Recently German law enforcement authorities came to their Panamanian counterparts with some alarming news. An investigation of an international child pornography ring has followed an electronic trail to Panama. While it does not appear that the pedophile sex is being performed and photographed here, it does seem that the sordid commercial products, the images, are being uploaded onto the Internet in this country.

Should we be surprised that the complaint from our Public Ministry is that Panamanian law is not properly equipped to deal with such criminal activity?

No doubt this will provide a window of opportunity for opportunist legislators, who, shorn of the patronage that comes with the circuit funds that the president has vetoed and holding positions in the public institution that polls say Panamanians despise the most, will jump on the opportunity to take a stand against kiddie porn. And maybe there are a few points of law that could be cleared up, and some procedures that could be made less cumbersome.

However, I think that the Public Ministry doth complain too much. The laws are there if there is a will to use them. However, a good look at the record in office of Procurador General José Antonio Sossa (whose job title this publication translates into English as "attorney general" and who heads the Public Ministry), and of the circumstances of his appointment and the history of the political movement from whence he came, will say much about Panama's reticence to zealously pursue this latest gang of nasty criminals to have been discovered operating in our midst.

To wit:

• Sossa was a legislator with the Christian Democratic Party, which has since transformed itself into the Partido Popular. He was appointed to his 10-year term by former President Ernesto Pérez Balladares, a PRD member, with a specifically announced mandate to "end judicial terrorism."

• The Christian Democratic Party here was and the Partido Popular is a part of the international Christian Democratic movement, which has its origins in 1948 as a CIA-brokered political alliance between the Catholic Church and the Mafia for the purpose of keeping the Communists out of the post-World War II Italian government. Since then the Italians have become sick of all the corruption and the original Christian Democratic Party has declined and changed its name, but affiliates of the Christian Democratic International are strong in many countries. In Germany, for example, they recently came within a whisker of retaking control of the government from the Social Democrat-Green alliance.

• One almost invariable trait of Christian Democratic parties is a servile obeisance to the policy demands of the United States government. That was certainly the case at the height of Panamanian Christian Democracy's power, just after the 1989 invasion when they controlled the legislature, the police, the prosecutors' office, Panama City's municipal government and the office of the first vice-president. It was George H. W. Bush's intention to control Panama through Christian Democrat leader Ricardo Arias Calderón, who was first vice-president, leaving President Guillermo Endara as this jovial Arnulfista figurehead. However, Endara wouldn't go along with it --- he wouldn't cede his decision-making powers to Arias Calderón, nor would he agree to the prolonged presence of US military advisors in his government's ministries, a treaty to keep American bases here, or the end to banking secrecy that Washington wanted. The ensuing political divorce paved the way for the PRD's return to power in the first elections after the Noriega nightmare's end.

• The United States has been known to throw its weight around despite the niceties of treaty provisions, and this has been so under administrations of both major parties. However, the currently ruling Republicans go way beyond the Democrats' abuses, showing open hostility to any semblance of international law. US participation in last April's failed Venezuelan coup is the most egregious recent example of this in our neighborhood, but George W. Bush's stated intention to replace international law's respect for national sovereignty with "regime change" in Iraq is the high-profile example of the moment. Notice that the German Christian Democrats ran in the last election against the Social Democrat-Green alliance's scorn for Bush's Iraq policy. Notice that COPEI, the Venezuelan affiliate of the Christian Democratic International, is at the center of the movement to overthrow Hugo Chávez. Notice that Panama's Partido Popular was just about the only Panamanian political group that liked the short-lived coup in Caracas.

• Now look at Attorney General Sossa's record in matters of international law enforcement cooperation. He has rejected foreign requests for assistance in high-profile money laundering probes. He has allowed international fraud specialists --- "offshore asset protection" hustlers whose clients' funds disappear and pyramid scamsters --- to openly use Panama as their base of operations, so long as foreigners and not Panamanians are the ones who are swindled. He has not seriously investigated the illegal sale of Panamanian seamen's papers to unqualified persons, a practice that not only endangers maritime safety but also creates opportunities for terrorists. Even though the FBI says that Panama's former consul in New York used the Panamanian diplomatic pouch and the Panamanian consulate for the trafficking of stolen Peruvian antiquities, which violates Panamanian law as well as international treaties and US law, Sossa has taken no action on the scandal.

• Let's also look at Sossa's performance in the last high-profile case involving the commercial sexual exploitation of minors. Despite complaints to police by neighbors in Rio Abajo, nothing was ever done about a child prostitution ring that operated in that area, until a Spanish television network captured the operation on video and broadcast it around the world. Then Sossa's ministry moved in to arrest the woman who allegedly ran the business and a few alleged accomplices. However, there has been no serious investigation about the customers, who surely include men from Panama's privileged wealthy elite, nor has the matter of police protection of the business been addressed.

Keep the above-cited record in mind while you consider the sources and traditions of international law, which by the Panamanian Constitution is part of our national law as well.

The principal sources of international law are treaties and established customs. More recently, United Nations resolutions, particularly those coming from the UN Security Council, have also taken on the aspect of law.

Trans-national sex crimes are being taken more seriously by the world community lately. There is a treaty about cross-border trafficking in women for the purposes of prostitution in the works. Courts and law enforcement agencies in most countries cooperate in efforts to prosecute the distribution of child pornography over the Internet, either under national law theories that to the extent that such material is disseminated within their countries it amounts to a violation of national laws, or as a matter of global cooperation. Only a few countries, places like Panama and the Ukraine, plead that there's not much that they can do.

Actually, the law that's needed for Panama to fully and vigorously cooperate in the suppression of child pornography has been around for a long time. It was a matter of customary international law for a century before Panama even became an independent republic.

Can a minor consent to sexual activity before a pornographer's cameras? No --- not here, not in any other Latin American republic, not in the developed countries where most pornography is made and consumed, not in any place where there is the rule of law.

When a person engages in economic activity without his or her consent, isn't that the essence of involuntary servitude? Isn't that really just another form of slavery?

In the 21st century we don't have ships making the Middle Passage with chained West Africans bound for unpaid labor in the plantations of the Americas, but we do still have slavery. In parts of Asia and Africa, the enslavement of children is part of the pathology of war or famine. In the supposedly more advance industrialized world, the prostitution and pornography rackets often thrive on the services of people coerced into the business against their will, whether by small time pimps who control addicts' drug supplies or by well organized international gangs that use deceit, violence and intimidation by bribed law enforcement authorities.

International slave trafficking is illegal, and has been so for some 200 years now. It's so illegal that it's one of the few crimes whose perpetrators are considered "hostes humanis generis" --- enemies of all humanity --- in international legalese. Slave traffickers, like maritime pirates, may under international law be arrested and punished by any country that can lay hands on them.

It's not an improper stretch to treat Internet traffickers in child pornography as modern-day international slave traders. Certainly it's far less of a stretch than many of the legal contortions that Sossa has used in his attempts to criminalize a large minority of Panama's journalists.

Those who deal in kiddie porn, whether as traffickers or as consumers, are also principals in the crime of sexual assault, a most extraditable offense throughout the world. Whether we may want to say that the crime took place in Panama because its products were uploaded onto the Internet here, or may want to act as a matter of reciprocal cooperation with other jurisdictions, there are applicable national laws on the books.

The bottom line is that if the leaders of Panama's law enforcement and judicial systems throw up their hands and say "No se puede" in the face of international calls for cooperation in the fight against the global trade in child pornography, it should be turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. They should be made personally unable to act, by way of losing their jobs. There is no valid legal basis for any claim that Panama can't act against Internet child pornography, and any public official who asserts such a claim is by that act unworthy of the office that he or she holds.

The elimination of such attitudes from our government should not be driven by mere outrage over a particularly ugly criminal case. Although rejection of international law may be de rigueur among those who find it necessary to ape every trend coming from Washington, it's a self-destructive attitude for the Crossroads of the World. Panama can't afford to give up on international law because our crucial maritime and financial industries depend upon it.

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