Cotito

By Carlos H. Cuestas G.

Subjects: civil-military relations, Police shootings, Political persecution, Agricultural colonies

Description: On July 7, 1941, war raging in Europe, the United States demanding drastic measures to root out "German" saboteurs, and the Presidency of Arnulfo Arias Madrid on the point of collapse, the *Policía Nacional* of Panama opened fire in cold blood - killing 12 and severely wounding 8 women and children - obstinate but unarmed members of a Swiss pacifist agricultural settlement in the western highlands of Panama. Arias denied ordering the massacre, but praised the police for carrying it out. The judicial investigation and criminal proceedings dragged on for 12 years without reaching any conclusion or determining the responsibility of Pres. Arnulfo Arias. Forty years later in the fraudulent 1984 election between the military's puppet candidate and Arnulfo Arias Madrid, the Government widely publicized an entirely fraudulent book, *Holocausto en Panamá* which claimed that Arias was acting under the direct, personal orders of Adolf Hitler to annihilate (non-existent) Jewish settlements in the area. Cotito relates the history of the colony, its destruction in a blaze of gunfire, describes the political context of the period. It also refutes in detail the allegations of the military's attempted exploitation of the event for political ends in the 1980's, and describes the ghastly and totally unnecessary exhumation of a common grave by the military propagandist Aristides Iván Hassán R., one of the exhumations staged for a gullible CNN reporter and his cameramen.