Ricardo Martinelli escaped from the asylum the other day, and made an appearance at the National Assembly for the festive opening of the new season; another year of sausage law producing get-in-on-the-deal and grab-em-while-you-can dealing and stealing bonanza also known as the Legislative Year. Not that Martinelli really cared about that; he went to finally vent his frustrations with people and things he doesn’t like. Waving a copy of newspaper La Prensa, all the drunken anger that he had been piling up during decadent Christmas dinners and parties came out in what must be a new world record for in-mouth vomiting. Look! Here! (Videos at end of page).
ALL Panama’s entrepreneurs are empresaurios, the president declared, and they criticize his government because then they don’t have to pay taxes, he explained. And the media, especially La Prensa, really suck, we learned (Martinelli himself owns EPASA, part of TVN, RCM and several other media outlets). He is being treated unfairly, dear readers, while he does such great works stealing all the money from for our country – when he’s not being abducted by space aliens of course. “There is no way back!”, the president said, before officially declaring war on everybody who’d dare question his activities or, imagine, criticize him.
The best part was towards the end when he directly addressed his ministers, explaining to each one of them how the evil opposition in cahoots with the media would capture them, torture them and rape them in front of their families, just because they can, and how he would do nothing to help them. Then the guards took him away.
Understandably, this performance then caused considerable unrest. The empresaurios of the Chamber of Commerce – for years the staunchest supporters of Martinelli’s shenanigans but now seeing their interests threatened – dropped their support for the deranged mafia boss. The PRD came out in full force to make political hay of the disaster, hoping they will one day be able to return to power and implement their own particular brand of mobster rule again. Vice-President Varela – now member of the opposition – mumbled some lame stuff about unity, working together and ending divisiveness. La Prensa opened with war-type headlines next morning, but that whole spectacle is mostly show: There are all kind of business ties and overlaps between the shareholders of that corrupt newspaper and Martinelli’s empire, and newspaper La Estrella has been MUCH more vocal against Martinelli’s rule but was not even mentioned in his cocaine-driven rant.
Meanwhile, back in isolation and on suicide watch, Martinelli started playing with his Twitter Bots. For some mysterious reason Panamanians call this the “callcenters”, but what it amounts to is that Martinelli has some sort of cyber dignity battalions at his disposal which consist of neanderthals who will make phantom Twitter and Facebook accounts to anonymously attack people by calling them “gay” and talk about penises a lot, to thus explain Martinelli’s vision and policies better to the rapidly growing group of people who want him out.
So, now what will happen? What will happen is what we’ve said before: Martinelli will not finish his term. No way you can be some dumbshit pro-business mafia president and make enemies of the oligarchy and the entrepreneurial class; not in Panama you can’t. He won’t make it till the end of this year, we say. Next!
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