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Assembly leadership shifts from one group of losers to another
by Eric Jackson
No longer will we see full page, out of season, government financed campaign ads with Partido Popular deputy Rubén Arosemena’s mug on them when we read the daily newspapers. Maybe we will see Carlos Alvarado strut his stuff, and certainly President Moscoso will continue to aggrandize herself at public expense.
I do not mourn the defeat of the legislative alliance between the PRD and the former Christian Democrats. Neither am I shocked by it --- anybody who knows anything saw it coming this past January 9, when the PRD’s discipline broke down and Mireya Moscoso’s less-than-stellar Supreme Court nominees were approved.
All that the selection of Carlos Alvarado as the Legislative Assembly’s new president really demonstrates is a further crumbling of Panama’s public institutions. Those who would like to overthrow these institutions and don’t mind a bit more misery in the meantime may have reason to take some comfort and a new batch of hacks may rejoice in their turn at the trough, but those who are motivated by partisan passions --- for whichever party --- would be fools to celebrate. All parties came out looking like losers.
Under the present constitution, when a legislator defects from his or her caucus, the party on whose ticket that deputy was elected has the right to revoke the voters’ mandate. It’s a much criticized provision of Panama’s political system, one with its roots in the dictatorship's implicit promise that if the voters elected opposition party members to the legislature, that choice would not be nullified by means of bribery or coercion.
This past Day of the Martyrs, PRD legislators Carlos Afú, Carlos Alvarado and Tomás Gabriel Altamirano Mantovani jumped ship. The former two voted to confirm the president’s Supreme Court nominees, and the latter stayed home to let his father and suplente, Tomás Gabriel Altamirano Duque, vote against the party line.
There were allegations of bribery, which remain unproven and largely uninvestigated. In Fito Duque’s case there was a clear conflict of interest, because despite what the constitution may say about legislators not being able to have government concessions, his family has the lucrative lottery ticket printing business to lose if the president sees fit to take it away.
In the days before last January’s vote, Comptroller General Alvin Weeden moved to cancel another conflict of interest, a government quarry concession held by legislator Miguel Bush (PRD-Colon). Weeden, whose motive was very clearly partisan intimidation, said at the time that there were other similarly illegal concessions and that he would move against them. To date he hasn’t kept that promise.
Let’s be blunt about it. The PRD lost control of the Legislative Assembly due to corruption within its ranks, and nothing would have been said or done about the improprieties had the party maintained its dominant position. Yes, Afú, Alvarado and both Altamiranos betrayed the PRD, but their party put itself in a position to be sold out by its own betrayal of the public trust. Legislative politics has been turned into a game played for personal and family gain, the PRD played that game, and they lost by way of a double cross.
The PRD caucus moved to rectify things by purging Carlos Afú. Why just him, and not Alvarado and the two Altamiranos? Because Afú alleged widespread bribery in the legislature, charges that also remain unproven and largely uninvestigated. In the PRD, selling out to the other side appears to be much more tolerable than spilling the beans.
Had the constitution worked the way it should have, Afú would have been replaced by a more loyal party member by now. But there were legal proceedings, and then appeals. The weekend before the elections for this session’s legislative leadership, the Supreme Court, now dominated by Arnulfistas thanks to Afú, Alvarado and the two Altamiranos, made a most irregular announcement, by way of a press release, that it wasn’t going to rule on the legality of the PRD’s move to expel Afú just yet. In keeping with its policy of gutting laws and policies granting public access to information about what government does, the Supreme Court declined to release the opinion or any information about who voted which way.
In other words, to regain control of the Legislative Assembly, the Moscoso administration relied upon the Supreme Court’s partisan and opaque refusal to uphold an unambiguous provision of the nation’s constitution.
So now Mireya and her entourage are free to indulge in more insurance frauds like the HP-1430 helicopter affair, funnel more government jobs and contracts to relatives, sell more first mate’s certificates to unqualified wannabes, participate in more arms shipments to Colombia’s AUC death squads, stash more unexplained large sums of money in their freezers, and so on. (And on, and on, and on....) The legislature won’t ask questions, the prosecutors won’t prosecute and the courts won’t intervene.
When it all comes crashing down --- as it surely must, because our economy can’t stand much more of this --- I won’t be moved by the tears of the now high and mighty.
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