Military Government and Popular Participation in Panama: The Torrijos Regime, 1968-1975 by George Priestley

Author:George Priestley [Priestley, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780429711541
Google: fXakDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 52794083
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-04-11T11:14:03+00:00

5

Institutionalization of the Revolution: A New National Constitutional Structure

San Miguelito and the peasant settlements represented significant attempts to draw the poorest of the poor in both city and countryside into the political process. But that was no substitute for a constitutional structure that would both realize Torrijos’s vision of the popular alliance’s political role and enhance the regime’s legitimacy. Only days after the October Revolution, the military had disbanded the National Assembly and political parties that were the institutional expression of the oligarchy’s customary power. Torrijos subsequently toyed with the idea of a one-party system as employed in other Latin American nations. But in the early seventies he chose a representative structure, in which elected representatives of the people at each level of administration were to balance the power of appointed executives. The new system was embodied in a constitution that was drafted and ratified in 1972.

Having proposed to open new channels of participation, the regime had to ensure that the resulting demands on the system would not jeopardize its policies, undermine its power, or deprive it of flexibility. At the central level, the National Assembly of Community Representatives (NACR) sought to expand its power and influence from the time it gathered to ratify the new constitution. Yet it was generally more successful in generating support for Torrijos than articulating demands on him and his lieutenants. Similarly, representatives at the local level were usually unable to overcome the traditional monopoly of power enjoyed by the appointed corregidor.

This chapter describes the representatives’ struggle for meaningful political participation at the national level, and the following chapter describes what occurred at the local level.

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