ABSTRACT
San Miguelito lies northeast of Panama City, and in 1968 this shanty community had over 68,000 residents who had migrated from every district of the nine provinces of the Republic. San Miguelito, the largest and most popular of several shanty communities, began to grow during World War II. The San Miguelito experiment resulted from the negative reaction of San Miguelito religious and lay leaders to the military coup. The project for a special San Miguelito district was designed by members of these two agencies, and by December 1969, plans for the implementation of the district were well under way. Movimiento de Unificacion Nacional, Desarrollo y Orientacion's (MUNDO) task was therefore political, that is, to continue the concientizacion program in order to prepare the members of the San Miguelito population to arrive at intelligent, sensible, and democratic decisions. Ramon Hernandez of MUNDO characterized the organization as one that believed in a “new politics.”.
