Democracy in Panama

Rob has some interesting thoughts about democracy in Panama after Sunday’s referendum. They mirror both my own experiences at the last election and my thoughts on corruption in young democracies.

If I’m not mistaken there have been 3 referendums in Panama’s democratic history: in 1990, President Guillermo Endara left it up to us to decide whether the constitution should be tweaked in several respects, all of them which escape me at the moment but I’m sure you can google if you’re interested, and the country told him “No.” 1998 rolls around and President Ernesto Pérez Balladares wanted to run for a second term, so he left it to the Panamanian crowd to decide… they told him a bigger, fatter “No.” This time the fate of the Canal was at stake and the population had the final say about whether it should be expanded or not… only 16 years as a democratic country… politically in its teens, and they’re asked to make the decision that could make or break the most symbolic representation of the country in the eyes of the world.

So you can see the Panamanians don’t necessarily do as told by el presidente, which is something many foreign journalists have tried to portray.

The whole process is controlled by the Tribunal Electoral, who don’t take any crap from anyone. In the week up to an election they basically take control of the police force, so a crooked president couldn’t start intimidating the voters. Panama really did learn from their dictatorial 80s and 70s, unlike Venezuela where the idiot voters voted for more powers to their little cartoon character of a president.

Rob explains the Tribunal Electoral:

We all know how the goverment operates, no matter what political party they come from: they all steal and do stuff behind our backs, so why in the hell would they go out of their way to ask us what we think? Of course, one of the main reasons is because the law demands them to, and if there’s one thing I’ve noticed from all of the recent elections that have been going down, is that nobody messes around with the Electoral Tribunal. Out of all of the government branches out there (and there are plentiful) I think that the least corrupt is them… perhaps not because they don’t want to, but because they’re kind of in a compromising position that, if they even tried, they’d be hanged, beat up and burned to the cross. I like that, though: the government could be a rotten apple but at least there’s some good in there, and we’re lucky that it’s where it really counts, where we have an active role in regards to the proceedings. Panamanians don’t realize this I think, but our voting system is one of the best (if not THE best) in the entire world, definitely in Latin America. Voting started at 7AM and was over at 4PM; by 5:30PM the Tribunal could give out an extraofficial assessment of the results, giving the “Yes” a landslide victory with 80% of the vote.

They are unbelievably efficient and kick ass in public when ass kicking is needed.

Unfortunately as a young democracy and this was something many loud mouthed well intentioned foreigners had a problem understanding is that there is a lot of corruption within elected government. It can be frustrating to see people get voted in, who 5 years earlier got the boot because of corruption. As Rob puts it:

Every 4 or 5 years when the elections come around some monkey in a suit will promise the Panamanian people the moon and the stars and they will buy into it because we’re in our democratic teens, and as 16 year olds we’re naive and easily wooed. As teenagers, since we don’t have any real power over our parents (the government) and they’ll never listen to our suggestions since we’re kids and we don’t know any better, the only way we ever get heard is by crying, trashing our room and screaming at the top of our lungs… so we take it to the streets. There was a point in time where the teachers, the social security, the transport authority and even retired folks went out to the streets to get what’s theirs. Of course, they all eventually died down when they were given some degree of attention (here’s a cookie) and it all went away… because we don’t know any better.

I agree with what Rob says above, only that it doesn’t go away after 16 years. At the last parliamentary election here in Denmark I saw for myself the public bribery that went on and it really disgusted me. But then again that is the biggest failures of representative democracies, you can bribe the voters turning it into a social kleptocracy. In Denmark the idiots turn to the streets as well and as I discovered that our democracy is in fact very weak indeed from a constitutional standpoint.

The main thing that differs in Panama is that Panamanians like Rob and my wife don’t actually trust the government. They know that it’s corrupt. But they also know they can kick the crooks out next time. In Denmark people tend to trust the government, which is really why yesterday’s quote of the day was so suitable.