A divided Partido Popular goes
with the Panameñistas again

by Eric Jackson

By a 261-180 vote, delegates to a Partido Popular special convention voted to ally their party with President Varela’s Panameñista Party in the 2019 elections. That party has nominated Panama City’s mayor, José Isabel Blandón Figueroa, as its presidential standard bearer.

By the post-invasion rotation of parties in the presidency the conventional wisdom is that the Panameñistas will be ousted from the Palacio de las Garzas, but there are legislative and local offices up for grabs in the general election as well. Political parties are prohibited from making alliances with independents, although they may nominate someone who has been running as an independent for some office or another. The Electoral Tribunal has more or less banned public opinion polls but the most common expectation is that the Cambio Democratico Party will be much reduced and that this election is for the Democratic Revolutionary Party and its presidential candidate Laurentino “Nito” Cortizo to lose. But with corruption scandals plaguing all major political parties a strong independent might win, and so far the leading independent is legislator and former attorney general Ana Matilde Gómez.

The split at the convention was in part between people with political patronage jobs in the Varela administration and those hoping for such posts in a PRD government. The leadership had recommended the alliance with the Panameñistas but convention delegates forced a vote.

Theoretically one might call the Partido Popular, originally the Christian Democrats, as a center-right formation. This alliance, however, is much more in the nature of a business deal than an ideological stance.

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A rerun of the last failed nominations, or have arrangements been made this time?

by Eric Jackson

Deja vu? After failing to fill high court vacancies earlier this year, the president is making another stab at the process. The partisan lineup in a legislature in which his party’s caucus is only third-largest, however, as not on the face of it changed. If the two opposition parties, the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) and Cambio Democratico (CD) gang up again, there will be no replacements and the two magistrates with now expired terms will continue in office until someone else is nominated and ratified.

Recall that about this time last year President Juan Carlos Varela had three high court vacancies to fill, and nominated two while letting one slide. For the civil bench vacancy of the outgoing Martín Torrijos nominee Olmedo Arrocha — a former legislator and veteran PRD activist — he appointed Ana Lucrecia Tovar de Zarak, an undistinguished lawyer who had worked in government regulatory agencies but had the distinctions of having been an active Panameñista Party campaigner and being married to a vice minister in Varela’s cabinet. For the vacancy to be created by the outgoing penal bench magistrate Jerónimo Mejía — also a Torrijos appointee — the president named veteran prosecutor Zuleyka Moore, then working in the Public Ministry’s anti-corruption office on some high-profile cases.

There was already an existing vacancy left by the impeachment of Alejandro Moncada Luna, which has been filled ever since by his suplente Abel Zamorano — if you count him as a de facto magistrate it leaves a de facto suplente missing from the administrative law bench. Were Varela to appoint a nominee to replace Moncada Luna, if approve that person would replace Zamorano. But the president decided to leave what appeared to be well enough alone and leave Zamorano in his acting magistrate status. Moncada Luna’s term will expire in 2020.

Some folks expressed doubts about Moore, wondering whether her appointment amounted to a manipulation or at least worked a disruption to ongoing investigations of crime in high places. Hardly anybody expressed the opinion that she wasn’t well qualified for the high court. Tovar de Zarak, however, was derided as an unqualified partisan figure meant to twist the court into a political stand more to Varela’s liking. There was a public uproar about her appointment.

But also at that time, the PRD and CD were both working hard to distinguish themselves from Varela’s party and each “prove” that they were “the real opposition.” Moore and Tovar were rejected earlier this year, in a process that the president had scheduled to be done in late 2017 special legislative sessions. Moore had excellent credentials but Tovar provided an excuse for a party line vote to reject both nominees. Ortega and Mejía stayed on for lack of replacements.

Now Mejía is acting as judge in the Supreme Court trial of former president Ricardo Martinelli, such that his replacement at the moment would be quite disruptive. Plus Mejía has never been considered the partisan figure that Ortega has been and there is sentiment to give him another 10-year term, an opinion that crosses party lines.

So this time, Varela nominated Zamorano to finish the rest of the Moncada Luna as a magistrate in every sense rather than an alternate temporarily filling a void; and named Olmedo Arrocha to fill Ortega’s spot. Arrocha is considered a capable enough lawyer. These days he works with the Ministry of Economy and Finance. He has been lawyer for the Panameñista Party and for the president himself. He’s an active Panameñista and the brother of Melitón Arrocha, a Panamenista legislator who is now Panama’s ambassador to the United Nations.

Arrocha isn’t as easily discreditable a nominee as Tovar was, but he was not on the list of possibilities submitted to Varela by a citizens’ commission representing important social sectors and he is being widely criticized as a partisan figure.

Has the PRD cut a deal with Varela to go along with Arrocha and Zamorano, in exchange for either a new decade on the high court bench for Mejía, or at least leaving him in place for a new president to determine his future as a jurist? Could be. Ricardo Martinelli’s media and the CD president of the legislature’s Credentials Committee, Sergio Gálvez, speak scornfully about Arrocha such that a deal with CD and the Panameñistas looks quite unlikely. Especially so, as Mejía has taken charge of CD founder Martinelli’s trial for eavesdropping and theft of that spy equipment notwithstanding the ex-president’s constant repetitive frivolous motions. The Martinelistas might just reject Zamorano (a Martinelli pick) and Arrocha to show their annoyance with Mejía.

Before the end of the year we are likely to get decisions on the Zamorano and Arrocha appointments, plus a verdict on the first of Ricardo Martinelli’s criminal trials.

Panama’s Supreme Court of Justice

• Nine members, staggered 10-year terms
• Three benches of three magistrates each: Penal, Civil and Administrative
• On many matters a nine-member plenum decides cases
• Ordinarily each magistrate has an alternate (suplente)
• Suplentes may fill in for magistrates for various reasons

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BUSTED!

Ricardo Martinelli’s two sons, wanted here for laundering the proceeds of Blue Apple and Odebrecht kickbacks, arrested in Miami on US immigration charges

by Eric Jackson, from other sources

Ricardo Alberto Martinelli Linares and his younger brother Luis Enrique Martinelli Linares, the sons of jailed Panamanian ex-president Ricardo Martinelli, are incarcerated at an immigration detention facility in Miami. The accounts of the arrests ultimately come from but two sources, neither of them reliable: the Trump adminstration and the Martinelista camp. There are slight variations, such as the time of the arrest, what the two suspects were doing when apprehended and so on.

We hear tales of a getaway attempt, of the brothers nabbed with plastic bags stuffed with cash as they attempted to board their daddy’s yacht, the White Shark, which is moored at the marina behind the family’s mansion in Coral Gables. From the Martinelli camp we hear that denied. Similarly, we hear slightly different accounts of precisely when the arrest was made.

Undisputed — except in the fantasy world of Martinelli lawyers — is that the two younger Martinellis are held on immigration charges after having been fugitives for more than one year.

Back in 2017 there were elaborate tales of the headlong flight toward the USA of helicopter N1626L, property of a Silver Wing Corporation, a company which Panamanian police and prosecutors say had been bought by Luis Enrique Martinelli with money laundering proceeds. With Swiss authorities having frozen hundreds of millions in accounts they said were controlled by the Martinelli brothers and depositories for bribe money from construction contractors, the chase after the helicopter hopscotched from Panama to El Salvador to Guatemala to Mexico, and ended up with the aircraft abandoned in Tapachula, in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, on March 31 of 2017. Mexican officials later sent it back to Panama, where the government took custody.

Were either of the Martinelli brothers, by then charged by prosecutors here with money laundering, aboard that aircraft when it was abandoned in Chiapas? Those who know the answer to that have not published it. It may have a bearing on the case at hand, at least as a detail.

There is no question that the Martinellis were in the United States without a visa to be there. The State Department canceled their visas sometime in 2017. But had they been canceled, or did the brothers reasonably expect them to be so, in late March of last year? Did they get off that chopper in southern Mexico and make their way into the United States from there? Perhaps add a misdemeanor illegal entry charge, or trump it up into a felony conspiracy, if that was the case. Perhaps some US immigration official is in trouble for letting them in when she or he should not have. Perhaps they got back just before they lost their visas. Or were they in the USA when their visas were voided? However the facts shake out, the appearances — both to a judge and to the American public — might matter.

Perhaps it might not. Leave it to the ham-handed Martinelli style that sometimes works in Panama to play out in the United States. The father tried that in his extradition case. If a phalanx of lawyers comes before an immigration judge and says that the brothers were in the USA all along and nobody ever told them that their visas had been revoked, an American judge is likely to be unamused — especially if that is quickly proven to be a lie.

In any case, the Martinellis are held in the Krone Detention center and have an appearance before an immigration judge on December 4. In the ordinary course of things they would be deported to Panama. But if they can keep it a deportation case, perhaps they might arrange a voluntary departure to a third country that gives them a visa or of which they are citizens. Their dad has an Italian passport and so might they, so perhaps their lawyers are working on allowing the chase to continue in Europe.

Panama’s prosecutors have other ideas, whether or not they are capable of implementing them. They have been going through the motions of getting INTERPOL warrants for the two brothers. It’s about money laundering charges. The process has been complicated by procedural rulings and appeals of those with respect to the underlying Blue Apple and Odebrecht corruption cases. The Martinelli brothers’ tangent is the allegation that between 2010 and 2014 they laundered bribe and kickback money from companies with public works contracts and moved it through corporate shells and bank accounts to one or more other countries. It can be reasonably foreseen that arguments will be made to the effect that some procedural ruling in the case about people taking or paying those bribes, or somebody’s plea bargain in that scandal, lets the brothers off.

Attorney General Kenia Porcell has at least a small window of time to intervene and change it from a deportation question to an extradition case. Perhaps the immigration hearing in December will be the occasion for an arrest by US marshals on the extradition matter.

It might make a difference as to the brothers’ standard of living. In its early days after conversion from a US military base to a place where a lot of Cuban rafters were held, Krone had a terrible reputation for gang rule, guard brutality and rape. By many accounts things have improved since that time, to the point that time served there would be substantially less harsh than that same time spent in the Miami Federal Detention Center, where the elder Martinelli was incarcerated while fighting his extradition to Panama.

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