INDIGENOUS groups in Panama called on the Pope to intervene at the weekend to protect them from “systematic and violent persecution.”

The appeal came after the central American country’s political crisis, triggered by a deal allowing US troops in and by a social security law increasing working hours and reducing pensions, plumbed new depths.

“As a result of peaceful protests, the government of President Jose Raul Mulino has taken on the task of using all security agencies to brutally attack protesters, and has initiated a systematic and violent persecution against native peoples, especially from the Ngobe Bugle region and also the collective Embera-Wounaan territory,” the letter to Pope Leo XIV signed by Leonides Cunampia, president of the co-ordinating body for Panama’s seven recognised indigenous peoples, reads.

He said violence against them exceeded the “darkest days of the military dictatorship” [of the 1980s] and said indigenous areas had been militarily besieged, with local leaders and even whole families disappeared.

A strike that began among teachers against the social security law on April 23 spread quickly to the huge construction union Suntracs, the powerful Banana Industry Workers Union, indigenous and student groups.

The protest movement’s demands have expanded too, to include revocation of a controversial secret treaty signed with the United States which allows the US navy to patrol the Panama Canal and US troops to re-establish military bases in the country, and for the government to drop plans to reopen a polluting copper mine that was closed two years ago after mass protests.

On Friday Swiss-US banana giant Chiquita Foods sacked all its workers who are not on permanent contracts — 5,000 people — blaming banana union chief Francisco Smith for a strike it said was illegal and had already cost it $75 million (£55m).

The move was seen as political — the strike has also been denounced as illegal by President Mulino, and Chiquita is the modern incarnation of the United Fruit Company, whose neocolonial domination of central American states in the 20th century gave the world the term “banana republic.”

Thousands of trade unionists marched on Friday to demand the government release Suntracs union officials, whose arrests on money-laundering charges they say are politically motivated. The union’s leader Saul Mendez has sought political asylum in the Bolivian embassy.