Page 14 - Anatomy-of-a-Fraud
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have had unlimited powers over everything having to do with family life. On the
cultural level, a so-called Educational Reform was instituted, seeking to extend
government control to all schools, whether public or private, and uniformly
politicizing education’s ideological content. There were occasions when attempts
were made to divide the clergy; tensions between the Church and the government
culminated in the expulsion of several priests and the death of Father Héctor
Gallego.
On the economic level, great emphasis was placed on the government’s
intervention in industrial, agro-business and, eventually, mining operations, aiming
to reverse the previously existing 1 to 2 ratio in public and private investment.
Official controls over transportation and housing proliferated; in general, prices
and labor-management relations also came under the watchful eye of the
government. Thus, the polarization of the Panamanian economy was exacerbated;
on the one hand, there was the very free international sector, where foreign
investments predominate, with a sustained rate of growth but a relatively low rate
of job creation and government revenue generation; and, on the other, the highly
controlled domestic sector, where national ownership predominates, mired in a
prolonged crisis and therefore unable to respond to the two-fold demand of
creating more jobs for a rapidly expanding population and paying more taxes to a
government more and more in the red.
Thus, a “socialist militarist” scheme was hatched, aiming to change
Panamanian society by force, from the locus of political power and according to its
whims or, more accurately, to those of the military in the role of political leaders.
Gradually, national life became circumscribed to the government’s centralizing
decisions, made by the Executive Branch which, in turn, was subject to the diktats
of the armed forces, i.e., their General Staff and their Commander in Chief. A left-
leaning version of the national security ideology. Again, the regime included
everything but popular, pluralist participation.
In the area of foreign policy, this Torrijista scheme succeeded in
internationally dramatizing Panama’s relations with the United States over the
Canal. The result was the agreement to gradually decolonize the Canal Zone and
reduce U.S. presence in it, in exchange for the formal acknowledgment of the right
of the United States to eventually intervene militarily anywhere in Panama. In the
process, the regime committed itself to the Third World movement, including
some of its more radical exponents; staked out an ambiguous role in the
confrontation between Western democracy and Marxist-Leninist regimes; and in
the end gave its support to a series of regional intervention adventures, all of
which went far beyond the resources and the national interests of Panama.
The 1984 elections were exceptionally meaningful and not only because they
were the first in sixteen years for president and legislators and the only elections
the younger half of the electorate had ever known. They were exceptionally
meaningful because they amounted to an opportunity for a plebiscite to choose