No big deal. It's just a decapitated corpse on the beach at Jaque. Though it's prima facie evidence of an atrocious murder encountered within Panamanian territory, it's not Panama's problem.

At least, that's how the Moscoso administration wants us to think about it.

National Police Chief Carlos Barés discounted the possibility that a murder bearing the hallmark of Colombia's AUC paramilitary happened in Panama. He reached that conclusion because nobody had filed a missing person report in Panama. "You have to understand that the marine currents, which are very strong, above all at this time of the year when there's a lot of wind, can carry the body of a person who could have died in Colombia, or even Ecuador," Barés told reporters. Repeated AUC incursions into Panama over several years, attacks that have resulted in the deaths of several people, didn't figure in the chief's theory of the crime. Although an autopsy would readily determine if the body had in fact drifted here by sea, Barés said that there are no resources for that.

Barés's superior, Government and Justice Minister Arnulfo Escalona, said at an appearance in Boquete that there's nothing out of the ordinary going on in the eastern part of the Darien. "It has been determined that Panama's border with Colombia is calm," he declared.

Escalona also used the occasion to hail the AUC's announcement of a cease-fire that purportedly began on December 1 as a step toward peace in neighboring Colombia. On December 10 at least 13 people were killed in an AUC offensive against a FARC-held area in Cordoba province, not far from Panama.

Over the past few months the AUC and Colombian Army have been on the offensive along the Panamanian border, trying so far without definitive success to dislodge the leftist FARC guerrillas from Jurado. Nobody has an accurate count of how many people have crossed the border into Panama to flee the fighting. Many of these refugees --- most of whom are non-combatant women and children --- fear that Panamanian authorities will turn them over to the people from whom they fled. Almost all of them have heard that officials here consider them undesirable at best. But still, mostly in small groups, mostly over jungle trails, they come.

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) reported earlier this year that as of the end of 2001 there were nearly 900 Colombian refugees in Panama, only 85 of whom had been recognized as refugees by the government here. The UNHCR alleged that last year "Panamanian authorities forcibly returned more than 400 Colombians who may have been asylum seekers." The Moscoso administration's treatment of Colombians who flee to Panama, according to the UN agency, "falls short of international standards." Panama is faulted for not having any objective standards about who is and who is not a refugee, and for refusing to allow the UNHCR access to displaced Colombians.

The day after Barés discounted the significance of the body found in Jaque, Escalona announced that a team of US military advisors had arrived here for the purpose of training Panamanian cops in jungle warfare techniques at the former Fort Sherman. The situation along the border with Colombia was cited as the reason why such training is needed.

Father Conrado Sanjur, the radical priest who heads the Popular Human Rights Coordinator of Panama (COPODEHUPA), told The Panama News that although authorities try to limit displaced Colombians' access to non-governmental organizations like his, "we're aware of the problem and we do what we can to follow the situation." Sanjur described the official Panamanian position as one of denial. "Now, and under the prior government, they deny there's a problem, then say that the problem is under control, then send special forces. This indicates that they don't have the situation under control."

"There's a regular flow" of refugees, Sanjur claimed, "sometimes massive, sometimes individuals, but more or less constant." COPODEHUPA is against Panama's policy of immediate deportation because, the priest argued, the Colombian government promises protection for those who are sent back but fails to comply.

According to Sanjur and most of his opponents in the refugee policy debate as well, the Colombian influx has aggravated social and economic problems in an already impoverished border area. "There's already too much unmet demand for schools and health care," he said, and the presence of hundreds of Colombians who are not allowed to work and have few ways to occupy their time "makes the locals uncomfortable."

Many indigenous families have members on both sides of the border, and sometimes people fleeing from Colombia are taken in by relatives in Panama. According to both Sanjur and Embera leaders with whom The Panama News has spoken, in those cases police are quick to accuse indigenous communities of hiding guerrillas.

The frequent allegation that Embera, Wounaan and Kuna communities near the Colombian border support the leftist guerrillas has as part of its basis a long history of commercial ties between these villages and the FARC rebels, who have come into Panama to shop for groceries and rest between military campaigns. FARC has also occasionally indulged in criminal activity in Panama, for example the 1993 kidnappings and subsequent murders of three American missionaries who were working in the Darien Kuna village of Pucuro.

The AUC's most massive and overt incursions into Panama have been for the announced purpose of denying their FARC adversaries the use of this country as a source of supplies and a refuge. The paramilitaries have been largely successful in accomplishing this aim over the past few years. In the course of the AUC's raids into Panama, they have burned down the Kuna Yala village of La Bonga, vandalized schools, health clinics and a Catholic church in the Darien, threatened Panamanian police and killed several individuals, all of them Colombians who had fled across the border. A common paramilitary modus operandi, not practiced by the guerrillas, is to behead or otherwise mutilate the bodies of their victims.

Though they emphatically deny claims that it's due to AUC pressure, Panamanian police have been trying to disrupt the old relationship between this country's indigenous communities and the FARC. Part of this effort has been the establishment of police posts in remote border area villages.

The increased police presence has led to a new set of problems, an emblem of which was the shooting death earlier this year of Ayda Chirimia, a 13-year-old Embera girl in the Darien village of Biroquera. Chirimia was shot by a single bullet from a machine gun at a National Police outpost in the village, under circumstances that rule out suicide or self-inflicted accident. The police all deny any knowledge of what happened, the weapon in question had been vandalized to render its firing pin inoperable, and the PTJ announced the result of its "investigation" --- the gun must have fallen and gone off of its own volition, so the police aren't responsible --- before conducting "scientific" tests aimed at "proving" the conclusion reached in advance. Thus in Biroquera, as in other communities, the spillover of Colombia's civil conflict has aggravated relations between Panama's government and indigenous ethnic groups.

For Father Sanjur, there's a systematic political tilt in place. "The guerrillas are automatically blamed," he said, "but the paramilitaries are active, not only in the Darien, but throughout Panama."

The government would have a hard time denying AUC activity in Panama. Police have repeatedly seized of arms bound for the AUC, and have foiled some but not all of several paramilitary attempts to steal aircraft here. In one thwarted helicopter theft, a Colombian consular employee was implicated.

Despite the occasional arrests, prosecutions tend to be lax when the AUC appears to be involved. In the biggest series of raids that Panamanian law enforcement has claimed against the AUC, which took place in June of 2001 and in which a skydiving school in Chame, airplanes at Albrook, homes and offices in Panama City and a farm in Veraguas were seized, the charges were quietly dropped on Christmas Eve of last year, when few people were paying attention.

More recently US Attorney General John Ashcroft announced "Operation White Terror," wherein it was claimed that an international plot by which the AUC planned to trade drugs for weapons had been broken up by an multinational law enforcement sting. Meetings involving alleged AUC supply operatives were secretly videotaped in London, the Virgin Islands and Panama, and at least three people have been arrested here in connection with the alleged conspiracy. The alleged plan was to exchange $25 million worth of cocaine for 9,000 AK-47 assault rifles, 300 pistols, a number of grenade launchers, 300,000 grenades, several rocket launchers and 53 million rounds of ammunition.

That sting and other Panamanian raids on the AUC notwithstanding, another ongoing international scandal calls the Moscoso administration's true policy regarding the paramilitary group into question.

In November of 2001 a huge shipment of AK-47 assault rifles and other military equipment made its way from Nicaraguan police arsenals to the AUC through the Colombian port of Turbo. On paper, the arms were sold by the Nicaraguan police to the Panamanian police, using Israeli arms merchants as middlemen. The US ambassador in Nicaragua, Oliver Garza, admits to approving the deal but claims that he was deceived into believing that the weapons were actually destined for Panama. National Police Chief Carlos Barés says that the documents implicating Panama were forged, but Panamanian cooperation with the Organization of American States investigation into the affair has been less than complete. The OAS's final report has been delayed several times, with investigators citing problems obtaining documents from the governments of Panama and Nicaragua. More recently Panama arrested Shimon Yelinek, one of the Israeli arms merchants implicated, but, allegedly because Yelinek has challenged his arrest in court, Panamanian authorities have not permitted OAS investigator Morris Busby to interview him.

Thus more questions are raised than answered when a corpse bearing the hallmarks of an AUC execution is found in Panama and the police don't seem to think that it's their problem.