OPINION Panama's dark “guardianship” scandal

French Philosopher Michel Foucault criticized disciplinary institutions for being mechanisms to impose order at the end of punishment, fear, and the supposed reward, to people who in asylums, orphanages, prisons, schools, and psychiatric hospitals,  who are at the mercy of authority. The tragedy of the shelter in Tocumen evokes the dark passages denounced by Foucault. The State abandoned its obligation to protect the minors who are under its “guardianship”.

It left them in perverse and depraved hands, without technical knowledge or auditing of what was happening behind closed doors. Girls and young adolescents suffered worse acts than those that caused their hospitalization, while children and adolescents with disabilities or other conditions were sedated and handcuffed.

There are no words to describe the enormous damage caused to the soul and body of these minors by the neglect of the State.

This cannot be another morbid scandal, that that bureaucracy, drowns in oblivion. What happened in this shelter forces us to review all the similar enclosures, and to reconsider once and for all that negligence and corruption are not tolerable. – LA PRENSA, Aug 14

SEE ALSO: A  refuge that became a children’s hell hole