By G. Dunkel
February 20, 2025

A mass national demonstration Feb. 12 in front of Panamá’s National Assembly protested the regime’s attempt to privatize social security and its attacks on the labor movement. Using excessive force, police fired tear gas at protesters, who replied with rocks and bottles. Police made 480 arrests and injured 100 demonstrators, while claiming that 15 cops were injured.

The demonstration protested Law 163, which is intended to privatize social security. It denounced President Donald Trump’s statements threatening to seize the Panamá Canal and the servile pro-U.S. attitude of Panamá’s President José Raúl Mulino. The action also honored the memory of Al Iromi Smith Rentería, a worker killed by Panamanian police on Feb. 12, 2008.

For the past few years, unions in Panamá, led by SUNTRACS (the National Union of Workers of Construction and Similar Industries), have been fighting for union rights, freedoms and activism in general.

In 2023, SUNTRACS conducted a months-long campaign against what its leaders considered a bad deal between the Panamanian regime and an internationally known mining company, Minera Panamá S.A., a subsidiary of the Canadian multinational First Quantum Mineral. SUNTRACS won when the Panamanian Supreme Court ruled the deal was unconstitutional. (equaltimes.org, Feb. 13)

A few months later the government-owned banks where the union held its members’ dues closed the union’s account, declaring that it suspected this account was being used in the “financing of terrorist activities.”

The union brought up this “illegal and arbitrary” act of the government’s bank to the International Trade Union Confederation’s (ITUC) Global Rights Index as well as to Panamá’s Ombudsman’s Office. Both these entities held that closing the account “violated the union’s right of free association.” The International Labor Organization also took up the issue.

SUNTRACS moved some of its funds out of the country. Its general secretary, Saúl Méndez, and foreign relations secretary, Jaime Caballero, have been charged by the public prosecutor’s office with crimes against freedom and the economic order. Caballero was arrested Feb. 26, 2024.

Eduardo Gil, general secretary of the Panamanian national Center Convergencia Sindical (Trade Union Convergence or CS) has said that the criminalization of social protests, particularly when directed against union leaders, continues to be one of the main challenges for trade unions.

Protests against privatizing social security

Despite these active attacks from the government, SUNTRACS together with the Pueblo Unido por la Vida (People United for Life) alliance managed to hold the Feb. 12 mass protest over attempts to turn social security into a privately run institution.

The government’s proposed law would turn over the resources of the public entity to the banks and pension administrators and raise the retirement age. The regime refuses to listen to popular proposals on pensions and how to guarantee decent health care.

Secretary General of SUNTRACS Saúl Méndez said that the bill seeks “to impose the theft of insurance money, increase the retirement age, rob pensioners and workers of their money to give it to the banks. We all want peace, but not the peace of the cemetery, the peace of misery and hunger that they want to impose on us. That is why we need unity, firmness and discipline in the face of this problem.” (Peoples Dispatch, Feb. 13)