Despite widespread disapproval of her adminstration's corruption and a bad economy, President Moscoso's public approval rating is up, according to a Dichter & Neira poll commissioned by La Prensa. The survey found 47.7 percent of Panamanians giving the president good or very good marks for her job performance, against 48.9 percent who give her bad or very bad marks. The latest poll suggests that if the elections were held today, Mart’n Torrijos would defeat Alberto Vallarino by a 41 to 25 percent margin, whereas the previous Dichter & Neira poll had Vallarino slightly ahead. It is not certain, of course, that either Torrijos or Vallarino will secure a presidential nomination for the May 2004 elections.

After the 2004 elections there will likely be more indigenous representation in the legislature, as President Moscoso has signed a law that creates three new electoral circuits within the Ngobe-Bugle comarca. The semi-autonomous indigenous commonwealth that comprises about nine percent of the nation's territory in parts of Chirqui, Bocas del Toro and Veraguas provinces is home to more than 100,000 people, almost all of whom are desperately poor. Each of the three new circuits will elect a single legislator. The Ngobe and Bugle, sometimes collectively referred to as Guaymis, are distinct indigenous ethnic groups with historic political, cultural and social ties.

On July 15, 13-year-old Aida Chirimia was shot in the head and killed in a National Police defensive work at Biroquera, an Embera and Wounaan village on the Darien's Jaque River near the Colombian border. The circumstances of precisely how the girl was shot with a single round from a 7.62 millimeter machine gun and who pulled the trigger have not been made public. National Police Chief Carlos Barés did say, however, that members of the community have asked the police to maintain their presence in their indigenous village, through which Colombian right-wing paramilitaries, left-wing guerrillas and criminal gangs have sometimes passed during their armed incursions into Panama.

The Electoral Tribunal has indefinitely suspended the August 4 party convention of one of the junior partners in Mireya Moscoso's governing alliance, the Nationalist Republican Liberal Movement (MOLIRENA). The conservative business-oriented party is currently dominated by the Rosas family, but party president Jesús Rosas is being challenged by a slate led by the nation's First Vice-President Arturo Vallarino. In voting for convention delegates, pro-Vallarino candidates were excluded from the ballot in several districts and a number of other abuses and irregularities are alleged by the challengers. Educators' unions have complained that MOLIRENA's membership has been expanded by the Education Ministry requiring teachers to join the party in order to get the school assignments they want. Jesús Rosas's sister, Doris Rosas de Mata, is the education minister.

The Panamanian Constitution allows parties to remove legislators who fail to toe the party line from their elected offices, and the PRD is seeking to do precisely that in the case of Carlos Afú, whose break from party ranks along with deputy Carlos Alvarado and alternate Tomás Gabriel Altamirano Duque provided the margin of approval that gave President Moscoso's Supreme Court nominees Winston Spadafora and Alberto Cigarruista needed for confirmation. The PRD's president, San Miguelito legislator Balbina Herrera, alleged that Afú and the others were bribed to vote the way they did, and in return Afú alleged that bribes were paid to gain legislative approval of the CEMIS multi-modal transport and industrial development project that's centered around Colon's France Field airport. The PRD disciplinary tribunal promptly voted to purge Afú from the party and strip him of his seat in the Legislative Assembly, but that decision was appealed to the Electoral Tribunal, which has the effect of delaying its implementation. The tribunal was set to rule shortly, but Afú has challenged its and his erstwhile party's authority to remove him via a petition filed with the Supreme Court. The court won't decide the case until at least mid-September, and before then the Legislative Assembly will elect its leaders for the 2002-2003 session. With Afú's vote on their side and no other countervailing shifts, that would give the Arnulfistas and their allies the votes they need to oust the PRD-Partido Popular alliance from the legislative leadership and regain control over committee assignments and patronage jobs. The Arnulfista-dominated Supreme Court has assigned the Afú case to magistrate Winston Spadafora, who apparently has no qualms about the conflict of interest.

Purportedly to carry out the mandate of freedom of information legislation passed late last year, the Electoral Tribunal has decreed regulations which restrict information about the judgments it renders in cases involving electoral crimes and proceeding to remove elected officials from their posts. The regulations have been challenged in a petition filed with the Supreme Court by attorney Higinio Aguirre. So far the Arnulfista-dominated Supreme Court has voted to limit, restrict or void parts of the freedom of information law each time it has had the opportunity to do so, and meanwhile the Moscoso administration has promulgated regulations that deny the public the right to know such things as who is on the government payroll at what salary and to restrict access to public documents to those who can demonstrate that the documents pertain personally to themselves.

The University of Panama's Faculty of Business Administration and Accounting is without a dean, as the purported winner of the June 12 election for that post, Ruth Mata, has been kept from assuming the post due to a lawsuit by her challenger, Mario Castillo. The problem is that the faculty at the university's Chepo extension were not allowed to vote.

Marcelo Jelen, an Uruguayan journalist has accused the former president of Panama's Colegio de Periodistas and current University of Panama journalism professor, Bárbara Bloise, of plagiarizing his and several other Latin American professionals' work. Bloise has not specifically and forthrigthly denied the allegations, which appear to be well founded on the face of the documentary evidence. She has, however, called her accuser "ignorant," "sinister" and "incompetent." Bloise has been at the forefront of those advocating a journalist licensing law that would exclude foreigners from Panamanian journalism and set up the University of Panama Faculty of Social Communication as the judge of whether a person's education is adequate to allow that individual to work as a journalist here. Though in every other reputable university journalism department proof of plagiarism will result in a professors' disgrace and dismissal, it appears that there will be no negative consequences forthcoming against Bloise at the University of Panama. The Uruguayan Press Association's communique supporting Jelen appears in the Spanish-language opinion section of this issue.

Colombian drug smuggler Jairo Alberto Builes Molina, one of several major drug offenders whom President Moscoso and then-Government and Justice Minister Winston Spadafora freed from Panamanian jails by way of pardons or sentence commutations (in this case the latter), has been busted again. This time, Mireya's largesse won't be very helpful, as Builes Molina was arrested on July 15 in Colombia, allegedly possessing 13 kilograms of pure heroin. The bust was part of a joint Colombian Police and US Drug Enforcement Agency operation, and the US is asking Colombia to extradite Builes Molina to the United States, where he might face the death penalty as an alleged drug kingpin.

In the second major heroin seizure in recent weeks, police detained six individuals, some of them Colombians and the others Panamanians, and 10 kilos of heroin on Play Juan Hombron in the Cocle municipality of Anton. As in the previous seizure at the Customs checkpoint on the Trans-Isthmian Highway in Colon province, the heroin was concealed in the linings of coats.

President Mireya Moscoso, Panama's first female president, is divorced. However, she has her sister Ruby Moscoso performing the functions of first lady, which in this country is an office that comes with a government budget and various perquisites. Among those perks, Ruby Moscoso now gets around in a $43,000 Cadillac because, she claims, the previous first lady left her with an "inadequate" vehicle for her position. Former President Ernesto Pérez Balladares's wife, Dora Boyd de Pérez Balladares, is indignant about that claim. The ex-first lady says that the Chrysler that she used was in perfect condition when she left it for the incoming administration.

In the criminal defamation case that former President Ernesto Pérez Balladares has brought against Arnulfista legislator José Isabel Blandón, whose offending remark was a claim that the ex-president hasn’t adequately explained the source of his wealth, prosecutors have allowed former National Security Director Samantha Smith and retired General Rubén Darío Paredes to be called as defense witnesses. However, they have blocked all questions pertaining to the matter in dispute, the sources of Toro's wealth. Smith claims that visas granted to Chinese citizens, which the US government says was part of an illegal scheme to sneak into the United States, were directly ordered by the former president. Paredes was a top government official during the dictatorship, when Toro served in cabinet positions.

President Moscoso has vetoed legislation that would have imposed reciprocal sanctions on countries that impose disriminatory policies against Panama. She said that the proposed law would have required retaliation within 45 days in cases where the intention and effects of foreign countries' policies are difficult to analyze.

On July 19 National Police Sergeant Oscar Degracia and IDAAN inspector Luis Enrique Fung were slain in an incident that arose after a tanker truck providing fresh water in Pacora was attacked. Fung was shot dead while investigating the attack, and a suspected murderer was arrested, and then Degracia was mortally wounded while responding to the call about the attack on Fung. It appears that the murders were the work of a local street gang.

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