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After intense and exemplary days of struggle by the Panamanian workers’ and popular movement, today it is facing the worst attack on democratic freedoms of the century. The government led by the ultra-right-wing José Raúl Mulino, the dauphin of the most corrupt President of the republican era in Panama, Ricardo Martinelli, came to power almost spuriously, with 33% of the valid votes.

Mulino has publicly declared that his government is a business government and based on that definition has begun to apply an adjustment plan in a brutal manner, judicializing and criminalizing social protest against the unpopular measures it adopts, among these, the recent reform of social security to modify the pension system and hand over to the bourgeoisie, through its pension administration companies (AFPs), the banks, Yankee imperialism and the IFIs, the funds of the Social Security Fund, which belong to the pensioners and which, in the near future will reach the astronomical sum of 200 billion dollars (an appetizing booty for the business mafia).

This pension counter-reform generated a strike that lasted almost 80 days and was led by the main construction union (SUNTRACS), in addition to unions and the education union, which, together with the native peoples of Bocas del Toro, bordering Costa Rica and Arimare in Darien, bordering Colombia. For which leaders and activists are being criminally prosecuted, in a rigged manner, imprisoned, exiled, persecuted, crippled and murdered by Mulino’s repressive regime.

This included the intervention of the SUNTRACS workers’ cooperative and the request for dissolution of the union, a historic event never before referenced in Panama, according to labor law specialists.

Meanwhile, on the side of the teachers who were on strike, as a form of revenge, disciplinary investigations were initiated, without any proof, against the most hardened leaders in the strike process, with the Minister of Education making her own the words outlined by Mulino, in her Thursday national chain, where she indicated that it was necessary to create a hard precedent, and that precedent is to leave without employment almost 700 educators who exposed their lives and their work for the health of Panamanians and Panamanians.