Turmoil Leads to Uprooting of Panamanians

Thousands of people are on the move in Panama: The well-off board flights heading abroad, the poor invade vacant fields and erect shacks in the capital and working-class city dwellers pile belongings onto buses and take refuge in the countryside.

In different ways, many Panamanians are uprooting themselves, at least temporarily, to ease the impact of nearly two months of unprecedented political and economic turmoil.

The long-term effects of this social dislocation depend, according to analysts and the transients themselves, on how soon the political players resolve the crisis. The longer it takes, the more profound will be the human cost for Panama’s 2.2 million people.

Juan Alberto Apolayo, 28, and his wife and four children joined a squatter invasion three weeks ago of two open fields within sight of the ruins of Old Panama, along the Pacific shore about three miles from the capital’s downtown.

Apolayo, an office cleaner, said over the weekend that he and the other 1,000 or so families who have thrown up shanties virtually overnight came from nearby city neighborhoods, where they had paid monthly rent or crowded into the homes of relatives. Then, he said, the banks closed, factories shut down and the country began to implode from the American-backed campaign to oust strongman Manuel A. Noriega through economic sanctions.

Apolayo was laid off from his job, unable to pay the rent and desperate. So he set up home in a one-room shack of zinc sheets and plastic and wood scraps. To survive, he trudges around the settlement selling cigarettes--for a nickel apiece.

Few of the shanties are tall enough for a man to stand in, and most are barely wide enough to lie down in. The rainy season will begin any day now.

“At least this is ours,” Apolayo said. “There are many who have been in the city for eight or 10 years and now have gone back to the country. Everybody here has checks in their shacks, but they are worthless--no one will cash them.”

The government has chastised the squatters, saying they are not really needy but are simply exploiting the turmoil to act illegally. The squatters reason that the police have their hands full and won’t bother them for the moment.

Apolayo said: “We are prepared to wait months as long as he (Noriega) finally goes. But if the United States doesn’t get Noriega out, we will fall apart, isn’t that right?”

The two dozen residents who had gathered around murmured “Yes, yes.”

Movement to Rural Areas

Some of the urban poor and working class, hit hard by factory closures and forced vacations, are choosing to ride out the storm in the rural areas where they have roots.

In Lidice, a farming village of 3,000 people about 40 miles west of Panama City, people gathered Saturday afternoon on the veranda of a general store, sipping beer or soft drinks and discussing the turmoil.

Serafin Zuniga, a farmer, said he grows rice, corn and bananas and now shares his crop with those who came back from Panama City. He supports the campaign against Noriega, whom the United States accuses of drug trafficking and related corruption. “We just want a new government that the people choose,” he said.

The tar on the five-mile road to Lidice from the Pan American Highway is marked every few hundred yards with the painted slogan “National Strike” and graffiti on a bridge over a creek declare, “Noriega--Narcotraficante (Drug Trafficker).” That is a change from the capital, where the graffiti that survive for long are pro-Noriega and anti-Yankee.

Felix Lopez, who owns the shop in the one-street town shared by cars and men on horseback, said he has lost half his business in recent weeks. “There’s food but no money to buy it,” he said. “Most people here are out of work.”

He said uncounted numbers of workers from closed factories in Panama have been returning to the villages they left years ago to try their luck in the city.

At a trinket shop in Capira on the Pan American Highway, owner Jose Bernaza said he’s doing less than one-fourth of his previous business. Even the rich can no longer afford gasoline to make the weekend trip to their beach houses, costing him drop-in trade.

Bernaza said that he and most other shopkeepers in Capira and Lidice closed their doors for a few days during the general strike that crippled Panama City for two full weeks in March.

“Ninety-nine percent of all Panamanians want Noriega to go and want the United States to invade,” he said. “If this continues, we are going to die of hunger. I am going crazy worrying about these problems.”

Some supplies such as cooking oil are running short, he said, because factories are closed and inventories are running down. “In another month, it will get much worse. But at least I can cut open that coconut,” he said, pointing to a palm tree, “and drink and feel like my stomach is full. The people in Panama (City) have to pick through the garbage.”

The monied class in Panama City is experiencing dislocation of a different sort.

Some people sleep overnight outside the government passport office--the fee rose to $30 from $15 recently--awaiting passports. Then they get into equally long lines for visas for Costa Rica and the United States, whose visa applications have doubled.

“On my street, three of 11 families have sent their children to Costa Rica,” said Dr. Marisin Villalaz Arias, former president of the national medical association. “Costa Rica is full of Panamanians.”

The main purpose, she said, is to allow children to keep up in school. Panama’s schools did not reopen as scheduled in mid-March, at least partly out of fear that youths assembled in schools could organize protests more easily.

“There is a great deal of displacement of people,” said Villalaz, a member of the National Civic Crusade that is campaigning against Noriega. “It all depends on how long this takes and how deep is the economic damage. The quicker it ends, the fewer structural changes will occur in Panamanian society.”