Alejandro Aguinaga said the former president had a condition that was eating away his stomach.

Mr Fujimori is serving a 25-year sentence for human rights abuses, but his family says he is too frail to be in prison.

They have called for a presidential pardon on humanitarian grounds.

This is a recurrent theme for either jailed ex-dictators or for ex-dictators facing charges:  that they are too old to be charged and jailed (this often came up in regards to Augusto Pinochet, for example).  Recently, Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, died in prison.

Sounds like this might be a ploy as much as anything else:

Correspondents say that the doctor’s diagnosis is likely to add more pressure on President Ollanta Humala to issue a pardon.

Last October, his family asked Mr Humala to commute his sentence.

Under Peruvian law, he can be pardoned only on health grounds.

But opponents argue that Peruvian jails are crowded with prisoners in worse health and for lesser crimes than those for which Alberto Fujimori was convicted.

Ultimately, Fujimori’s story is one of great hubris:  he thought he could return from exile in Japan (he fled Peru in 2000) and reenter Peruvian politics to great acclamation.  Instead, he was arrest in Chile (which was supposed to be the first stepping stone on his path to restoration) and extradited to Peru to face various charges associated with his time as president.

The nano-satellite, called Pegasus, was launched from the Jiuquan spaceport in China less than a month ago.

It is Ecuador’s first and only satellite in orbit.

Experts said Pegasus had collided with debris from a Soviet rocket but was still in orbit. It is not yet clear if it has been damaged.

The US-based Joint Space Operations Center, which monitors all artificial Earth-orbiting objects, said there had been no direct crash but that their “data indicated a lateral collision with particles” of the Soviet rocket.

The satellite itself doesn’t exactly have a major mission, however:

Pegasus, a small cube weighing just 1.2kg (2.6lb), has been orbiting the Earth at a height of 650km (404 miles), transmitting pictures from space while playing recordings of the Ecuadorean national anthem.

Beyond the fact that it was about space (which is probably reason enough to mention it), the story struck me as interesting for at least two reasons.  First, it shows how countries still see placing an object in space as a  means of enhancing their prestige.  Second, it is another example of Chinese relations with Latin America.

The next launch will be, however, from Russia:

Ecuador is planning to launch a second satellite, named Kryasor, from Russia in August.

Venezuela’s National Assembly has backed plans to import 39 million rolls of toilet paper, in an effort to relieve a chronic shortage.

Lawmakers voted to approve a $79m credit for the country’s ministry of commerce, which will also be used to buy toothpaste and soap.

The products are currently in short supply in Venezuelan shops.

The oil-rich nation relies on imports, but currency controls have restricted its ability to pay for foreign goods.

May I humbly suggest that sad policy isn’t working too well?

And, further, I don’t figure that the following hypothesis is correct:

President Nicolas Maduro, who won a narrow majority in April’s presidential elections, maintains that the country’s periodic shortages of basic goods are the result of a conspiracy by the opposition and rich sectors of society.

More likely, the problem is more along these lines:

analysts say that the government’s attempts to impose state control on the economy have created huge imbalances that have led to the shortages.

“Price controls, for example, act as a disincentive to local producers, forcing them to cut output,” says the survey organisation Consensus Economics.

“The resulting scarcity forces up inflation, defeating the entire purpose of price controls in the first place.”

Venezuela’s inflation is the highest in Latin America and is currently running at about 25%.

Former Argentine military leader Jorge Rafael Videla has died aged 87 while serving a life sentence for crimes against humanity.

He is reported to have died from natural causes in prison.

The general was jailed in 2010 for the deaths of 31 dissidents during the 1976-83 military dictatorship, of which he was overall leader until 1981.

Up to 30,000 people were tortured and killed during this period, in a campaign known as the “Dirty War”.

[…]

In 1976, he and two other military leaders staged a coup against President Isabel Peron, the widow of former leader Juan Domingo Peron.

Quite frankly, he was where he deserved to be, even if it took a while to get him there:

Gen Videla had been sentenced to life in prison for torture, murder and other crimes in 1985, but was pardoned in 1990 under an amnesty given by the president at the time, Carlos Menem.

In April 2010, the Supreme Court upheld a 2007 federal court move to overturn his pardon.

Eight months later he was found “criminally responsible” for the torture and deaths of 31 prisoners and jailed for life.

[…]

Last year, he was also convicted of overseeing the systematic theft of babies from political prisoners.

At least 400 babies are thought to have been taken from their parents while they were held in detention centres.

More than 100 children given for adoption to military or police couples have since been reunited with their biological families.

How is it that the president won the argument on gun safety with the public and lost the vote in the Senate? It’s because he doesn’t know how to work the system. And it’s clear now that he doesn’t want to learn, or to even hire some clever people who can tell him how to do it or do it for him.

It’s unbelievable that with 90 percent of Americans on his side, he could get only 54 votes in the Senate. It was a glaring example of his weakness in using leverage to get what he wants. No one on Capitol Hill is scared of him.

There is a lot wrong with this assessment.  On a general level it incorrectly assumes that the president can make things happen if he just tries hard enough.  (Of course, the fantastical nature of Dowd’s position is underscored by the fact that she wonders why Obama’s White House isn’t more like the fictitious one depicted in The American President“).

Beyond that, let me address a couple of specifics, starting at the bottom with “No one on Capitol Hill is scared of him.”   There is really only two ways a President can make members of congress scared—1) if that president can, by campaigning, influence the electoral fortunes of the legislators in question, or 2) if that president can somehow affect key legislation of importance to that legislator.

So, let’s consider:  there is only one more election where Obama will be relevant.   That election is over a year away, and will only effect one third of the chamber in question.  Further, if a given Senator is concerned more about how a given vote would play at home than how it plays nationally, what is Obama is going to do to scare said senator?

In regards to legislation:  given the current partisan configuration of the Congress, and especially given that body’s inability to pass significant legislation of late (and given the state of fiscal policy), exactly what legislative initiative is the president going to use to strike fear into the hearts of the Senate?

Of course, while it is true that there was 90% support in public opinion, the Senate is decidedly not designed to take national opinion into account.  Beyond that, the bill was able to garner majority support in the Senate, it just couldn’t garner a super-majority.

Beyond all of that, let’s consider the following:

Even House Republicans who had no intention of voting for the gun bill marveled privately that the president could not muster 60 votes in a Senate that his party controls.

If, in fact, House Republicans “had no intention of voting for the gun bill” then making a big deal about a failure in the Senate is a bit baffling, since the Republicans control the House of Representatives and, therefore, even if a bill passed the Senate, it would  have never have become law.

So, exactly what would be the point of expending energy to get votes that probably couldn’t be gotten for the purpose of seeing the bill fail anyway?

If we want to understand our own government, and the outcomes it produces, there are some key issues that have to be taken into account.

1. Having a majority of the seats in the Senate does not mean that a party controls that chamber.  This is not a new observation, but it seems to be one that has not truly sunk in.  I would note that this is not a new phenomenon, as even prior to the current era in which the chamber pretty much requires a super-majority to do much of anything, the minority always had a lot of influence over the operation of the chamber.

The bottom line is this:  true control of the Senate only can exist if the majority party has 60 seats and is relatively unified.  This is not a normal or likely outcome of any given electoral cycle.

2.  Symmetrical bicameralism means passing a bill in only one chamber only is the same thing as passing no bill at all.

3.  Separation of powers means that presidents are quite limited in their ability to force domestic policy through Congress.  It has ever been thus, and it is especially true in the context of a) a divided Congress in terms of different partisan majorities in both chambers, and b) a determined minority in the Senate that is willing to use its veto power over the process.

4.  Our system of election and representation does a terrible job of actually reflecting public opinion and translating it into public policy.  Legislators’ incentives are linked to pleasing relatively narrow sets of voters in primary elections.  This does not create a situation in which they are going to seek to conform to (or even have to pay much attention to) national public opinion (and may, in fact, not even require as much attention to state and district opinion as one might like to think).  Since a large majority of members of congress (in both chambers) come from safe districts (i.e., barring the unusual, we know which party will win the seat), then the only contest that matters for many members of congress is the primary election.  And groups like the NRA have a lot of influence over primaries.

Really, Dowd is buying into a number of myths that we American like to buy into.  The first is the assumption that because we are the World Greatest Democracy ^TM as invented by The Framers, that it it actually works in a way that creates results that reflect public sentiment. The second is that all it takes to accomplish legislative outcomes if Great Leadership. This myth assumes, therefore, that all that really matter is how well the president leads. However, this ignores that this is not how the machine of government is constructed.

Note:  cross-posted at OTB.

DOMA was passed in 1996 and signed into law by President Clinton and there are two central facts that have to be understood about the law:  a) it was initially symbolic (and remained such for almost a decade), and b) the very nature of bill guaranteed a court challenge, and an ultimate date with SCOTUS.

The Symbolism of it all

The immediate political context of the passage of the law was the possibility that Hawaii might legalize same sex marriage (which did not come to pass—indeed, the opposite happened).  However, the Congress preemptively acted to  prevent a) the recognition of same-sex marriages across state boundaries, and b) federal benefits to same-sex couples (more on this below).

However, no state recognized same-sex marriages until May of 2004, almost eight years after DOMA was signed into law. This happened in the state of Massachusetts.*

Now, this means that from 1996-2004, DOMA was dormant.  There was nothing to enforce, nothing to challenge, nothing whatsoever to do with the law.  As such, if one is inclined to think of it as established law dating back almost two decades, one has to understand that there was no basis whatsoever to challenge the law (or even see how it would function) until after a state legalized same-sex marriage and then only after same-sex couples were wed and then went on to make a legal claim that would run afoul of DOMA (i.e., either seek recognition of another state of the marriage in question or to claim some federal right or privilege based on the marriage).

Put it another way:  while DOMA has existed since 1996, it only became a relevant, active law some time after 2004.  As such, the fact that we about to have a SCOTUS case examining the constitutionality of DOMA is about on schedule (i.e., roughly a decade after the law went into force—something I have been predicting in front of American Government classes since the late 1990s—i.e., that it would take 10-12 years, so I was slightly conservative in my estimates, from the time the first state legally recognized same-sex marriage to the point that SCOTUS reviewed the law**).

A Date with Destiny

So, DOMA has always had a date with the Court.  Why?  Well, it is because of the nature of the provisions in the law itself.

DOMA has two main sections:

Section 2. Powers reserved to the states

No State, territory, or possession of the United States, or Indian tribe, shall be required to give effect to any public act, record, or judicial proceeding of any other State, territory, possession, or tribe respecting a relationship between persons of the same sex that is treated as a marriage under the laws of such other State, territory, possession, or tribe, or a right or claim arising from such relationship. Section 3. Definition of marriage In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word ‘marriage’ means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word ‘spouse’ refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.

Note:  DOMA does not create a national definition of marriage in any meaningful way that would apply to the actual process of issuing marriage licenses, because that is a state-level function.  Rather, DOMA attempts to (in section 2) limit recognition of same-sex marriages across state boundaries, and to define (in section 3) for federal purposes marriage as being only between members of the opposite sex.  This means that any kind of federal program or benefit that used marriage as a category (e.g., filing income taxes, receiving Social Security survivor’s benefits, etc.) that the federal government would not have to recognize state-level same-sex marriage licenses.  DOMA is very much a law that deals with federalism and the fact that marriage is a state-level function, while being married is a category used by various public policies at the federal level.  It also, however, creates national issues in terms of equal treatment of citizens.

Now, the activation of DOMA in 2004 meant that both section 2 and section 3 provided the possibility of court challenges on constitutional grounds.

First, section 2 provides the basis for a challenge via the Constitution‘s Article IV and the Full Faith and Credit clause.  The clause reads:

Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.

It is this clause (which has its origins in the Article of Confederation***) that allows things like my California marriage license to be valid in Alabama (i.e., my wife and I did not have to get remarried when we moved from California to Texas and then from Texas to Alabama).  If my marriage license has to be recognized by other states, the question could legitimately be asked as to why the marriage license of a same-sex couple from Massachusetts would not similarly be recognized.  Now, it is possible that the second sentence of the clause gives Congress sufficient power to make that distinction, but then again it may not.  This becomes something for the courts to decide.

Second, the fact that different marriage licenses would be treated differently under the law, as well as unequal treatment of citizens based on sexual orientation under section 3 could raise equal protection issues under the Vth Amendment, and such was the ruling at the district court level in Windsor v. United States (which is one of the cases going to SCOTUS).   After all, citizens cannot be deprived of liberty without due process of law, and hence the question emerges as to whether treating different classes of persons differently is an unlawful taking of liberty.  And note:  one can disagree with whether same-sex couples and different-sex couples are the same class in a theoretical sense, but once a state grants marriage licenses to both types of couples, they are then legally in the same category at the state level and the federal government has to make an argument for why it can treat those citizens differently when a state is not.****

In short:  if state X issues marriage licenses to citizens, regardless of whether the couples are of differing sexes or not, what is the constitutional basis for the federal government giving benefits to one set of citizens whilst denying those benefits to another set, especially when the legal definition of the two sets of citizens is legally identical at the state level?

It should be noted that there have been numerous court challenges to DOMA since 2004, which have included lower courts declaring portions of the law unconstitutional.  It is this process that has led to SCOTUS review, which is usually how these things work.

The point of all of this is to demonstrate that this legal confrontation was inevitable (which the Framers of DOMA knew) and that this process it is not the unsettling of settled law, it is actually the process of the settling.  The Court could rule any number of ways, and the ruling issued will provide the legal basis for dealing with same-sex marriage for the foreseeable future.  However, it needs to be understood that DOMA was never going to be the last word on this subject (even if some of its supporters hoped that it would be).

——

Cross-posted at OTB and PoliBlog

*It is also true that civil unions were legalized in several states, including Hawaii and California in the 1990s.  The state of Vermont was the fist to recognize civil unions in a way that was legally equivalent in the state to marriage, but it did not have a specific same-sex marriage law until 2007, which did not go into force until 2009.

**I have been using DOMA as an illustration of federalism, as well as the way laws might be challenged in the Supreme Court since right after it was passed.  I have long maintained that as soon as a given state legalized gay marriage that it would lead to legal challenges in the courts and eventually to a SCOTUS review.  As noted, I long stated that the timeframe as 10-12 years. I have also long argued that DOMA would be overturned either on Article IV and/or equal protection grounds—and I have though that even before I changed my mind on this topic some years ago. While I was never a vehement opponent, I used to reject the notion of same-sex marriage on religious grounds.  However, about a decade ago I softened my position to support civil unions and then quickly decided that the only logical position, based on things like equal treatment under the law, was full support of same-sex marriage.

***See Article IV.

****Indeed, hardcore supporters of “state’s rights” ought to be cheering for DOMA’s demise, as it clearly attempts to ignore/redefine a given state’s power to define marriage as it sees fit.  Of course, the hardest of the hardcore on this situation will never be happy because the ultimate lesson here is going to be that the federal courts and the federal constitution will control the outcomes and that there is an inevitable role to be played by federal policy.

That lefties are accusing the new pope of handing over lefties to the right wing junta for execution makes me adore the new pope.

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) March 13, 2013

This is a pretty heinous statement, in my opinion, given that the “right wing junta” in question would torture and summarily execute “lefties” handed over to them.  This represents partisan nonsense at its worst:  Erickson thinks of himself as part of the “right” so the “right junta” must be the good guys in this scenario.*  Or, at a minimum, he thinks that if “lefties” are making accusations, then the Argentine military regime should not be taken as a serious topic.

Erickson did not back off when he was criticized (shockingly enough) as he later wrote at Red State:

He’s already being attacked by lefties for allegedly handing over commies to the right wing junta back in the day. If you think this attack on him makes him more awesome, I’ve learned today that it means you are endorsing death squads as opposed to a new pope getting attacked by old enemies.

But here’s the thing:  glibness about the Argentine military regime that was in power from 1976 to 1983 is to be glib about death squads.  As such, if Erickson wants to dismiss these charges against the Pope  as simply political attacks, he is free to do so, but to glide over the significance of the Argentine military’s government at the time is highly problematic.  Regardless of one’s conclusions about Bergoglio’s actions, one has to take seriously the period of time in question, as well as the actions of persons in powerful positions at the time.

Prior to the establishment of democracy in 1983, Argentine politics had been a tumultuous affair pretty much from independence from Spain.  There were periods of stability (such as the first Peron era),  as well as dabblings in democracy.  However, the entire period was one punctuated, as was true of many of its neighbors, with military forays into governance, with the last military government being the most vicious.

The war against “subversion” was one waged against the Argentine people, and not just against guerrillas, but against anyone that the military thought might be sympathetic to the left, including students, professors, poets, philosophers, union leaders, and the like (yes, even priests).  The military used torture, rape, and disappearances** to terrorize its perceived enemies, leading to a substantial death toll.  As Stepehn G. Rabe notes:

During la guerra sucia (“the dirty war”) of the late 1970s, the Argentine military and associated death squads massacred 30,000 Argentines. Many of the dead assumed the title of “disappeared” or desaparecido. The victims, sometimes alive, were often dumped into the frigid South Atlantic from airplanes.

There is also the fact that the children of the disappeared were often given to military officers who were involved in the murder of the parents.  See, for example, this story from the NYT:  Daughter of ‘Dirty War,’ Raised by Man Who Killed Her Parents:

It took an incessant search by a human rights group, a DNA match and almost a decade of overcoming denial for Ms. Montenegro, 35, to realize that Colonel Tetzlaff was, in fact, not her father — nor the hero he portrayed himself to be.

Instead, he was the man responsible for murdering her real parents and illegally taking her as his own child, she said.

[…]

Jorge Rafael Videla, who led the military during Argentina’s dictatorship, stands accused of leading the effort to take babies from mothers in clandestine detention centers and give them to military or security officials, or even to third parties, on the condition that the new parents hide the true identities. Mr. Videla is one of 11 officials on trial for 35 acts of illegal appropriation of minors.

The trial is also revealing the complicity of civilians, including judges and officials of the Roman Catholic Church.

The abduction of an estimated 500 babies was one of the most traumatic chapters of the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. The frantic effort by mothers and grandmothers to locate their missing children has never let up. It was the one issue that civilian presidents elected after 1983 did not excuse the military for, even as amnesty was granted for other “dirty war” crimes.

Let me say this is as clear a terms as possible:  the actions of the Argentine military, as well as any number of military regimes in Latin American from the 1950s into the 1980s in the name of anti-communism were crime against human rights, liberty, and democracy.  They should not be the subject of glib political commentary (not if one wants to pretend that one has a clue as to what one is talking about). 

As to placing the new Pope into this context, as noted in the excerpt above, charges of complicity of Catholic officials in these events creates questions regarding the new Pope if anything because he was head of Argentine Jesuits at the time.   A run down of the issues can be found in this WaPo piece:  Pope Francis faces scrutiny over Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’.

As the young leader of the country’s Jesuit order, Bergoglio was aware of the atrocities that were being carried out and worked quietly to save victims, according to people who knew him then. But Bergoglio, like many other clerics at the time, remained publicly silent about the abuse and did not openly confront the military leaders.

[…]

Exactly what Bergoglio did — and didn’t do — during the years of the dictatorship is now the focus of intense scrutiny since his ascendancy to Pope Francis, with the Vatican pushing back forcefully against allegations that Bergoglio failed to protect two left-leaning priests in his Jesuit order, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics, who were kidnapped by soldiers in 1976 and imprisoned for five months.

[…]

Bergoglio did not speak publicly about his role during the dictatorship until 2010, when he told an interviewer that he hid and protected several persecution victims at the Jesuit seminary, but could not say how many. He also recounted helping a young man who shared his likeness to escape across the Brazil border, giving the man his identification card and dressing him up in clerical vestments as a ruse. “It saved his life,” Bergoglio said.

Part of the controversy regarding Bergoglio can be found here (as well as the two sides of the story):

At one point, Bergoglio said he met privately with military commanders, including coup leader Emilio Massera to inquire about the missing Jesuits. “Look Massera: I want them to appear,” Bergoglio said he told him in a tense encounter before abruptly walking out of the room.

Yorio and Jalics were eventually freed, dumped off in a field after five months, half-naked and drugged.

Yorio later blamed Bergoglio for the imprisonment. In a 1999 interview with a respected Argentine journalist, he was quoted as saying, “I have no reason to believe [Bergoglio] did anything to free us, in fact just the opposite,” suggesting his superior had lifted his protection on the men as a punishment for their political views.

And also:

The criticism of Bergoglio for not doing enough has prompted several prominent Argentine rights activists, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel, to come to his defense in recent days.

“There were some priests and bishops that helped the dictatorship, and others who spoke out and died because of it. But Bergoglio wasn’t a collaborator,” said Graciela Fernandez Meijide, a politician and prominent human rights investigator whose 16-year-old son vanished after being snatched from his bed by soldiers in the middle of the night.

There is also this general fact that provides some context:

Argentina’s church leaders did not confront the country’s military rulers with anything approaching the public fervor of fellow clerics facing other dictatorships, as in Chile or El Salvador, where Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, was assassinated in 1980.

The bottom line is this:  Erickson is showing a severe lack of understanding of history to make the glib comments that he has.  More importantly, however, the tale of Argentina (and most of Latin America during the timeframe under discussion) is rife with horrific tales of military governments abusing its citizens all in the name of anti-communism (and theoretically, “liberty”).  There was far too much glib support for such policies in the US at the time, but the continued ignorance of the situation is really inexcusable.

One thing we ought to be able to do, especially now that the Cold War is well in our rearview mirrors, is acknowledge that everything done in the name of “anti-communism” should not be absolved.  Rather, the fact of the matter remains that many things done in the name of fighting “lefties” ended up being heinous abuses of human rights and were every bit as opposed to liberty, freedom, and democracy as any Cold Warrior’s worst case scenario of communism.

To summarize:  if one wants to understand the discussion about  Bergoglio and the military regime, one needs to know a bit of history.

—————————

Posted at both OTB and PoliBlog

*Erickson is a child of the talk radio generation who thinks that bombast equals cleverness and who has never seen a political discussion that can’t be delineated into a simplistic left-right dichotomy.  He is emblematic of what is wrong with conservative commentary in the current era.

**People would likely disappear without a trace—kidnapped by the government and tortured and killed without due process.

Since January 2012, the United States, in partnership with various European and Latin American nations, has been conducting Operation Martillo (Martillo = Hammer), a multi-national, interagency and joint military operation to combat aerial and maritime drug trafficking off Central America’s coasts. It began in January 2012 and has no end date, though its end is believed to be a few months away.

The linked fact sheet has a good bit of information, as well as a map showing the current flows of cocaine into the US market.

One thing to watch, as is often the case in this situations:  does this policy lead to substantially less drugs in the US, or does it simply re-route the drugs via other pathways and means?  The multi-decade evidence would suggest that a temporary disruption of flows will result followed by significant adaptation by traffickers.

But, of course, when everything looks like a  clavo, the only tool you pull out is a martillo.

Punta Paitilla in the background, with a construction project in the foreground.

However, what was really instructive to me was my visit to what was the Canal Zone and to the Canal itself.  As my colleague, Greg Weeks noted (both when we were at the Canal, but on his blog) , we have read about and taught the significance of the Canal and the Canal Zone for a long time, but there is something especially instructive about seeing the scale of it all.

Now, yes, the scale of the Canal is impressive, especially when one considers that it was constructed in the late 19th/early 20th centuries.  Indeed, the doors at the Miraflores Locks are the originals and have been in operation for 98 years.  The engineering of it all is remarkable as is the impact the Canal has had on world trade.

However, on the political/historical side of things, I was especially struck by the scale of the former Canal Zone, which used to be US territory until the turnover to the Panamanian government on December 31, 1999 as a result of the Torrijos-Carter Treaty signed in 1977.  It is one thing to read that the Canal Zone was a buffer zone created to allow the US to govern and maintain the Canal, it is another to see that at one point the are of the Zone near Panama City was a city unto itself on primo real estate that was granted to the United States via a treaty negotiated between the US and a French national only two weeks after Panama had gained independence from Colombia.  The Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty, which gave the US control of the Zone in perpetuity, was created via talks between Secretary of State John Hay and  Phillipe Bunau-Varilla, a Frenchman who had been directly involved in the French attempt at building a canal, and who had significant business interests in the process.  He was not negotiating in the interest of the Panamanians.  Really, the entire affair was imperialism, pure and simple, and any understanding of the events in Panama since its independence have to be understood in this context.

As such, when we try to understand events like the 1964 riots over the flying of a Panamanian flag, and the Johnson administration’s response thereto, the history (and the geography) have to be taken into consideration. (Of course, Johnson saw it all as left-wing agitation, not to mention with a great deal of arrogance, saying about the situation:  “I’m not going to be pushed around by a *** country no bigger than St. Louis”).**

Or, for that matter, when we try to understand why Carter negotiated the handover in the first place, and the context of the Ford-Reagan battle in 1976 on this issue.***

None of this is a new revelation in regards to nationalism in Panama (or elsewhere in Latin America, and around the world), but it was just something that was really brought home by seeing the actual context.

More generically, the entire tale is one that should remind us that it can be all too easy to ignore the way US actions affect local populations (and why local populations often harbor substantial, and well-founded, resentments against the United States—something that struck me this morning as I listened to a story about the US drone war in Waziristan).  One of the things that Americans (both politicians and everyday citizens) need to be better at is looking at our actions from the perspectives of those our actions directly effect.  It is all to easy to engage in the type of rhetoric that Reagan did in 1976 (“We dug it, we own it”) and get swept away in our own power-created self-righteousness.

One passing thought that strikes me as further fodder for thought in the current political climate:  the original attempt to build the Canal was a private venture, that eventually collapsed (as was the second attempt).  The third, successful, attempt was a government project.

All photos by me.  More here.

Posted at both OTB and PoliBlog.

*It is true that the country makes a remarkable amount of money from the Canal and the country has become a major banking center (to go along with a significant intake from tourism) but I still could not help but wonder if there was too much happening too quickly.  Still, that is an impression based in studying the region, but not an observation based on actual empirical evidence.

**As quoted on p. 163 Henry Raymont. 2005.  Troubled Neighbors:  The Story of US-Latin American Relations from FDR to the Present. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press.

***In looking for a quote, I came across this piece from The American Conservative that discusses a Firing Line debate between Reagan and Buckley on this topic, which includes the following:

The Reagan-Buckley friendship en-dured two sharp fractures over foreign policy. The first has become legendary. In 1978, Buckley and Reagan, two paladins of the American Right, arrayed themselves on opposing sides of the Panama Canal treaties being negotiated by the Carter Administration. Buckley, who favored turning the canal over to the Panamanians, invited Reagan, opposed, to debate him on “Firing Line.” The knights had esquires: James Burnham, George Will, and Admiral Elmo Zumwalt stood with Buckley. Pat Buchanan, Roger Fontaine, and Admiral John McCain Jr., father of the senator, were with Reagan.

Back then, conservatives could disagree with one another about foreign policy openly and civilly. Reagan sounded notes familiar from recent debates over America’s role in the Mideast: “I think we would cloak weakness in the suit of virtue” if America were to surrender the canal, he warned. “With this treaty, what do we do to ourselves in the eyes of the world, and to our allies? Will they, as Mr. Buckley says, see that as the magnanimous gesture of a great and powerful nation? … I think the world would see it as, once again, Uncle Sam putting his tail between his legs and creeping away rather than face trouble.”

Buckley’s response would today get him branded an unpatriotic conservative. “We donegotiate under threats,” he told Reagan. “Ninety-nine percent of all the negotiations that have gone on from the beginning of this world have gone on as a result of threats. … The fact of the matter is that there are people in Panama who don’t accept the notion of Governor Reagan about the undisputed, unambiguous sovereignty that the United States exercises over that territory.” Likening Panamanian demands for sovereignty over the Canal Zone to the American Revolution, Buckley observed, “All of a sudden we find that we resent it when people say that they’re willing to fight for their freedom.”