APRIL/MAY
PROFESSOR TEACHES COURAGE IN PANAMA
By R.M. Koster
BERNAL
CATHEDRAL PLAZA, THE OLDEST PART OF PANAMA CITY, PANAMA - Citizens file past a card table set up opposite the church, bending to add their signatures to the petition. A sturdy man in shirt sleeves stands nearby, shaking hands, accepting encouragement, nodding gravely as a woman tells him why his city and country need him, aiming stiletto wit at the corrupt office holders infesting both. Dr. Miguel Antonio Bernal is running for mayor of the oldest city on the mainland of the Americas.
In an hour, however, he will be teaching international relations to a class of FSU students at the university's Panama Canal Branch. The Branch has been in existence 41 years. Since 1991 Dr. Bernal has been a member of its faculty. In the 1970s and '80s his opposition to Panama's dictators sent him twice to the hospital and twice into exile, but besides these diplomas from the school of hard knocks, he has a doctorate in political science.
Bernal began his mayoralty campaign as an independent.
"Dictatorship ruined our politics," he explains. "Holding office meant being a flunky for General Torrijos or General Noriega, and thereby an accessory to their crimes. Our political class became parasitical, and the U.S. invasion in 1989 didn't change that. The Americans took Ali Baba but left the forty thieves.
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"Like the nobles before the French Revolution, our politicians have little in common with the rest of the people and serve their class interests, not the public good. They control the parties, and the parties control access to the ballot. I tried to change that."
Hence the petitions. In Panama, to get one's name on the ballot, a person not nominated by a political party must demonstrate the support of 20,000 eligible voters. Dr. Bernal rounded them up. For three months he stood in shopping malls and squares like Cathedral Plaza asking voters for their signatures. By Christmas he had collected 22,000.
Bernal's appeal is grounded in his commitment to democracy and the personal courage that required during the dictatorship. Even today most Panamanians are reluctant to take on the powerful. Press laws instituted during the dictatorship are still on the books. Critics can be jailed without trial.
Bernal's radio talk show "Alternativa" is the most popular program of its kind in Panama, for Bernal has the courage of his democratic convictions and speaks out against corruption and abuse of power no matter where he finds it.
Bernal was enrolled at the Université de Bordeaux in France in October 1968, when Panama's armed forces deposed President Arnulfo Arias, dissolved the legislature and seized control of the country. Bernal earned a law degree as well as a Ph.D., then went home to fight the dictatorship.
In 1976 he was sent into exile for criticizing governmental corruption over the radio. He taught at Mexico's National University until 1978, when U.S. senators pressured General Omar Torrijos into bringing exiles home as the price of ratifying new Canal treaties.
A year later, when President Jimmy Carter offered Torrijos $12 million to admit the Shah of Iran to Panama (Torrijos spread the cash around among his top officers), Bernal led a demonstration in protest and was beaten almost to death by soldiers and goons.
After a month in the hospital and two months bedridden at home, Bernal went back to the fight with daily broadcasts of his radio talk show "Alternativa." In March 1986, however, he ran afoul of Manuel Noriega, who had replaced Torrijos as Panama's dictator after Torrijos died in 1981.
Displeased by Bernal's references to Panama's growing prominence in the drug trade, Noriega had Bernal fined $2500. Bernal raised the sum by asking for contributions in pennies, collecting more than 300,000, before the banks ran out. He gave the extras to the state nursing home, then rented a truck, shoveled a quarter million pennies on board, and dumped the lot on the lawn of the ministry of finance. Meanwhile, he gave his program every weekday at noon standing on a busy street corner, till later that year Noriega goons ran him over, breaking his leg.
At that, it being clear he would be murdered if he stayed in Panama, he accepted a Fulbright lectureship and went off to the United States on another term of exile, teaching first at Davidson College, then at Lehigh.
The restoration of democracy did not bring him ease. "Alternativa" is back on the air and still raises official hackles. Bernal has been sued for libel by two presidents and one police chief.
Nor does the establishment welcome the prospect of his being mayor of Panama's capital. In January 1999, the Electoral Tribunal refused to honor the signatures he had collected. They weren't inscribed on the proper forms.
By then, however, Bernal's candidacy had generated enough support to secure him the nomination of Unión Por Panama, one of three party alliances in the campaign that will end in general elections on May 2. His name will be on the ballot.
Whatever the election's outcome, Bernal's students are winners. The theoretical knowledge of politics they find in their textbooks is informed by his experience on the political battlefield. He practices what he professes.