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Having crushed Noriega's slate by something like a three-to-one margin in May of 1989 (due to the former military strongman's efforts to steal as many ballot boxes as possible, nobody knows the precise vote count) and then finished his term in office in 1994 with voter approval ratings hovering just a bit over 20 percent, Guillermo Endara is on the comeback trail. On March 16 delegates to the Solidaridad national convention nominated him as their standard bearer for next year's presidential election.

Endara is not a member of Solidaridad, but rather one of the founders, and as this story was written, members, of the Arnulfista Party. However, after a stealthy campaign by Solidaridad legislators and Arnulfista activists to block Endara's nomination came to naught, the venom from the Arnulfista heirarchy began to flow freely. Part of the reason for that, other than the insult to President Moscoso's personal control over the party and movement that bears her late husband's name, is that polls suggest that most rank-and-file Arnulfistas would vote for Endara rather than the nominee of Mireya's choice.

And so the following day former Foreign Minister José Miguel Alemán, the leading "approved" presidential hopeful --- a Dichter & Neira poll taken the week before Endara was nominated showed that were the voting held then, Alemán would have received 7.2 percent of the vote, to Endara's 27.3 percent and Martín Torrijos's 44 percent, but were the Arnulfista nominee Víctor Juliao or Marco Ameglio the rout would have been even worse --- went into attack mode. Alemán went on RPC-TV's "Debate Abierto" morning talk show and accused Endara of corruption in connection with the failure of Banco DISA, whose crash is reverberating through the Panamanian courts.

The first problem with that allegation is that Endara had nothing to do with the creation, ownership or management of Banco DISA. (If you want to get into matters of questionable public policy with respect to Banco DISA, you may want to go back several decades to its creation, which was accomplished with the financial backing of the US government, but that's another story.) Alemán was calling Endara a crook because during his administration the state-owned Caja de Ahoros savings and loan institution deposited some of its funds in Banco DISA.

The second problem with that purported scandal is that after Endara left office, the Pérez Balladares and Moscoso administrations kept those deposits in Banco DISA. Because transparency is not one of the attributes of the Moscoso administration, we can't say for sure that as a member of the Cabinet Council Alemán never raised objections to the deposit of Caja de Ahorros funds in Banco DISA - -- but so far no public record of such a thing has come to light.

A third weakness in Alemán's case is the fact that, given the assets recovered in Banco DISA's liquidation and the Caja de Ahorros's priority among the late bank's creditors, none of the funds that the public institution has deposited have been or will be lost.

In the culture of Panamanian news media, when a former government minister calls a former president a crook, that's usually treated as newsworthy. However, Alemán's charge was so specious that media with partisan alignments that give them reason to trash Endara wouldn't touch the story.

The next wave of the Arnulfista attack came in moves to expel him from the party. Mireya said that accepting the Solidaridad nomination is incompatible with remaining a member of the Arnulfista Party, and called on Endara to resign from the party. He wouldn't budge. So charges were drawn up before the Arnulfista disciplinary body and on March 27 a delegation was dispatched to Endara's home, to serve notice of an impending purge trial.

Endara says that the party delegation forced its way into his home, and vows to sue its members for that. Meanwhile, a political trial before the followers of an unpopular president is likely to boost Endara several more points in the polls.

The main beneficiary of all of this is Martín Torrijos, who appeared to be winning the PRD presidential primary as this story was being written. The PRD has never commanded a majority in a presidential election, but with three or four candidates in the race 44 percent is the stuff of which resounding victories are made. (The fourth man is likely to be supermarket baron and former Canal Affairs Minister Ricardo Martinelli, who is likely to be locked in a contest with Mireya's Arnulfista nominee for third place.)

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