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Panama: DNA and a press that's going mute

by Eric Jackson

After a delay and accompanying recriminations between the second and third votes in Panama's Legislative Assembly, a new paternity testing law was passed by the legislature but then vetoed by President Moscoso. The measure would have provided for DNA testing to resolve questions of paternity, required fathers to be named on children's birth certificates and provided criminal penalties for men who falsely deny that they are the fathers of their children or mothers who misidentify their offspring's fathers. The crux of the controversy over the law, which Mireya ended up calling unenforceable and unconstitutional, went mostly unreported in the Panamanian press. The entire affair belied several layers of power politics under the apparent incongruities that show on the surface. Moreover, now that the world press has begun to take notice of Panamanian politicians' systematic repression against journalists, the circumstances surrounding this rather mundane piece of attempted legislation served to highlight the inadequacies in the mainstream corporate media's perceptions of what constitute threats to freedom of the press.

The paternity testing law's principal advocate was legislator Teresita Yaniz de Arias, of the Partido Popular (formerly the Christian Democratic Party) and the wife of party boss Ricardo Arias Calderon. Mrs. Arias hailed the legislature's approval of the law as an important advance in Panamanian women's rights.

Arias Calderon and his party have played, or attempted to play, the zig-zag "third force" role in Panamanian politics for decades. In the mid-60s, they were the me-too force tailing after student leftists who demanded Panamanian sovereignty over the former Canal Zone. In the early 70s, they were one of the civilian political factions that a de facto accomodation with the military dictatorship, though without much success. In the mid-80s they joined the movement for civilian rule. In the government that came in with the 1989 US invasion, Arias Calderon played the dual role of first vice-president and minister of government and justice. In that role he persecuted civil servants of the old regime and members of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) that General Torrijos had founded and over which General Noriega had assumed control. The Christian Democrats had a falling out with the post-invasion president, Guillermo Endara, a protege of the late Dr. Arnulfo Arias and one of the founders of the Arnulfista Party. Arias Calderon's party suffered a catastrophic defeat in the 1994 elections, going from 39 seats to one in the 71-member Legislative Assembly. The Christian Democrats made their peace with the new PRD administration, receiving in exchange the appointment of one of their leaders, Jose Antonio Sossa, to a ten-year term as the nation's Attorney General. By allying itself with a dissident Arnulfista in 1999, Arias Calderon's party scored a modest comeback and took a half-dozen assembly seats. The new Arnulfista government, headed by Dr. Arnulfo Arias's widow Mireya Moscoso, quickly showed itself to be unusually inept and corrupt even by Panamanian standards. After a year of that, the Christian Democrats joined with their old enemies the PRD and a couple of other minor party deputies to wrest control of the Legislative Assembly from a coalition loyal to Moscoso.

Arias Calderon's alliance with the PRD elicited a scornful reaction from many erstwhile allies in the movement against the dictatorship. One was by La Prensa cartoonist Julio Briceo, who drew a cartoon portraying Arias Calderon walking arm-in-arm with the Grim Reaper. For that, Briceo and La Prensa's publisher at the time were charged with criminal defamation and now face the possibility of prison terms.

Though the Briceo case has drawn worldwide attention, in Panama it was no shock. During Jose Antonio Sossa's tenure as Attorney General, criminal defamation charges brought by politicians against journalists have been the norm. In many of these cases, Sossa himself has been the complainant. Though only a few people have actually gone to jail, people and institutions have been exhausted, enervated and impoverished by long-running legal proceedings. It has clearly affected news reporting.

One indicator of the prevailing climate was a recent report in El Panama America, one of the country's six daily newspapers, about the Supreme Court's confirmation of a lower court's order in a domestic violence case. The newspaper reported, based upon the word of a confidential source at the court, that a Panamanian member of the Central American Parliament had been ordered to vacate his home and stay away from his wife after battering her. (The case file in question, like court records and trials in Panama generally, is not open to the press or the public.) El Panama America did not report the name of the PARLACEN deputy involved.

Meanwhile, the differences between the executive branch and the opposition-controlled legislature have been slowly simmering toward a constitutional crisis, with the president slashing the assembly's budget, and the parties that run the legislature vowing to reject the chief executive's nominees for the Supreme Court and other important posts. Even the most ordinary good government measures have become vulnerable to legislative stalls or presidential vetoes on the basis of the partisan affiliations of their proponents.

Between the second and third votes on the paternity test legislation, the Arnulfista-led pro-administration caucus stalled. Naturally, it led to allegations that the delay was a cynical part of the power struggle between the Arnulfista president the PRD-Partido Popular alliance that controls the legislature.

Just how cynical did it look? Consider that President Moscoso, Panama's first female president, came to power promising to better the lot of single mothers. Consider that one of the stars in the Arnulfista legislative caucus is San Miguelito's Gloria Young, who founded the country's first shelter for battered women. On one level, then, it would appear to be a matter of feminist- minded politicians weakening their principles for the sake of political expediency.

So does that make Teresita de Arias the feminist heroine, and the Partido Popular the champion of women's liberation? As we shall see, certain circumstances call her party's commitment to women's rights into question, but for reasons of corporate solidarity or political alliance, you won't notice that sub-text to the debate in the Panamanian corporate media.

Also underlying the arguments and gaining only scant mention in the press, there are questions of money and power revolving around Attorney General Jose Antonio Sossa.

The new law provides that paternity testing is to be done by the Instituto de Medicina Legal, or by a laboratory designated by that government entity. The Instituto's director, Dr. Humberto Mas, has held his post for many years, through governments dating back to the dictatorship. Sossa's brother-in-law also works at the institute.

The presumption that family or partisan ties are likely to influence the designation of private DNA labs lies beneath much of the trouble that the Arnulfistas and others have with the new law. Such suspicions would be inevitable given Panamanian political culture, in which there is an expectation of nepotism and corruption. Moreover, Sossa has a sordid reputation for protecting corruption and organized crime, and the predictions of bias in designating DNA labs generally name him rather than Mas or Sossa's brother-in-law as the probable bad guy.

Mas, on the other hand, has served under both PRD and Arnulfista governments and has achieved far less notoriety. The most frequently heard negative opinion heard about him is that he didn't do his job very well during General Noriega's time. The specific case most often mentioned is his ruling that an anti-dictatorship activist who died in an Anton hotel with both of his wrists deeply slashed had committed suicide --- it is popularly believed that with one wrist so deeply cut, the man would not have been capable of cutting the other.

There is a litany about Sossa. It includes, among many other things:

% A string of prosecutions of journalists for criminal defamation or disrespect that has prompted international criticism;

% Failure to investigate corrupt acts by members of the Perez Balladares administration, for example by failing to take action when Panama's consul in New York at the time, Francisco Iglesias, who used the consulate on the Avenue of the Americas as a gallery to market looted Peruvian antiquities. Iglesias is wanted by the FBI for that one, but despite applicable Panamanian laws, not by Panama's authorities;

% Failure to investigate corrupt acts by members of the Moscoso administration, for example by not looking into the expulsion from Panama without legal procedures by former Immigration director Erick Singares of Singares's illegal immigrant Nicaraguan maid in the course of a pay dispute. In another case, the Supreme Court took the unusual step of ordering Sossa to conduct a criminal investigation after Singares defied the court's writ of habeas corpus and put a man wanted for fraud in China onto offshore "asset protection" hustler Marc Harris's private jet for delivery to Chinese authorities;

% Failure to cooperate when authorities in other countries have asked for Panamanian help in investigations of financial crimes. In one case, German and US authorities asked for help in money laundering investigations involving Marc Harris, and not only did Sossa forbid it, he fired Panama's INTERPOL chief and the head of the Judicial Technical Police (PTJ) and unsuccessfully tried to have several reporters for La Prensa jailed when the matter came to public light. In another case, members of a Peruvian congressional committee that's investigating the alleged corrupt activities of their country's former security chief, Vladimiro Montesinos (who after his fall briefly took refuge in Panama City, then flew away in Marc Harris's jet) fault Panama for scant help in their probe of what they believe was the laundering of millions of dollars in proceeds from illegal arms deals;

% Failure to conduct a serious investigation into the sale of ship officers' certifications by Panamanian consulates abroad, a racket that has gained international notoriety and has harmed Panama's reputation with a world maritime industry that is crucial to the nation's economy;

%JFailure to investigate the roles of Panamanian public officials in the smuggling of illegal Chinese migrants into the United States, a racket for which the US government has cancelled the visas of former President Perez Balladares, former National Security Director Gabriel Castro and several others;

% Failure to investigate corruption in the nation's prison system, with recent examples including the just-concluded trial of 12 inmates who were charged with the 1998 beheadings of four fellow inmates at the Coiba penal colony (seven were convicted, five acquitted) and the ongoing criminal defamation prosecution of law professor Miguel Antonio Bernal for his criticism of the police in relation to the incident, all while there has never been any serious investigation of why one of the slain inmates, who had finished serving his sentence months before, was still being held; and

% Repeated attempts to block investigations into the fates of activists who disappeared under the dictatorship, including by his office's mishandling of evidence uncovered by the Truth Commission that President Moscoso set up to investigate the deaths.

The qualms that some legislators and observers have had about putting the designation of DNA labs to do paternity tests into the hands of Sossa's brother-in-law, however, have hardly been mentioned in the press or on the floor of the Legislative Assembly. There are three important reasons why this is so.

First, if there was public corruption that went uninvestigated during the Perez Balladares administration, most informed observers and the majority of the Panamanian public believe that corruption is generalized throughout the Moscoso administration. If Arnulfistas complain too much about Sossa or the power that he holds, there is always the possibility that he could begin to investigate certain political figures in this administration.

Second, about one-quarter of all Panamanian journalists, including the author of this article, have criminal charges --- almost always calumnia e injuria (criminal defamation) against a government official --- hanging over their heads. Many reporters are intimidated, and most of those who are not must submit their articles to editors who are.

Third and probably most important, despite the usual failure of prosecutions against journalists, Sossa, Arias Calderon and their political allies have been far more successful at business takeovers of media that had been critical of them, and at getting journalists who have published unflattering stories fired.

Prosecutions of reporters, editors and cartoonists have brought on worldwide attention from journalists and human rights groups, but corporate media like The New York Times and groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists have a taboo against reporting the business of the news, or complaining about how private economic forces can and sometimes are marshalled to suppress the news. Such scrutiny is generally seen in those quarters as an infringement on editorial prerogatives, and the problems of corporate decisions to censor the news or fire controversial journalists are viewed as matters best left for resolution by market forces.

While the Christian Democratic Party was in the process of turning itself into the Partido Popular and allying itself with its old enemy the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), it was also, along with its allies, grabbing control over elements of Panama's press. Though it's a key aspect of the story of how the Panamanian press has been intimidated, reportage of this political maneuver has been taboo in the most influential of the international news media. Thus The New York Times's coverage of the predicament in which Panamanian journalism finds itself made less sense because it failed to mention things like:

% How El Universal's publisher and editor-in-chief, Carlos Ernesto Gonzalez de la Lastra, was fired by the previous owner for allegedly slanting the news toward the Christian Democrats (after Moscoso, citing said bias, cut off government advertising); and then turned the tables by leading a group of investors who bought the daily and restored him to his post. With Gonzalez de la Lastra back in control, El Universal has taken a very predictable editorial stance in favor of the PRD-former Christian Democrat alliance;

% How La Prensa, once considered the nation's "newspaper of record" and having historically taken an editorial stance opposed to the PRD, fell into the control of the PRD-Partido Popular alliance by way of a shareholder's revolt led by Ricardo Alberto Arias (who served as Perez Balladares's foreign minister) and supported by Teresita de Arias and her husband. Most of the La Prensa journalists whom Sossa tried to jail have since been fired, and on October 1 Sossa took a triumphal stroll through the offices of a La Prensa that no longer publishes stories about his abuses; and

% How El Siglo, a financially troubled tabloid best known for its gory photos of accident victims and hardcore hostility to both the PRD and the Arnulfistas, was put even further into its economic hole by a $100,000 libel judgment in favor of former President Perez Balladares and subsequently sold to a group headed by Ibrahim Asvat, the former Christian Democrat chief of the National Police. Since the takeover, all of the El Siglo journalists whom Sossa tried to imprison have lost their jobs and the paper's editorial postion solidly supports the PRD-Partido Popular alliance.

Add to that Perez Balladares's cousin's control of two of Panama's three commercial television networks, RPC and Telemetro, and of Panama City's cable television system. The opposition, which is widely expected to win the next elections in 2004, has a strong base among the nation's media.

The PRD and Partido Popular do not, however, have a lock on the press. The Arnulfistas control Panama's smallest but oldest daily newspaper, La Estrella. The heirs of Harmodio Arias --- elder brother of Dr. Arnulfo Arias, from whom the Arnulfistas derive their name --- own the country's largest-selling paper, the gory tabloid La Critica, and the more respectable daily El Panama America. These latter two papers maintain more independence from the political parties than do the other dailies, but when Ricardo Alberto Arias engineered the dismissal of award-winning Peruvian editor Gustavo Gorriti from La Prensa, El Panama America's top investigative reporter, Rafael Perez Jaramillo, was fired for breaking the story through an Internet discussion group after his superiors had killed the story in their newspaper. The problem was that Perez Jaramillo's boss, Francisco Arias, is Ricardo Alberto Arias's cousin.

Therefore it has come to pass that when suspicion arises that a relatively ordinary piece of legislation might increase the power and influence of Attorney General Jose Antonio Sossa, Panama's mainstream news media are a lot less willing to touch the issue than they would have been a couple of years ago.

The critical reader might well ask what these tales of political and media business intrigue have to do with a simple piece of legislation designed to crack down on fathers who refuse to take responsibility for their children. After all, shouldn't Teresita de Arias and her party be given the benefit of the doubt, and credit for standing up for the rights of women?

Well, maybe. Just how committed the Partido Popular is to the rights of women is a complicated question, as shown by the example of El Siglo's new editor-in-chief, one Dante Dolphy.

Dolphy, who was Arias Calderon's personal aide, murdered his wife, who worked for El Siglo. He shot her dead during the course of an argument and was thrown in jail for it. However, despite Panama's provision of 20-year prison terms for such crimes, he was released after a brief incarceration.

Earlier this year, when the Christian Democrats gained control of El Siglo, the new publisher and former National Police Chief chose Dolphy as the new editor-in-chief. Now a murderer edits the newspaper whose staff member he blew away.

El Siglo recently had a big celebration to show off its new look. And who made a triumphal appearance? Attorney General Jose Antonio Sossa, of course, along with a host of other political bigwigs. Practitioners of violence against women are socially acceptable in these rarefied circles, unlike reporters and cartoonists with independent minds.

So much for that particular faction's commitment to women's rights - but you won't learn about this from Panama's partisan mainstream media