Political Crisis in Panama

The ruling administration intends to build a multi-million dollar diplomatic villa behind the people's backs, and has signed agreements that allow the presence of foreign troops on national territory, thereby violating all neutrality treaties in the midst of a war. The government bows its head when it agrees to belong to a supposed and captive 'Shield of the Americas,' under the false argument that Panamanians bought the Panama Canal for the price of one dollar. That is the manifesto proposed by the current government. Mulino threatens the unions and denies the legacy of the martyrs. The bill that seeks to regulate what is already regulated, regarding the right of reply in social communication, constitutes, without a doubt, part of a seditious plan with the purpose of controlling any expression of thought in Panamanian society. That plan, devised by a totalitarian regime, began to show from the moment it was forbidden to disclose the minutes of the Council of Ministers and the actions for the dismantling of trade unions, which had its most acute point in the repression against the workers in the banana plantations, in the province of Bocas del Toro. Dismantling the unions, creating yellow groups and dismounting leaderships, were other steps directed, evidently, to subject the voice of the worker before the pronouncements of a government that vociferates without any shame that it is totally businesslike. The unions and other groups of Panamanian citizens, with the exception of the political parties, practically docile, have been manacled by the current government, which illegally seized money that workers and employees deliver to the five percent fund created to guarantee union education. Skillfully, from the Ministry of Labor, the rights of the various guilds of workers have been manipulated so that they diminish their public statements and paralyze their demonstrations. In that same plan of totalitarian aspirations, other measures are proposed that restrict the right to strike, such as those organized by teaching professionals and more recently those aimed at mediating protests and imposing prison sentences of years for those who cover their faces with hoods in a public demonstration. Control, control, control. Meanwhile, cynically lies are told in reports on progress in school repairs. What has been done so far, by embracing the anti-national script, is to mock the sacrifice of the martyrs of the feat of January 9, 1964. It must be remembered that, from the beginning, the current president of Panama boasted of becoming a Central American tropical dictator.