Bill 442.

Summary.

The bill designates June 9 of each year as a Civic Day of Reflection for the Victims of the Military Dictatorship. The designation establishes an annual date for remembering the victims. It also provides a common date for the commemorative activities assigned to public institutions, local governments, and schools, and for the content to be included in programming by mass media controlled by the State.

Each June 9, autonomous, semi-autonomous, and decentralized public institutions, together with local governments, would hold events to remember victims of arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearance, and extrajudicial execution during the military dictatorship in Panama (Panamá) between 1968 and 1989. The provision expressly links those events to victims of the four categories of acts it lists. It also requires public and private schools to hold commemorative events for victims of the military dictatorship on the same date. The annual commemoration requirement therefore extends to the specified public institutions and local governments, as well as to both categories of school.

For general basic education, the bill calls for curricula to include material on the establishment of the military regime, the human rights violations committed during it, and the civic struggle to establish democracy. It places this material in History and other relevant subjects. This curriculum provision addresses classroom instruction alongside the annual commemorative events required of public and private schools. The listed subjects cover the beginning of the regime, violations committed while it was in place, and civic action aimed at establishing democracy. They are the topics that the bill directs schools to include in their general basic education curricula.

The bill also requires mass media controlled by the State to include, in their programming each June 9, content promoting the history of the events that occurred, human rights, and democratic values. This provision concerns programming by those media outlets on the civic day designated in Article 1. The final article provides that the law would take effect on the day following its promulgation.

The proposal concerns autonomous, semi-autonomous, and decentralized public institutions, local governments, public and private schools, and mass media controlled by the State. It also concerns general basic education, particularly History and any other subjects in which the specified material belongs. The commemorative provisions relate to victims and to the memory of the military dictatorship in Panama, while the curriculum and broadcasting provisions concern the education and media sectors identified in the bill.