MEDIA WATCH: Panamas moral and financial debt to poison victims

ON MONDAY March 21, Panama began the long  delayed hearing into the  mass poisoning of thousands of its citizens, most of them from low income groups. In hoyporhoy  La Prensa wrote:

AFTER  10 years and many failed attempts to do justice, today we will try again, to  hold the hearing on  mass poisoning by diethylene glycol.

Panama maintains a huge moral and financial debt to the survivors and relatives of those anonymous Panamanians who died for the greed of contractors willing to do anything to win a tender and the ineptitude of the insensitive bureaucracy of an institution charged to ensure the health of its  partners, the Social Security Fund (CSS). It is a shame that in other countries the Panamanian case is  used as a model experience of a catastrophic failure in the management of public health inputs. Neither the CSS nor the justice system have been reformed, so that such villainy is not repeated despite three different administrations.

Although today finally, there is an audience and in the coming months the perpetrators of this atrocity will pay, the damage and suffering caused will never be repaired. That is the lesson we must teach public servants and the courts.