The Arnulfista Party's Directorate decided at an April 30 meeting that the party's presidential candidate will be chosen at a June 22 party convention in Penonome. Candidates Víctor Juliao and José Miguel Alemán are members of the 27- member committee that voted unanimously to adopt that procedure. There will be 620 delegates to the convention, who have already been chosen. The most important delegate, Mireya Moscoso, has yet to name her favorite. It seems that one of the three hopefuls, legislator Marco Ameglio, has depleted his campaign coffers, but the Juliao and Alemán campaigns are highly visible on TV and in the streets. The most important politicking now, however, is mostly behind-the-scenes lobbying and canvassing.

For the first time ever, there has been a Panamanian criminal conviction for violence committed in connection with the spillover of Colombia's civil war into this country. The criminal court for Darien province has sentenced José Zayas, Víctor Hernández and Teófilo Carillo, all Colombians and alleged by prosecutors to be members of the left-wing FARC guerrilla army, to 14-year prison terms for the 1999 kidnappings of Domingo Samaniego and Alexis Ortiz. A Panamanian accomplice, Miguel Santizo, got a five-year term for delivering ransom demands in connection with the abductions. Ortiz was freed after a ransom demand was paid, while Samaniego has never been freed. Special Prosecutor Cristóbal Arboleda said that the convictions were "a clear message" to Colombia's insurgents. By some accounts, the three Colombians who were convicted were freelance thugs rather than guerrillas operating under FARC's command, who kidnapped their victims and then sold them to FARC, which then held the men for ransom. Since the early 90s Panama has seen a string of kidnappings, assaults, murders and robberies by leftist FARC guerrillas, rightist AUC paramilitary and apolitical "bandolero" gangs who have crossed the border from Colombia and raided the Darien and Kuna Yala. Even before such violence began, Panama was used as a Colombian rebel supply route and resting area.

President Moscoso has offered political asylum to a Cuban man who was caught by the US Coast Guard just short of landing on Key Largo, Florida in a makeshift boat. After the announcement security was stepped up at the Panamanian Embassy in Havana to prevent a flood of asylum seekers. Although economic conditions are grim in Cuba and the Castro government has unleashed its most severe wave of repression against dissidents in several decades, it seems that few Cubans want to flee to Panama.

The Second Superior Tribunal has rejected another petition for bail on behalf of anti-Castro activists Luis Posada Carriles, Guillermo Novo, Pedro Crispin Remón and Gaspar Jiménez Escobedo, who have been held in preventive detention since November 2000 on various charges arising from an alleged plot to kill Fidel Castro during an appearance the Cuban dictator made at the University of Panama. In the long-running legal wrangling the activists' trial has been delayed several times, the most serious charges have been dismissed but then that decision has been appealed, and groups that hosted Castro have sought to bring private charges under the theory that the bombing that was allegedly contemplated would have killed and injured their members too. The suspects say that they were set up by the Cuban government, which they say lured them to Panama with a bogus tale of a Castro aide who wanted to defect and then planted explosives on them. The Cuban government and the groups bringing the private charges against the accused say that there was a very real plot to set off a massive explosion during Castro's appearance and that Panamanian prosecutors are dragging their feet in the case. The charge of plotting to kill Castro was thrown out after it turned out that a component of a detonating system was not in the evidence.

US authorities have handed the captain and 11 crew members of a Panama-flag ship, all of them Chinese citizens, over to Panama for prosecution in a case arising from an assault on Dominican stowaways en route to Houston. The incident, in which stowaways from the Dominican Republic were beaten and thrown overboard from the freighter Well Pescadores, apparently took place in international waters and resulted in three deaths. The survivors were picked up by a Liberian-flag ship headed to Miami, leading to the arrest of the 22-member crew in Houston. After an investigation by the US Coast Guard, the FBI and Panama's Judicial Technical Police (PTJ), the Chinese-owned ship's captain and 11 crew members were handed to Panama for prosecution and the other sailors on the ship were exonerated. Under the US Constitution and current practices, the accused could have been tried and punished in the United States. The People's Republic of China or the Dominican Republic might also have claimed jurisdiction, based on the citizenship of the accused or the victims. However, as the crime was alleged to have taken place aboard a Panamanian-flag ship in international waters, Panama got the case. Here the accused will face harsh prison conditions and a dysfunctional legal system, but unlike in the United States or China they will not be subject to the death penalty.

At an April 25 meeting the Kuna General Congress demanded the political unification of the three existing Kuna comarcas --- Kuna Yala, Madungandi and Wargandi --- along with Kuna communities outside of the comarcas like the Darien towns of Paya and Pucuro under the umbrella of a single Kuna national government. Their resolution argued that Kuna country was a contiguous whole before Spaniards in search of gold dispersed its people. In addition to the comarcas and the villages in the Darien, there are now substantial urban Kuna communities, particularly in Panama City's Kuna Nega and in Arraijan.

Immigration Director Ilka de Barés and her legal aide Luis Adolfo Corró, stung by recent criticism by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees for its treatment of Colombia's who flee their country's civil war by crossing into Panama, have hit back with allegations that it's really the non- governmental organizations that are causing the problem. Alleging a plot to undermine the government, on a Radio Caracol program Corró said that NGOs are trying to exclude the Panamanian government from the process of assisting refugees. "Everyone wants to stick his hand into the Darien," Barés complained, alleging that NGOs excluded Immigration representatives from a seminar about the problem. The Moscoso administration's de facto immigration policy is to repatriate Colombians fleeing from the right wing AUC paramilitaries and tolerate those fleeing from the left wing FARC guerrillas.

If you get caught in Panama carrying a firearm for which you have no permit, you can be penalized by up to a maximum of a $200 fine. Arnulfista legislator Francisco Ameglio thinks that in light of all the carnage that's too light a penalty, and has proposed a measure to drastically increase the sanctions, with prison terms of up to seven years for illegal weapons possession. Ameglio's proposal would also limit the number of guns a person could own and make the process of getting a permit more difficult.

President Moscoso has added to the public controversy over the presidential beach house at Punta Mala by announcing that she's interested in buying it. The building, former US military officers' housing that was built in the World War II era and improved at public expense after its acquisition at the beginning of the Moscoso administration, is on land that the president says was expropriated from her grandfather before she was born. The president or her relatives have also acquired much of the adjacent property, which is on the Pacific coast of Los Santos near Pedasi. Shortly after the property was acquired, it was announced that it would be sold. That was two and one-half years ago, but no details of any sale process have yet to be announced. What skeptics want to know is whether there will be a fair and transparent bidding process and whether Mireya will get right of first refusal.

Ten cops who were taking classes to become detectives at the Judicial Technical Police academy have been fired for cheating. PTJ Secretary General Gustavo Barragán says they were caught using cheat sheets on an investigative theory exam.

The presidential Truth Commission investigating slayings and disappearances by the former military dictatorship and Attorney General Sossa are continuing their long-running war of words. Alberto Almanza, the president of the office set up to follow up on the commission's findings, called Sossa's decision to block murder investigations in the cases of 20 individuals whose remains were uncovered from clandestine graves "shameful," while Sossa said that the commission has no legal standing. Sossa's underlings have over the past few years manifested their attitude by mingling and mishandling forensic evidence uncovered by the Truth Commission in front of television cameras, and by using bogus DNA "evidence" to try to discredit the commission's identification of some of the remains.

The Asociacion Amigos de Animales is being sternly criticized for putting unwanted dogs and cats to sleep at its animal shelter, in particular for killing a number of cats on Holy Thursday. The group, which has a contract to pick up stray animals in San Miguelito, lacks the space and funds to keep animals for very long and can't find enough homes for all the strays that come in. Part of its public relations problem has been a hesitancy to admit that it kills unwanted animals. It's a philosophical dilemma faced by Humane Societies around the world, but in Panama economic and cultural factors have kept the public from facing up to the problems posed by booming stray cat and dog populations in the cities.

Panama Bay turned red on April 30, but it wasn't a fish-killing red tide algae bloom. It was actually and industrial spill, and fingers are being pointed at the Coca-Cola factory. It seems that it was an accidental release of a relatively harmless food coloring, for which the National Environmental Authority (ANAM) says a fine will be imposed once all the facts are determined.

The Panama Canal Authority complains that another of its hydrological measuring stations, this one on the Toabre River in Cocle province, has been destroyed. The commission suspects members of the Farmers' Coordinator Against the Reservoirs (CCCE), a group of local residents opposed to being displaced by plans to build a series of dams that would create a new lake for the Panama Canal.


Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
Chiriqui, Bocas governors in trouble
Tougher US immigration laws

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