IF you want to see our beloved government and its supporters make total fools of themselves and their country, all you need to do is switch on the TV or the YouTubes.
In case you missed it, dear reader, there is currently a small scandal about an interview the Panamanian consul in Miami gave on the Show de Fernando Hidalgo. In what was clearly a sponsored segment (meaning that Panama paid the producers to do a segment on the Canal), consul Tomas Guerra, a pony-tailed nightclub owner from Calle Uruguay who owes his post to the fact that he campaigned for Martinelli, displayed a stunning lack of historical and geographical knowledge about his own country.
Here’s the clip:
The French got the idea for the Canal in 1903 or 1904? Really? And they were defeated by a mosquito and not by technical problems AND the fact that financing of the endeavor turned into a huge scandal? Between 40 and 50 ships transit daily? For sure? And Panama is/was the coastal area of Colombia?
Best part, we think, is where this dumbshit describes how the Pacific is “higher than the Atlantic”, and how a ship entering from the Caribbean is “lifted by the locks to the level of the Pacific Ocean”.
Following that logic, the Magelhaen Strait must be a giant waterfall where the Pacific spills into the Atlantic, then? Or maybe this genius thinks that south of Argentina the earth turns flat and the oceans level out, magically. Whichever it is, he is obviously completely clueless about the history and working of the Panama Canal. It takes bottomless depths of stupidity to screw up on the rehearsed softball questions the host was asking – the host who even corrected this dipshit consul when he said that the Canal had so far generated $25 million for Panama.
It didn’t take long for Panama’s intellectuals to weigh in. On Telemetro, the rector of the University of Panama, Gustavo Garcia de Paredes, said that those who represent Panama abroad should be academically trained and have knowledge about our country. However, that coming from a self-proclaimed “rector magnificus” whose doctorate is fake and whose only ever “scientific” publication is an introduction in a booklet about domino means that he himself wouldn’t qualify for the job either.
Not to be outdone, Martinelli gave an interview tonight on TV too, about several issues plaguing his government and the population. This appearance went down the same disastrous path as that of the consul, with Martinelli claiming that the water problem in the capital could not be solved “because of the weather” as there had been more rainfall than anytime over the last 5,000 years.
As anyone knows, Panama’s meteorologists started measuring and documenting rainfall about 3,000 years BC.
But the highlight was when he started complaining that being president is “very lonely” and added that he has “more interesting things to do than being president”. Is he just in one of his depressive episodes or will he indeed be leaving?
What is really going on here is that this government – not even two years into its term – has already lost its direction completely, the alliance with the Panameñistas is crumbling and the appointments of loyalists instead of qualified people are wreaking havoc – and not just because of what the WikiLeaks cables reveal.
Can this be fixed? Nope. It will get worse from here on, and we very much doubt Martinelli will finish his term. Stay tuned, dear reader, this is gonna be fun to watch.
UPDATE: Instead of taking blame for appointing this nitwit in the first place, the Foreign Ministry has ordered its diplomats to keep their mouths shut if not authorized to talk. Yeah, that will solve the problem of having unqualified people working to represent Panama, for sure.
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