On the evening of September 11 Panama City's firefighters held a somber torchlight procession from the fire station on Avenida Cuba to the US Embassy, to pay homage to the more than 300 of their counterparts who were killed in the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. That same day President Moscoso participated in a ceremony with George W. Bush and heads of state from dozens of other countries at Ground Zero.

The Supreme Court has thrown out a challenge to the Becker-Salas Accord, an agreement that allows US law enforcement officials to conduct anti-drug operations and make arrests in Panamanian territory. A group of lawyers challenged the agreement as an abuse of Minister of Government and Justice Aníbal Salas's authority, arguing that this deal was a treaty that needed legislative approval. The court, however, held that it was merely an addition to a 1991 treaty that needed nothing more than a minister's signature to become valid.

In a press release by the Direccion de Migracion, the non-governmental legal aid group Asistencial Legal Alternativa, which has its headquarters at the University of Panama's law school, was accused of ties to drug trafficking. The specific allegation is that the group provided legal assistance to two Colombians who had fled to Puerto Obaldia, Kuna Yala, and were subsequently busted on drug charges. (Immigration is headed by National Police chief Carlos Barés's wife Ilka de Barés, who assumed that position after former Immigration chief Erick Singares was removed under US government pressure after a number of illegal migrants were caught in the United States bearing immigration documents purchased from Panamanian authorities. President Moscoso subsequently appointed Singares to a diplomatic post in Caracas, but the Venezuelan government refused to accept him.) Those Colombians who flee to Kuna Yala or the northern part of the Darien-Colombia border are almost all running from the right-wing AUC paramilitary, which dominates the adjacent part of Colombia, and they are routinely treated as criminals by Panamanian authorities and returned to Colombia. Many of those Colombians who flee to Jaque or other places along the central and southern parts of the Panama-Colombia border, where the leftist FARC rebels are dominant, are more or less accepted as refugees, though the Panamanian government tends not to officially recognize them as such. Immigration's policies of branding lawyers who assist Colombian refugees as criminals and its disparate treatment those who cross our border fleeing from the AUC and from FARC are part of the Moscoso administration's unacknowledged but fairly open tilt toward the government and paramilitary side in Colombia's civil conflict.

Asistencia Legal Alternativa and the Catholic Church say that in the past few weeks at least 175 Colombians have fled over jungle trails across the border into the Darien, but that most of them are avoiding communities with a National Police presence for fear of being sent back. The government says it knows nothing about it. The AUC paramilitary has launched an offensive into areas adjacent to the Darien where the FARC guerrillas have held sway for the past year or two.

Former right-wing Honduran legislator Ricardo Antonio Peña was arrested on September 9 at a police roadblock on the Pan-American Highway in Chiriqui, allegedly carrying more than a pound of heroin concealed in the soles of two pairs of boots. The arrest and seizure was one more milestone in a recent upsurge in heroin trafficking through Panama. Some of the drug drops from fishing boats to cayucos have been taking place in broad daylight along heavily-populated beaches. In some beach communities neighborhoods people report new neighbors moving in, a half dozen or more vehicles converging at the property for a few minutes on a night shortly thereafter, and then the property becoming vacant right after that. The increased heroin trafficking may be financing part of the escalation of Colombia's civil conflict, as both the rightist AUC paramilitary and the leftist FARC and ELN guerrillas derive much of their income from the drug trade.

On August 27 unemployed protesters and riot police fought running battles in Colon, and some of the local maleantes took advantage of the situation to indulge in a little looting. The protesters were demanding that the national government make promised cash transfers to Colon's local government, which they believe would allow the municipality to create some jobs. Streets were blocked, tear gas grenades were launched and birdshot fired, and in the confusion merchandise was grabbed. In the end 18 people were arrested, four people were treated in hospitals for injuries, three government cars were damaged and many local businesses had an unproductive day.

It has been awhile since the young radicals at the Instituto Nacional have staged a major street blockade. According to principal Jaime Ruiz, his students may be up to new games. That is, the numbers. Ruiz says that some of the kids at the flagship of Panama's public school system are selling illegal lottery tickets and he's going to crack down on those he catches.

Manaure Antonio King, the 16-year-old who shot and killed Colon provincial Customs chief Aquiles Garc’a on a contract for adult gangsters, has received a five-year sentence from Childhood and Adolescence Tribunal Judge Alba Aponte. King, himself the target of a murder attempt after he killed Garc’a, will serve his time in the Basilio Lakas Vocational Center. His attorneys say they will appeal the sentence.

In a series of public hearings Arnulfista legislator and taxicab syndicate leader Marco González has been debating criminologists, educators and UNICEF representatives over his proposal to stiffen penalties for violent juvenile offenders. Siding with González at the hearings have been a minority of the experts and members of the families of those slain by young offenders and taxi drivers who have been left crippled by assaults. The consensus of public opinion seems to be with González, but most scholars who have studied the question say that the severity of punishment would not be an effective deterrent to violent crime but a greater certainty of being caught would be.

In Panama City there is an increased presence of the National Police's juvenile officers at bus stops around high schools, due to a number of recent clashes between students from different schools at such places. The school that is being watched most closely is Artes y Oficios, which is located on the Transistmica across from the University of Panama.

In a series of public appearances and televised interviews, banker and presidential candidate Alberto Vallarino has toned down his criticism of the Moscoso administration and advocated a more mainstream set of economic policies than he did in the 1999 campaign. Vallarino, who broke with the Arnulfista Party to run as a third party candidate the last time around, would like to be the Arnulfista standard-bearer in 2004 but that depends on whether President Moscoso will allow him to rejoin the party. Polls say that Vallarino is the only potential presidential candidate whose popularity is anywhere close to that of the PRD's Martín Torrijos, and a number of Arnulfista notables want him at the top of their ticket in the next elections. Vallarino, who has until now distanced himself from the Moscoso administration and has therefore avoided its unpopularity and reputation for corruption, says that the president has been successful in the social and political spheres --- citing her supporters' success in regaining control of the Legislative Assembly as an example of the latter --- but notes that she has been hampered by a bad economy that isn't her fault. In an interview, televised on PRC-TV's "Enfoque" program, Vallarino advocated an economic policy aimed at strengthening tourism, agricultural exports and commercial activity related to the Panama Canal. He is not talking about big raises in the minimum wage, large tax breaks for low and medium-income workers and large-scale job creation programs like he did in the 1999 campaign.

After the Electoral Tribunal quashed party boss Jesús Rosas's attempt to exclude the slate of convention delegate candidates that supports Vice-President Arturo Vallarino from the MOLIRENA internal party ballot in several districts, voting in those areas has been rescheduled for September 22. Meanwhile some alliances that Rosas thought he had consolidated appear to have broken up, and rhetoric in the contest for control of the party between Rosas and Vallarino has become more heated. At a September 14 rally in David, Rosas called Vallarino "disloyal" and "corrupt." Jesús Rosas's sister, Education Minister Doris Rosas de Mata, has turned the nation's public schools into a patronage fiefdom with teacher assignments based on politics rather than ability and widespread open and notorious nepotism that has put many members of the Rosas family in high-paid goverment posts, and these facts limit the appeal of her brother's campaign stump allegations.

Tests performed at the US Center for Disease Control in Atlanta have confirmed suspicions that 69-year-old Chilibre resident Segovia Rodríguez died as a result of rabies contracted from a bat bite. The Health Ministry says it's an isolated case, but has begun an intensive campaign in the area to vaccinate all pets, farm animals and people who care to be immunized. Panama's last previous recorded rabies case was in 1995 in the Darien. This was a wild rabies strain, rather than the form of the disease that's more common among dogs. Both are deadly for humans.

Peruvian businessman José Lizier Corbetto, who is alleged to have been a front for Peru's jailed former security chief Vladimiro Montesinos in the laundering of proceeds from gun smuggling, bribery and other criminal activities, was extradited from Panama to Peru on August 25. Lizier Corbetto's attorneys denounced the move as irregular and unconstitutional, and PRD legislator Miguel Bush accused the Panamanian government of speeding up the extradition to avoid a legislative investigation of Montesinos's alleged corrupt links with high-ranking members of the Moscoso administration and their relatives. When Montesinos briefly took refuge here in 2000, he was seen in the company of Foreign Minister José Miguel Alemáns' brother and the foreign minister's law firm did work for some of the companies that are alleged to have been parts of Montesinos's alleged money laundering maze.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has seized documents from and frozen assets of the American Financial Group and several of the individuals associated with it in a probe of what The Miami Herald reports appears to be a complicated $87 million investment fund swindle. The SEC believes that the American Financial Group was at the center of a spiderweb of some 40 companies registered in the US, the Bahamas or the Cayman Islands, through which German, Canadian, Russian and American investors' funds circulated and ultimately disappeared. At the center of the investigation is the Chism family, Panamanians or dual US-Panamanian citizens who live in Miami, including Teresita de Chism, her husband Edward Chism, her son Edward Chism Jr. and her son's mother-in-law Jilma de Tapia. Reportedly cooperating with the investigation is American Financial Group's Panamanian vice-president for marketing, Vincent Martinelli. Teresita de Chism took up residence in the United States after the 1989 US invasion of Panama left her unemployed. She was former dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega's secretary. As this issue of The Panama News was uploaded no criminal charges had been filed in the case.

As a part of what it describes as a crackdown on illegal trafficking in Panamanian archaeological treasures, the National Institute of Culture (INAC) is calling upon people to register their pre-Columbian artifacts. Such treasures are all theoretically public property, but private individuals are allowed to possess them so long as they do not sell or export them. INAC says that it only wants to update its national inventory of archaeological treasures and will not confiscate pieces that people register with them.

The IDAAN water and sewer utility has fired 40 employees, mostly for taking payments from customers to avoid having their water shut off for non-payment, or to restore service that has been cut off. IDAAN has been pursuing an aggressive program of water cutoffs, in a country where people aren't used to paying water bills.

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