OUTRAGE!
Big consternation on the social medias over the last couple of days. No, not carnival. Worse. The people have gotten upset, as they easily do on the networks, about this video. It shows two five year old children being forced to violently fight each other, beating each other up. They can be heard begging the mother to stop it, that they wouldn't have to fight any more, but the women don't want to hear of it and they force and threaten the kids to continue. All this happened in Bocas del Toro. The video spread like wildfire on Facebook, where it was viewed almost 11 million times already. Newspapers around the world picked up on the latest horror coming out of Panama. The authorities quickly seized the moment to show how upright and full of integrity they are, with talk, and then they arrested the mothers and put the children in an orphanage.
AN OLD DREAM BECOMES REALITY
One would almost forget that this forcing children to fight had at one point become official policy in this nation, thanks to the former mayor of Panama City, protege of the current mayor José Blandón, the show and dance man Don Bosco Vallarino of the same Panameñista Party that now runs the entire country.
If you recall, Bosco the Clown - not too long before he was caught accepting suitcases full of cash sent by Martinelli who then gave him a choice between jail or resigning - launched a proposal to organize fighting tournaments in which children between 8 and 13 would beat the shit out of each other and thus compete for the few scholarships that the municipality was still able to fund after that same Bosco had skimmed the budget a bit.
Of course it was an insane plan, and so depraved that even the catholic church opposed it - but the entire municipal council supported it.
Could it be, then, that the forceful response by the government and the show of moral outrage today has maybe something to do with rogue indians stealing their original idea from years back? Just asking....
Wow, Bosco gave that proposal? I never heard about this before. Could you cite more sources to that? The link that you have in your article to the news story is broken.
Going back to the video, I have said it before to my friends and I will say it again, for me this has been the worst I have seen of Panama even after having grown up there and I know there will always be worse but when there is children involved and on top of it a video… Seriously, who isn’t going to feel outraged after seeing that? Forcing children to fight against their will is sick, once you see this you can’t help but question the mental sanity and capacity of empathy these mothers have. You also wonder what would have become of the kids if they had ended up growing up all the way with those parents. I’m glad the authorities at least did something for once.
Some people are spreading rumors about this, saying putting children in fights used to be part of the Ngobe “culture”, or the culture of the Panamanian natives in general. How much of that is true I don’t know, the only thing I could correlate to this would be the canteen fights male natives are known for in Panama. It’s a shame this is giving them a bad reputation among the “capitalinos”, even after the Barro Blanco protests. This sadly it’s an incident that should be attributed to certain individuals and that could be happening anywhere.
Fun fact: I have realized every comment I put on this website starts with “wow” or a question of astonishment. I guess Panama is always full of surprises when it’s discussed here…
Que se puede esperar de gente que parecen más bien monos por la forma que se comportan todo el tiempo.
Lo de Bosco es totalmente cierto, yo lo recuerdo, una vaina de lo más salvaje como lo son la mayoría de los panamonos