Panama's Opposition Has Only Itself To Blame

Panama's Opposition Has Only Itself To Blame

Noriegaville
Today (10/5) we learned that journalist Maribel Cuervo de Paredes received a letter from La Prensa's director, cancelling her weekly column in the diario libre (see the letter here). The dismissal of Mrs. Cuervo was ordered by Panama's ambassador in the US, Federico Humbert, who previously figured on the board of the newspaper where he supported the Martin Torrijos election campaign and then received his appointment as the reward that had been previously agreed upon. A typical and clear-cut case of a journalistic corrupto.

Maribel Cuervo, persecuted by the oligarchy
This is not the first time that Cuervo is being dismissed. Almost a year ago, she was fired from TV station FETV as the result of the activities of a group of rabiblancos headed by Juan Carlos Tapia that had set out to cleanse that station of opposition voices.

Then, Cuervo was asked to resign from the prestigious Latin American Center for Journalism (CELAP), which she managed. That was the work of another press freedom imposter, I. Roberto Eisenmann, who was offended by the fact that Cuervo had expressed herself critically about the Panama chapter of Transparency International, which Eisenmann de facto owns. Eisenmann, as we published earlier, likes to portrait himself as some sort of freedom fighter from back in the dictatorship days, but in reality enjoys hanging out with military junta characters who are responsible for assassinations and disappearances of journalists.

Maribel Cuervo is the most high profile example of repression of journalists by the economical and political elite of this country, but she is not the only one. La Prensa also got rid of Marcos Castillo for example, who managed the opinion page, because he allowed too much different opinion to be published there. Castillo referred in an interview with us to La Prensa as "The Ministry of Information." There are numerous other examples, from TVN to RPC and EPASA, of journalists being fired, harassed, or otherwise told to tone it down, only because they do what a journalist is supposed to do: report the truth.

As usually happens in these cases, the dismissal of Maribel Cuervo from La Prensa is accompanied by a flurry of emails and articles by opposition figures in Panama. These protests, just as in the past, are ineffective. Whatever Panama's media-oligarchs do, they are not meeting any serious resistance from journalists and opposition groups. In fact, these groups often make it easier for the mediagarchy to impose its repressive policies upon them.

How FETV/Canal 5 was given away to the Tapia mafia
Case in point is what happened at FETV/Canal5. The lack of creativity and professional skills by management figures like Manolo Blanquer and Carlos Lee made it extremely easy for the Tapia mafia to practically close the station down. There was a lot of tumult about Maribel Cuervo's daily show being closed, but in reality the program was badly produced and uninteresting. It was some sort of one-way talkradio shown on TV. Instead of having Cuervo do real investigative journalism and produce TV reports, they instead aired a real journalism show from the Dominican Republic, while Cuervo just talked and talked. Most other debate and interview shows on FETV were produced according to the same formula of airing radio on TV. Any serious TV producer knows that this does not attract audiences that are of interest to advertisers. Ask RCM, they have the same problem (but survive by being uncontroversial and accepting huge bribes for airing or not airing certain stories).

But instead of looking for formats that would be more successful or accepting outside offers for help with production and programming, FETV's Carlos Lee and Manolo Blanquer just continued with more of the same. While, in typical Panamanian fashion, pretending to know everything and insisting on working on their own, they made the station and its employees sitting ducks for Tapia and his media-gangsters, who could now truthfully argue that the station was not attracting sufficient viewers to sustain the current programming.

Thus having practically given away a TV station to the rabiblanco elite, those who are being expelled from the Panamanian mainstream media circus have not made any sustainable effort to produce an alternative to these mainstream media.

Those outside the system should stop looking for positions inside it and instead produce serious alternatives
Sure, Maribel Cuervo, Miguel Antonio Bernal and Marcos Castillo have radio shows. But there is little cooperation, and if the now divided groups and individuals would work together they could maybe acquire a radiostation instead of just presenting shows here and there.

Sure, many individuals and groups have websites. But the percentage of households that has internet access in Panama is so low that this is still not to be considered a mass medium. And there is not like a couple of very good sites, there is a number of isolated small scale efforts with little coherence and exchange. Is there a lot of government propaganda on the web? No, there is not. Team Martin knows very well that public debates and propaganda wars are not fought in the digital arena in Panama, because they don't really need to worry about the influence a website against the Canal plans has. But instead of learning that lesson too, we just see more and more websites of various individuals denouncing the injustices of this country for a small group of readers.

Again, if individuals and groups would really want to present an alternative to the respression of journalists and the suppression of truthful reporting, they'd start a fully fledged news site together, with correspondents and reporters who dedicate their time to gathering news and reporting independently. Or better still, they would publish a printed paper or magazine. Surely the members of the opposition can raise the $1,500 it costs to print a first edition of a 24 page newspaper in tabloid format to get things started.

But alas, issues like massive corruption, censorship in the media, the Canal expansion plans, the privatization of the Social Security, the energy rip-off and the scandalously high discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots in this country are not sufficient reason for expelled journalists and opposition groups to join forces and create alternatives.

And that I find a lot more depressing than the expulsion of Maribel Cuervo from the Ministry of Information which, after all, was to be expected.

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