Blades Falls Short, Pre-invasion Party Back
REPORT FROM PANAMA
ERIC JACKSON
Blades Falls Short, Pre-Invasion Party Back
Editor's Note: Eric Jackson, an Associate Editor of AGENDA, filed this report front Panama. This is a follow-up to Jackson's pre-election article [AGENDA, May 1994] "Rubén Blades Sows the Seeds of a New Panama."
On May 8, just under one-third of Panama's voters chose "Toro" Pérez Balladares, enough to win him the presidency. Entertainer/activist Rubén Blades and his ragtag green crusade fell short in the seven-way race.
Thus Toro's Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), which was ousted with Noriega in the 1989 invasion, came back to office. Despite the image created by the U.S. government and major news sources that Panamanians were infinitely grateful for having been "saved" by the U.S. military, in reality people hated the crooked and inept white elite whom Bush installed. (Now the news media is astonishingly quiet about the whole affair.)
A former Citibank executive, Toro won't lead any revolutions. He will, however, make the Southern Command--from which U.S. military operations in Latin America are run--leave Panama.
Word of Toro's win spread quickly. Based on exit polls, Panamanian TV called Toro the victor, with Blades second at 23%. But the government intervened, declaring that only its official count could be broadcast. The count dragged on for days, with few results from Blades' urban strongholds. The officially approved numbers eventually placed Blades third, behind Toro and the ruling Arnulfista Party's Mireya Moscoso de Gruber. Officially, Toro ended up with 32%, Gruber 27% and Blades 18%.
Though pre-election polls showed Blades close to Toro, nobody doubts that the PRD got the most votes. Nor were there signs of U.S. meddling. Observers from all sides called it Panama's cleanest election in a long time.
But that's relative. In my 41 years, Panama has had only one presidential election where the candidate with the most votes was declared the winner and allowed to serve the whole term. Usually, U.S. backing was the key to victory.
One might compare this year with 1989. Then, a slate chosen at a meeting hosted by the U.S. ambassador and the Catholic archbishop, funded by $10 million from the CIA and facing incumbents hobbled by Noriega's scandals and two years of U.S. sanctions, trounced the PRD. The election was annulled, but the winner was belatedly sworn in at a U.S. Army base during the December invasion. In the 1984 election, both Noriega and the U.S. supported Nicolas Ardito Barletta, a World Bank executive and former student of then-Secretary of State George Schultz. Their man "won"--only to be later ousted--when officials discarded the votes from San Miguelito, a squatter camp that grew into a city of 250,000.
As in 1984 and 1989, there were problems in San Miguelito this year. There were also problems in Colon and many areas in and around Panama City--places where pre-election polls had Blades and his greenish Papa Egoró movement leading. Actas (official vote tally sheets) disappeared, then reappeared with erasures and new totals. The legislative vote count took two weeks. International reporters who had declared the elections honest in their dispatches of May 9 and 10 were long gone by then.
The PRD and Papa Egoró each got two of San Miguelito's six assembly seats. Among them are two legislators to watch. The PRD's Balbina Herrera, unintimidated by several post-invasion arrests, was the U.S.-backed government's most vocal critic, and will probably be the next assembly president Papa Egoró's Gloria Young, founder of Panama's first battered-women's shelter, is emerging as the green opposition's most-listened-to voice.
The PRD and its campaign allies fell just short of an assembly majority. The Arnulfistas got a large block of seats, maybe more than they deserved. Toro made a deal with a beer magnate's small party, putting together what looks like a working majority.
Papa Egoró ended up with six deputies in a 72-seat assembly. All came from urban areas--two from San Miguelito, three from Panama City and one from Colon. Though it did poorly in most rural areas, the party elected a mayor on the indigenous Embará reservation.
Papa Egoró can't just chalk up its defeat to vote tampering or rural weakness. They clearly lost the momentum that had them closing in on the PRD in mid-April. One could sense this in the week before the election. On May 2, 10,000 people danced through a tropical cloudburst in a stadium parking lot, and when the sun carne back out, maybe 100,000 poured in to hear Blades speak and sing. But across town the PRD drew that much or more as teenage pompom girls directed people toward 16 bands playing on three stages set up on a mile-long stretch of Avenida Balboa, the capital's waterfront drive. The PRD and Arnulfista rallies later in the week drew close to 150,000 each; Toro's crowd enthusiastic, the Arnulfistas' full of sullen government workers who had to be there.
Most analysts say that Blades lost because he was slow to respond to attacks, most coming from the camp of fourth-place finisher Rubén Carles. Carles was political buzzard chow, raving incoherently at campaign stops and getting nowhere with calls to keep the U.S. bases. Voters were leaving him for Blades. So Carles' TV ads called Papa Egoró "a new form of communism." A legislator claimed that Cuban documents proved that Papa Egoró and the PRD had Castro's backing--but wouldn't produce the papers. A pro-Carles tabloid tied Blades to Noriega's G-2 spy unit, and said that he was a U.S. citizen and had flunked out of Harvard. Spray painters covered the capital with "Blades G-2" graffiti and insulted Mrs. Blades for her U.S. citizenship.
The PRD was more subtle. Toro's wife emphasized that she had always lived in Panama. Toro played to rumors of Blades' drug use by taking a urine test, which Blades matched with his own clean specimen.
Unsigned newspaper ads claimed that the orange, green and white Papa Egoró flag was based on the red, green, brown and white flag of Italy's Democratic Party of the Left--the former Communist Party. By turning red and orange into a reddish orange, the two flags were made to look vaguely similar.
Blades first ignored the attacks, then in the last few days issued blanket denials. Complaining of an "immoral campaign of lies," Blades went on the defensive, rather than attacking his critics. So, it is said, Blades faltered.
As an old Ypsi ward heeler, I see another cause. Papa Egoró ignored grassroots organization and paid dearly.
At PRD gatherings they passed around volunteer lists. At Papa Egoró events they didn't. On election day I visited polling places in Cocle and western Panama provinces. The Arnulfistas and the PRD shuttled voters to the polls in every city and village. Of nine polls that I visited, only one had an organized Papa Egoró presence, a locally-organized effort to turn out rural voters in a small bus and an old pickup truck. The 26% of eligible voters who stayed home surely included a lot of people whom the Blades campaign should have brought to the polls.
Papa Egoró's campaign slogan was "Plant the good seed." That they did. They now have six legislators to build the movement. Already there is talk of a 1999 Blades campaign. If they can learn from defeat, Panama's green third force will grow.