Book Review: A Reinterpretation of Panamanian Transitism

• Author: Azael Carrera Hernández
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221129844
• Published date: 01 November 2022
• Date: 01 November 2022
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221129844

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 247, Vol. 49 No. 6, November 2022, 201–203

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X221129844

© 2022 Latin American Perspectives

201

Book Reviews

A Reinterpretation of Panamanian Transitism

by

Azael Carrera Hernández

Dídimo Castillo Fernández Panamá, modelo dual y excluyente: Retos y desafíos sociales a

200 años de la Independencia. Colima, Mexico: PuertAbierta Editores, 2021.

One of the features of the scientific method is the questioning of established knowl-

edge. According to Mario Bunge, scientific knowledge can be unpleasant, often contra-

dicts the classics, and sometimes tortures common sense and humiliates intuition. In

Panamá, modelo dual y excluyente (Panama, Dual and Exclusionary Model), Dídimo

Castillo Fernández, a Panamanian sociologist and demographer based in Mexico City

whose professional career has been devoted to the study of the labor market, the

changes in the world of work associated with neoliberal globalization, and the relation-

ship between development models and demographic processes, questions the

approaches of Panamanian social science theorists such as Hernán Porras, Alfredo

Castillero Calvo, and Marco Gandáseguí and risks proposing new interpretations of the

data they employed.

Castillo suggests that, ever since the colonial period, the predominant development

model has been exploiting the resources available in one’s geographic location, which

has produced a division in two of social, economic, and political spheres with a transit

area linked to the global economy through the service sector and little development of

the industrial and agricultural sector (a process driven by a rentier class that depends

on capturing the state to maintain its dominance) and a rural area with little connection

to this dynamic. Because the weak landowning class has failed to maintain a line of

capital accumulation based on the agricultural sector, the emergence and consolidation

of a rural proletariat such as occurred in other regions of Latin America has been impos-

sible, and this is part of the reason for some contradictory aspects of the Panamanian

social formation—its sustained economic growth vs. reduction of the proportion of

wages in the gross domestic product, its high minimum wage for the region vs. a rate

of informality that is almost half of its labor market, and its medium-to-high develop-

ment index vs. its high level of social inequality. In other words, this is a vulnerable

development model that shows signs of exhaustion and is territorially and socially

fragmented.

While the above interpretation largely corresponds to what the classics of Panamanian

social science would say, a careful reading raises questions about their approaches. One

of these is related to the thesis advanced by Castillero Calvo and Gandásegui of the

early incorporation of the country into globalization as a result of its geographic loca-

tion and its role in the European commercial expansion during the colonial period,

making sixteenth-century Panama the continent’s most important goods and services

center. For Castillo, this thesis must be challenged for two reasons: First, transit and the

acceleration of the flow of capital did not have a major impact in the interior of the

Azael Carrera Hernández is executive secretary of the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos

“Justo Arosemena” in Panama City, Panama, and a professor at the Universidad Santa María la

Antigua. He is coeditor, with Marcos Gandásegui Jr. and Dídimo Castillo Fernández, of CLACSO’s

Antología del pensamiento crítico contemporáneo (2018).

1129844LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X221129844Latin American PerspectivesHernández/BOOK REVIEWS

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