opinion

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Orwellian referendum

by Miguel Antonio Bernal

George Orwell was an excellent writer, regrettably not very well known in our contemporary Panama. However, I take the liberty to use him as a reference to describe the "constitutional consultation" programmed for (such a coincidence!) October 22, and I don't think it will bother the connoisseurs of the great analyst and critic of the totalitarian regimes.

In his great novel "1984," George Orwell shows us that "facts do not matter." In other words, for the rulers to systematically recur to the lie and the deception as a form of government is of no importance. Even when you confront them with the facts, with the "stubborn facts," it matters little. The most basic and elemental formalities and norms have completely disappeared. To ask about the motives for this situation is something that, in their conceited behavior, they really don't like but it's no impediment because we know that there is only one reason: the Agenda, the Agendas.

In effect, these people have kidnapped the few democratic spaces existing in public administration, they're pursuing an agenda or various agendas and the force behind these agendas is the corruption of political power and we all know that "power corrupts" and the power has absolutely corrupted these people. Among other things, it has done so due to the absolute absence of mechanisms of citizens' or institutional control. That's clear for both the party members as well as the allies, and also those recently arrived to the cause of "zero corruption," who will tear their vestments as many times as necessary to make us believe in that which isn't.

But the most Orwellian thing about this "constitutional consultation," this so-called referendum is that it's built atop pilings of lies and deceptions. They now can't speak the truth. They now can't make us believe anything because everything they have conceived has been on the basis of the deception and the lie. They lie and deceive among themselves and end up believing their own lies, and convert them into the "truth" that they want us to swallow without even joking about it. It's enough to read the articles and discourses that they write or order to be written. Whoever reads or listens will notice that he or she is dealing with tropical neo-fundamentalists inspired by the German fascist teaching of "lie and lie again so that something remains."

They're not going to change. They have no reason to do so. They can continue doing so with premeditation and perfidy. In other words, it doesn't matter to them if they lie and go on lying. In case they are caught at it --- are they sanctioned or punished? No, nothing like that. Nothing like that has happened for the 21 consecutive years of the dictatorship when they elaborated, published, imposed and constitutionalized lies. Thus it is that the activities of their lie and deceit factories have been shown capable of increasing their production, thanks in part to new collaborators who have been found "slippery" (Mario Galindo, for example), who said "no" to the expansion of corruption but today find the indebtedness and conceit inherent in this "potable" (Rómulo Escobar, for example). We aren't dealing with some magical reality. They're like fish back in water. Thus they bring us back Jimmy Carter through the mouth of Robert Pastor, in his "Ode to Omar;" Lopez Michelsen, of Monteria; Tomás Borge, of the Sandinista "piñata;" and of course, the great "reddish" Felipe Gonzáles, he of the telephone wiretaps, he of the Gala and Slim crowd.

They haven't apologized for not taking us where they've come and gone, but the fact is that they don't want to say how it is, for example, that we have acquired such "compatriots with cedulas" as Castill\lón Henao, Rayo Montaño and Eduardo Masferrer --- all contributors to "various Panamanian politicians for their election campaigns in the decades of the 80s and 90s." (See El Panama America, July 29, 2006.) Thus it becomes important not to skip over the story in the July 31 edition of El Panama America --- let us go back and read slowly: "The PRD leadership seeks the reaffirmation of the 'Miraflores Pact," an accord signed in December of 1999 by the political parties in which they promised to depoliticize for the government or the opposition the subject of the Panama Canal. The president of Cambio Democratico, Ricardo Martinelli, confirmed yesterday approaches begun last week by PRD leaders Héctor Alemán and Hugo Giraud, both of whom are in charge of keeping this pact in effect. The meetings have begun quietly and without the desire to publicize an event aimed at an apolitical disengagement from the subject of the canal referendum, confirmed deputy Héctor Alemán." In other words, Meta, Mami, Miraflores... and Olé!

But even more Orwellian than the canal expansion itself, it turns out that for them --- those of the lies and deceptions --- the expansion is more important than education. Sure, expansion is a business, and education has been called an investment. But meanwhile, as democratic educators have been again pointing out for the past several weeks:

1.      In Panama, an average of 40.8 percent of the schools lack electricity and 23.1 percent lack potable water. In the province of Colon, for example, 49 percent of the educational facilities have no electricity, and in Veraguas, of the 491 elementary school, 53.9 percent suffer the same malady.

2.      The schools lack libraries, librarians and up-to-date books.

3.      They don't have laboratories to contribute to the students' scientific education.

4.      The infrastructures go from classrooms divided with partitions to "bohio schools."

5.      Overcrowding has reached the point of 35 to 40 students or more in each classroom.

6.      In Panama there are in elementary education 2,906 schools with an enrollment of 385,247 students. Of the latter, 103,230 students attend multigrade schools, that is, with one teacher for several grades.

7.      The schools without qualified principals constitute a significant saving of money for the government, which doesn't have to pay people trained for this job, but it seriously prejudices the students.

8.      There are no national supervisors, and those who do exist lack the training that would allow them to orient the teacher and thus the educational system.

9.      Every type of professional incentive has been eliminated for teachers, including the law that lets them retire at their last salary after 28 years of service, which carries with it the burden of prolonged sacrifices for educators who have to work under these conditions.

10. The government set the education budget at $504 million, while it set aside $1.4 billion for service on the foreign debt, which represents 24 percent of the national budget

11. The policy of inclusion in the classrooms of students with special needs has been carried out without training the teachers to assume this laudable task.

12. The government is the only one responsible for the extreme politicization of the Ministry of Education.

13. There's an unmet need for educational psychologists to work with teachers to carry out the educational process in accord with the needs of each school region.

Given the cost of living, teachers' salaries are insufficient to satisfy basic needs. Currently the Minister of Education makes 16 times more than the teacher.

They continue with their orchestrated lies and their now well-known activities to whip up enthusiasm for their propaganda and its promoters. But they could give us, as Orwell described, a "rebellion on the farm."

Miguel Antonio Bernal is a law professor at the University of Panama, host of the Alternativa radio show and its new website, president of the Colegio de Abogados Honor Tribunal (the national bar association's disciplinary committee), a member of the Violet Legion (an honor society of intellectuals named by French presidents) for his work as correspondent for Le Monde Diplomatique and a noted Panamanian human rights activist.