President Moscoso says that banker Alberto Vallarino, who ran against her as the "third force" candidate in 1999, can rejoin the Arnulfista Party when it starts accepting new members again. Polls suggest that Vallarino, who isn't tainted by an association with the Moscoso administration's corruption and ineptitude, would have a good chance of winning the presidency in 2004. None of the circle around Moscoso can say the same. There would be a primary contest for the Arnulfista nomination, with former Health Minister José Terán and Foreign Minister José Miguel Alemán making preliminary moves toward their own presidential bids.

Legislator Arturo Araúz, citing Panama's loss to Malaysia of a proposed "international call center" because few applicants spoke English well enough, proposes to make English Panama's official second language. The proposal he has submitted to the Legislative Assembly's Education, Culture and Sports Committee would make English-language documents acceptable for filing in all Panamanian government offices, require many public employees to learn English, eliminate requirements for official translations into Spanish and require a three-year implementation plan. Translators, English teachers, constitutionalists, nationalists and human rights activists have all for various reasons objected to the plan. Critics say that the measure would throw a lot of interpreters and translators out of work, give those who were educated in English preference for government jobs, lead to mass firings of public employees and further opportunities for political patronage scams, violate the Panamanian constitiutional provision that Spanish is Panama's official language, and give unscrupulous businesses an opportunity to cheat consumers by requiring them to sign binding English-language contracts that they do not understand. Araúz's proposal, which has the support of US-educated Labor Minister JJ Vallarino III and ARI director Alfredo Arias, does not contain any specific provisions or funding to improve the quality of teaching English as a second language in Panama.

When people close to the president wanted to make a fraudulent $1.8 million helicopter insurance claim, the police were brought in to destroy the evidence by sinking the aircraft with machine gun fire. On May 10, a chopper fell into the sea near Paitilla, much like the one that fell out of Mireya Moscoso's entourage and landed in the sea off Rio Hato last year. This time, however, the National Maritime Service, Panamas' police water patrol, rescued the passengers unharmed, refloated the aircraft and helped to remove the engine so that the problem could be analyzed and identified by the experts.

Despite Attorney General José Antonio Sossa's determination not to do anything about it, relatives of 110 people who were killed or made to disappear by the former military dictatorship have submitted a petition to reopen the cases. A number of those known to be involved in the deaths and disappearances were given blanket pardons during the Pérez Balladares administration, and our attorney general is taking the position that if a completely proven court case is not presented to him, he won't investigate.

The director of the Institute of Agricultural Research (IDIAP) has refused to hand over data about a private foundation that he calls the institute's "executive arm." What apparently happened is that international grants were funneled from IDIAP to the Foundation for Agricultural and Forestry Research of Panama (FIAFOR), then allegedly used to put relatives of IDIAP officials on the payroll and otherwise for questionable purposes. A 1984 law provides that, although FIAFOR is a private foundation, its handling of government funds means that it's subject to audits by the Comptroller General, as Alvin Weeden's office proposes to perform. Nevertheless, IDIAP director David Berroa is refusing to hand over records and the FIAFOR board, all top IDIAP officials, are supporting him. President Moscoso, who could fire all of the officials involved and send police in to seize the records, has not seen fit to do so.

El Panama America raised some hopes for a day or two, when it reported, based on an American bounty hunter's claim, that former military strongman Manuel Antonio Noriega has a big certificate of deposit in a safety deposit box at Citibank. Allegedly the CD was for $4.6 billion in 1975, and would be worth more than $11 billion if it existed. However, the purported document, published on the daily's front page, had Noriega's surname misspelled and identified him as president of Panama. In 1975, Noriega was General Omar Torrijos's security chief, and he never actually held the presidency in his own name. Noriega, Citibank and former president and Citibank exec Ernesto Pérez Balladares all claim that the document is bogus. Were it genuine, Citibank would be in big trouble and Panama would have the money to pay off the national debt and modernize the canal.

La Prensa reporter Ismael Hernández got a black eye on May 8, when Luis Carlos Casas, the brother of the director for the Veraguas region of the state-owned Agricultural Development Bank (BDA) Julio Casas, beat him up for taking a photograph of the logging and burning of two hectares of land in Calobre that the community claims has been used by the public for more than 60 years. Across much of rural Panama, families with close ties to the Moscoso administration are grabbing public parks and lands belonging to the BDA. In this case, the Casas family had grabbed the land in question, then logged and burned without any of the required environmental permits. Those who are taking lands with the government's acquiescence or support generally don't want publicity about it.

Panama City Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro will head the Union of Ibero-American Capital Cities (UCCI) for the next two years. The group, which is composed of capital city governments from Spain, Portugal and Latin America, chose Navarro at its recent meeting in Madrid.

After several rounds of allegations and counter-allegations between Panama's and Nicaragua's police chief, the case of the arms shipment that made its way to the AUC paramilitary in Colombia has been submitted by Presidents Bolaños of Nicaragua and Moscoso of Panama to the Organization of American States. The OAS is headed by former Colombian President César Gaviria. When Gaviria was commander-in-chief of the Colombian Army, the AUC and the army regularly worked together, for example by soldiers blocking entrances and exits from villages and sending the AUC in to massacre the inhabitants. More recently, Colombian customs agents allowed the arms shipment in question to enter the AUC-held port of Turbo. In the most recent US State Department human rights report on Colombia, it was alleged that the ties between the army and AUC persist. However, the Bush administration just certified to the contrary, in order to meet US congressional restrictions on Plan Colombian funding. According to the paperwork for the questionable arms deal, the weapons were sold by the Nicaraguan police to the Panamanian police. Panama's police chief, José Barés, claims that the papers were forged.

The charge d'affaires at the US Embassy here, Frederick Becker, says that the United States will comply with its obligations under the UN's Chemical Weapons Convention and clean up old chemical weapons left on San Jose Island in the Perlas Archipelago. The island was used by the US, Canada and the UK to test chemical weapons between 1943 and 1947. However, Becker said that the US government has complied with its obligations under the Panama Canal Treaties to remove hazards "insofar as practicable" from the former firing ranges here, and will not be doing any cleanups on those sites.

The warden of El Renacer Penitentiary in Gamboa, 28-year-old Marcos González hijo (son of Arnulfista legislator and taxi syndicate leader Marcos González), says he was kidnapped during a visit to the Cali area of Colombia but escaped a day later. In the strange incident, the younger González's Colombian wife was shot three times and remained hospitalized in Colombia while her husband returned to Panama.

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