Poverty in the shadow of the skyscrapers

Panama is a country that boasts of its progress, of its skyscrapers, of its banking center, of an interoceanic highway that generates wealth for the entire population. The governments of the day project an exotic image of the country in which the forgotten do not appear, those who suffer an alternate reality, very different from that experienced by other Panamanians.

About one hundred of the more than 600 townships in the country live in what is called multidimensional poverty. It is where the State does not arrive and where that population lives, which is only valued at election time. These are, especially, townships located in indigenous regions, where education does not reach the youth; where homes lack electricity and people live in overcrowding; where the environment is unsanitary due to garbage and the lack of sanitary services; where work is scarce and informality abounds; where the water does not come from an aqueduct, but from a well, river, stream or cistern.

It is these indicators – or their absence – that tell us that there is an old debt with that population, condemned to perpetual poverty because it cannot get out of its precariousness without the help of the State, and the solution is not in simple subsidies. It is to them that progress is owed. It is not the height of a building that measures progress, but how far people can go. and the solution is not in simple subsidies. It is to them that progress is owed –LA PRENSA, Oct. 18