The Supreme Court has held that the public is not an "interested party" with respect to government spending for the purposes of the Transparency Law passed late last year. The decision came in a case arising from Christian Democrat activist Guillermo Cochez's request for infomation about presidential travel spending to Minister of the Presidency Ivonne Young. Presiding magistrate Adán Arnulfo Arjona and magistrates Graciela Dixon and magistrate suplente Emeterio Miller dissented. The opinion was written by magistrate Winston Spadafora, who accompanied President Moscoso on some of the trips in question but considered that he was not the sort of "interested party" who should have recused himself from considering the case. The decision has set off a firestorm of criticism from national and international organizations and from the Panamanian legal profession. Fernando Berguido, who heads Panama's chapter of Transparency International, said that the decision "lacks any legal basis" and attacks the rule of law. Foreign Minister José Miguel Alemán, who has announced that he will step down next year to run for president, said that those who want to know about President Moscoso's travel expenses should ask about former President Ernesto Pérez Balladares's and Panama City Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro's trips instead. Of course, one of Alemán's recent trips resulted in the death of a rather expensive horse.

Over the holiday weekend President Moscoso announced that she was sending more police to patrol the border with Colombia in the Darien. Colombia's army and AUC paramilitary are conducting an offensive against the Jurado area, which is held by FARC guerrillas. Refugees have come fleeing across the border into Panama as the offensive has progressed. Moscoso said that the extra cops are needed to prevent guerrilla incursions, but didn't mention the possibility of paramilitary incursions, which have frequently taken place. Generally the Moscoso administration treats AUC supporters who flee to Panama as refugees and FARC sympathizers who come here as criminals, allowing the former to stay here and repatriates the latter, often in effect handing them to their enemies. A lot of Darien residents, particularly in the indigenous communities, have relatives on the Colombian side of the border and will provide refuge to family members who flee the fighting.

A joint US, UK, Costa Rican and Panamanian sting operation called "White Terror" has resulted in at least six arrests for an alleged conspiracy by the right-wing Colombian AUC paramilitary to trade $25 million worth of cocaine for 9,000 AK-47 assault rifles, 300 pistols, grenade launchers, 300,000 grenades, rocket launchers and 53 million rounds of ammunition. Meetings involving alleged AUC supply operatives were secretly videotaped in London, the Virgin Islands and Panama, and arrests and seizures were made in Costa Rica, the United States and Panama.

The latest twist to the scandal over a large shipment of AK-47 assault rifles that on paper went from the Nicaraguan police to the Panamanian police, but actually went to Colombia's AUC paramilitary, is that the US ambassador to Nicaragua knew about the deal, or at least part of it. Nicaraguan government officials say that they cleared the transaction with American Ambassador Oliver Garza before purportedly selling the weapons to Panama via Israeli-owned and Guatemala-based GERSA, an arms trading company. The US State Department has confirmed the Nicaraguan version, but Garza says that he didn't know the weapons were headed for the AUC.

The Inter-American Human Rights Commission, a court in San Jose, Costa Rica whose decisions about cases from Panama have the force of law under a treaty to which this country is a party, has taken up the case of Heliodoro Portugal, a leftist activist who was abducted by men in plain clothes in May of 1970 and whose skeletal remains were found buried on the grounds of the former Panama Defense Forces Puma infantry company's barracks in Tocumen. Attorney General Sossa and his subordinates played "mix and match" games with the remains of several persons found at Tocumen, and at first refused to conduct the DNA tests to identify the remains. The Catholic Church paid for the tests, which identified the bones as those of Portugal. Then Sossa sent another bone from another person to an unqualified DNA lab of his choice to "prove" that the remains were not those of Portugal. In this and other cases, Sossa has refused to prosecute, using various excuses. However, within a few days after the court in San Jose accepted the case, which human rights activists say is as much as anything a trial in which Sossa and the impunity for which he stands are at issue, prosecutors announced that they will try former Colonel Ricardo Garibaldo Figueroa, who came to command at Tocumen in June of 1971, most probably after Portugal was already dead and buried. It appears that the Public Ministry is moving in a way that both insures that nobody will be convicted and will give it something to say if the Inter-American Human Rights Commission condemns its handling of the Portugal case and other murders and disappearances from the time of the dictatorship.

Near one of the National Police fortifications along the Colombian border in the Embera village of Biroquerá, Darien, 13-year-old Ayda Chirimia was shot and killed with a single bullet from a 7.62 mm machine gun. Nobody has come forward with a claim to have seen what happened, but location of the bodyk, the angle at which the bullet pierced her body and lack of powder burns indicate that the wound that killed the girl was not self-inflicted. Apparently there were no fingerprint or paraffin tests to determine who might have fired the weapon in question, which came to the PTJ ballistics lab with its firing mechanism battered and in an inoperable condition. Now the PTJ has announced that it has absolved the National Police of all blame and will conduct tests to "prove" that the weapon must have fallen and gone off without human intervention, unfortunately killing Ms. Chirimia. The Public Ministry is not investigating other possibilities, such as the obvious one that evidence has been tampered with and justice has been obstructed.

Law professor, journalist and activist Miguel Antonio Bernal has again beaten Attorney General Sossa in court. Sossa had appealed Bernal's acquittal on charges that he had criminally defamed the National Police when he criticized them for the 1998 machete decapitations of four prisoners in their custody, one of whom had finished serving his sentence months before. The Second Superior Justice Tribunal held that Bernal has a right to criticize public officials. It has not been announced whether Sossa will appeal to the Supreme Court.

Comptroller General Alvin Weeden, who has accused Social Security Director Juan Jované of corruption and inefficiency, took out full-page ads in the daily newspapers when Jované responded by asking for proof. (Whether the taxpayers footed the bill for the ads is not known. Some of them bore the seal of Weeden's office, but the Arnulfista-dominated Supreme Court has determined that the public has no right to know about the things for which it pays.) The first set of Weeden's ads alleged a year ago he had provided Jované with documents about corruption in the Social Security Fund. It turns out that those documents were about corrupt practices in the 1990s, well before Jované came to his position in 2000, and Jované says that he acted to prevent repetitions of past bad practices and to discipline those responsible who still work for the system. Weeden responded with another round of full-page ads claiming new evidence of corruption and mismanagement on Jované's part, but not specifying what that might be. Because it is a hard time to sell ads in the Panamanian economy, none of the mainstream media have been willing to denounce Weeden's tactics. In those media the comptroller's public pronouncements continue to be treated as if they are from a reliable source, which Weeden is not.

Former Vice-President Guillermo Ford has announced that at the end of the year he will step down as Panama's ambassador to the United States. Ford, who seems to be a lot more popular with the public than in his own MOLIRENA party or among the political class in general, said that the biggest task confronting his successor will be the negotiation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas treaty. Roberto Alfaro, presently Panama's ambassador to Italy, will replace Ford.

Luis Ríos, the PRD mayor of Anton, became one of the first casualties of the long holiday weekend when the car he was driving crashed into stationary vehicles at the scene of a previous accident on the Pan-American Highway. Holiday observances in Anton were cancelled and Ríos's suplente, Aristídes Rodríoguez, took over as mayor.

Costa Rican jurist Elizabeth Odio, a former vice-president of her country, has been nominated by President Moscoso to be one of the judges in the new International Criminal Court in The Hague. The court is not set up in a way that gives every country the right to pick a judge, so Mireya's choice of Odio does not mean that a Panamanian would have otherwise served on the court. However, many of Panama's leading lawyers and judges criticized the president for nominating a non-Panamanian --- especially because Costa Rican President Abel Pacheco has not nominated Odio. Pacheco did say, however, that although he found Panama's action annoying his country would also vote for Odio.

There is a low-pitched but pervasive clamor throughout Panamanian society for a new constitution, and Legislative Assembly president Carlos Alvarado, a dissident PRD member who owes his position to the support of President Moscoso's faction, may have been hearing it when he proposed a series of constitutional change. Alvarado would like to see Supreme Court magistrates elected, legislators get by with one suplente instead of two and the independent roles of the three branches of government more clearly defined. He proposes to do this by way of a package of constitutional amendments passed in this legislature and the next one, which will be elected in 2004. However, although leaders of some of the countries smaller parties met with Alvarado to talk about the plan, PRD leader Martín Torrijos was openly scornful, most Arnulfista leaders said that the time isn't right, Chamber of Commerce president José Javier Rivera said that the proposals do nothing to address our current economic plight, and the leading advocates of a new constitution pointedly did not appear by Alvarado's side. The Colegio de Abogados did express tepid interest, saying that some of Alvarado's ideas are worth discussing if it can be shown that they have a chance to be realized. It's a huge "if." The people who want an new constitution want it as a means to smash the political class, and almost all of the politicians are either satisfied with the way things are or are patiently waiting for the next elections and their turn to loot.

National Centennial Commission executive secretary officially kicked off Panama's centennial year on November 1, announcing some of the plans for next year's spectacular Independence Day festivities and a year-long series of lesser events. Actually, the commission has already been holding lectures and literary presentations, and the coming year will include a diverse mix of events and attractions that are likely to draw record numbers of tourists.

A five-day seige of the health clinic in the Ngobe community of Kankintú ended on October 27 with an agreement that the Health Ministry would not withdraw the area's only physician. Nobody was hurt in the standoff, in which the entire indigenous community surrounded the health clinic and refused to allow anybody to leave.

On November 7 in Puerto Armuelles more than 90 percent of all businesses closed their doors and a large portion of the town's population turned out to block roads. The riot police were called in and managed to keep the protesters from blocking the Pan-American Highway or the Paso Canoa border crossing into Costa Rica, but the confrontation was nonviolent. The basic problem is that the area's work force is 50 percent unemployed, largely as a result of banana plantations closing. The Moscoso administration proposed and the Legislative Assembly passed a law to create a duty-free import-export zone in the area to create jobs, but the president reneged on the promise by submitting a 2003 budget without the funds to actually create this free zone.

Panamanian Queen Joselyn Sánchez won't be strutting her stuff in Lagos, and MEDCOM won't be broadcasting the Miss World pageant in Panama. Thus this country joins many others, particularly in Europe, in the protest against a Nigerian court's death sentence against Amina Lawal for adultery. Though the punishment, the evidence and court procedures imposed against Ms. Lawal all directly conflict with the Quran, the Nigerian government has defended its action in the name of Islamic law.

On October 29 a student at the Centro de Educacion Basica Bonifacio Pereira in El Chorrillo was shot in the toe by a friend who was playing with a pistol in the hall. The shooter was later turned in to police by his father. Although street-blocking and rock-throwing protests are part of high school life in many of the nation's schools and bus stop brawls between kids from rival institutions are also fairly frequent, firearm violence in Panamanian schools is rare and this incident has prompted a lot of concerned commentary from educators and parents.

Until now, Panamanians have associated dengue fever with the Aedes Egypti mosquito. Now, however, we have another buzzing pest that carries the flu-like misery that can occasionally cause life-threatening hemorrhaging: the Aedes Albopictus mosquito. This little guy had been known in the Central American countries where dengue is a more pervasive problem, but in recent weeks it has been encountered in Panama for the first time. Some of Panama's mainstream media have been playing the new vector up as a super-bug, particularly because it is more resistant to chemical pesticides and a more efficient transmitter of dengue than Aedes Egypti. The basic problem, however, is not a super-mosquito but many Panamanians' persistent habit of littering. Beer cans, plastic bags, styrofoam food dishes and many other items tossed by the roadsides become very effective mosquito incubators when rainy season storms fill them with water. The battle against dengue is being fought not so much with DDT as by city street sweepers and public health inspectors who go around writing tickets for people who maintain mosquito breeding waters on their property.

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