Panama, a country in crisis
A crisis requires urgent and necessary changes. In the midst of the social upheaval that the country has been suffering for weeks, the most important corruption trial in the country’s history must begin today: Odebrecht, a case that, without a doubt, is one of the ingredients of today’s popular discontent, accumulated during years, together with the conjunctural demands. The manifestations of anger and disgust at the situation that the country is going through and the thousands of families without jobs due to the containment measures imposed by the pandemic have been general, they were mostly born spontaneously in almost the entire national territory and have paralyzed or affected a plural number of activities that has forced the government, for the first time, to sit down to negotiate.
The anger of society is manifested strongly in the streets, after tolerating years of corruption, lack of transparency, and growing cynicism on the part of officials and political leaders, who defied the patience of voters by neglecting their needs; putting their interests above those of the community; fleecing the State with phantom state payrolls; circumventing controls, accountability, and transparency. Society has carried too much weight on its shoulders and that explains this popular outrage.
That is why the agreements they reach, even if they resolve the immediate issue, must include an end to the rampant corruption that reigns in the Government. Simple statements that there is no such thing fool no one. If they refuse to see the obvious, as soon as the current ones are over, we will have new demonstrations and more and more reasons to be in the streets will continue to add up.
And something that the government must bear in mind: the solution to the problems of the high cost of fuel, of the basic food basket, and of medicines is not to borrow or continue indebted. The message is that the government has to make a real sacrifice, stop the waste, the patronage, put a stop to the party that has been staged since the start of the pandemic, hiring people, increasing salaries, including that of representatives and mayors.
If what the government intends to do is contract debt to get out of the quagmire, the protests will be worse when it comes time to pay. That is why the message is: no more debt and more cost containment. And that obviously includes the cost overruns in state works, something that is notorious in this, as in previous governments, when Odebrecht paid hundreds of millions of these cost overruns in bribes t8o local and foreign officials.
Thus we arrive at what we hope will be the final chapter of this theater of terror, in which, for now, there are only two high-profile convicts, and in the United States. We hope that this judicial process, which has been crooked, to the point of separating and almost exiling the prosecutors who initiated this investigation, does not end up as flawed as the defendants and protagonists of the largest corruption scandal in Latin America seem to be. – LA PRENSA, Jul. 1.
