Orccohuasi and Putis; 19 of those murdered were minors.<7> The Truth and Reconciliation Commission identified two mass graves in Putis, one behind the church and the other inside the school.<8> Some persons from Putis survived the massacre by staying in the mountains, where they remained until a few of them returned in 1997; as of 2002 some ten families lived in Putis.<9>

In May 2008, a group of forensic investigators began the exhumation of the Putis mass graves belatedly following a 2003 recommendation by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate all such massacre sites.<10> Around 50 relatives of the persons killed joined the investigators to watch the recovery of their family members remains.<11> Despite the exhumation procedures, no one has been indicted so far for the Putis massacre as the Peruvian Military refuses to give any explanation about the events, claiming all related documentation was destroyed in a fire.<12>

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putis

BBC News:

....."There are a large number of children of all ages - from very young children to nine and 10 years old," says Jose Pablo Baraybar, the EPAF director leading the exhumation.

"We have already found evidence that people may have been shot while in the grave, we have found bullets under the bodies embedded in the dirt."

The victims - all peasant farmers from the area - had been tricked by the military, who had set up a base in Putis, into digging their own grave.

In 1983 the region, Huanta, was controlled by the Shining Path - a brutal Maoist guerrilla group who had declared war on the state. They had killed all the local officials and the people had fled to the mountain peaks.

In November 1984, the army set up its base in Putis and invited the local population to live there under their protection. They asked them to dig a fish pond; then on 13 December they killed everyone and buried them there.

After the massacre, the soldiers sold off the villagers' livestock, according the 2003 commission report.

More:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7449079.stm

The over 69,000 murdered Peruvians doesn't include the ones who simply disappeared, of course, or the displaced people. This huge number of people slaughtered in Peru has NEVER made it to corporate media acknowledgement, oddly enough. It's simply unknown here.

Now that Peru is becoming more in touch with the outer world from its mountain communities, it might be possible that kind of secret history with relentless violence might sometime become harder to pull off by sociopathic, greedy, ruthless governments.
We DO know, however, that almost all useful information about the Bagua massacre was successfully blocked a couple of summers ago in Peru by creating such a violent environment few journalists dared to get close, and Alan Garcia closed radio stations, etc. in the area. He's definitely the corporatists' boy, especially considering how much of that area AFTER the massacre he has already given out to foreign interests for unrestricted exploitation.

I completely agree with your comments on Martinelli. Remember what they did under _{George H. W. Bush} with his dirty invasion of Panama, and the deeply buried truth of what he did to so many innocent people in such a short, vicious attack. Now they've got the President they were waiting for, apparently. What a shame.

(General Omar Torrijos was killed a short time after Reagan took office, and 3 months after another hated (by U.S. rightists) leader, President Jaime Roldós, of Ecuador died under VERY similar circumstances.)