Panama’s Plummeting Prospects
Tuesday, 11 May 2010, 1:20 pm
Press Release: Council on Hemispheric Affairs
President Martinelli Takes on Bernal Amidst Panama’s Plummeting Prospects to Finally Democratize
by COHA Director Larry Birns and COHA Research Associate Kaycie Rupp
• Martinelli establishes his credentials as being worthy of Olympic gold when it comes to being a first-class boor and an authoritarian bully when the issue is democratic dialogue
• At stake: An ill-merited free trade agreement with Washington
• Panama excels in the world of drugs, crime, money laundering and tainted rule
• Bernal case: A test of Panama’s human rights record and capacity for good governance, which the president seems to be rapidly losing
• Eisenmann, Brannan, Jackson and Bernal inevitably will outlast Martinelli in terms of patriotic inspired leadership
• Panama is a poor prospect for free trade because a corrupt Supreme Court will prevent the attainment of a level playing field required by the international business community
Accusations of corruption and a hard veer to the right have caused considerable consternation among U.S.-based Latin American specialists, as local Panamanian civil groups and good government bodies have expressed their concerns abroad regarding the country’s ability to engage in democratic practices under the recently inaugurated, controversial president, Ricardo Martinelli. In recent weeks, Panamanian NGOs have been expressing their concern over the country’s swift move to the totalitarian right, now being witnessed almost daily under Martinelli. He has been accused by a widening circle of critics for having sanctioned corrupt behavior and of being guilty of various human rights infringements. In office for less than a year, Martinelli continues to further blemish a record that already was beginning to appear shabby upon his inauguration.
Patriotic Panamanian Reaches for his Lance
One of the president’s most lethal foes is patriotic grandee Roberto Eisenmann, Jr., who, as much as any Panamanian of his generation, was one of the many reasons why Panama today is even marginally democratic. For those with too short a memory of the 1980s, when General Noriega was ruling the nation, Eisenmann (who, like Professor Miguel Antonio Bernal, had to flee the country at the peril of his life) indefatigably pounded the corridors of the U.S. Senate, to maintain a dialogue with that body throughout that decade. His success came in the form of a resolution condemning the Noriega regime for its anti-democratic behavior.
Although Eisenmann continuously worked to have a resolution passed as a beginning, he condemned General Noriega for drug trafficking, human rights violations and totalitarian tactics. Eisenmann by no means tried to persuade Senators Dodd, Kennedy or Leahy to win over President George W. Bush to use U.S. troops to invade Panama to rid the country of the dictator. No, he felt that such a task would be patronizing to his countrymen and should be undertaken by Panamanians, not Americans, which was not a particularly popular idea at the time. The fact that Panama even manages to be the lame democracy that it is today, is to a huge extent Eisenmann’s crowning achievement.
Just because Panama is a very small and a relatively unimportant nation, its guardians, as we shall see, look upon their profound role to protect its institutions and uphold its honor, as a sacred mission. Nor should their country, they insist, be a trash collector for the detritus of other nations, like the Shah of Iran and General Raoul Cédras, who headed Haiti’s military junta against President Aristide. Nor should President Mireya Moscoso have been forgiven by her nation for shamefully allowing Luis Posada Carriles, Latin America’s single most heinous human rights figure to flee the country, surely at a price. In a recent explosive column in Panama’s leading daily, La Prensa, of which he was the publisher for most of a decade, Eisenmann once again made use of his faultless credentials as a great warrior on behalf of Lady Democracy. He blasted the ugly aspects of the Martinelli regime and lamented the country’s now poor prospects for civility, pluralism and its inevitable fading capacity in the country to tolerate a free circulation of ideas.
More:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO1005/S00222.htm