All but about 20 of the 295 pre-Columbian gold and ceramic artifacts stolen from the Reina Torres de Araúz Anthropology Museum last February have been recovered, after man tried to sell them to an undercover detective at the Niko's restaurant on Calle 50. The artifacts, many of them more than 1000 years old, were carried in a duffel bag and some of them were damaged by their rough handling. The man who brought the bag to the restaurant for the arranged sale and two residents of a house in San Miguelito where the stolen artifacts are said to have been kept were arrested, bringing the number of people jailed in the case to 13. Two Colombian men are being sought in connection with the robbery, and it appears that the investigation of precisely how high in the National Institute of Culture (INAC) the conspiracy reached is ongoing.

Lida Agüero, the Moscoso administration's anti-drug chief for Darien province, is in jail without bail after having been arrested along with attorney Adis Staff and one José Manuel Echevers Martínez for arms trafficking. It is alleged that the three, probably with accomplices who have not been arrested, attempted to sell a small arsenal of AK-47 assault rifles to the right-wing Colombian AUC paramilitary. It turned out, however, that their death squad contact was an undercover Panamanian cop.

The Colombian government has demanded, and Panama has agree to, the movement of four Panamanian police border outposts. Colombia says that the structures encroach on its territory, and given that it's just a matter of a few meters, Panama has decided not to argue. Colombia has in recent years been involved in border disputes with almost all of its neighbors, and that's not counting death squad raids into Panama, Venezuela and Ecuador by the AUC paramilitary that works closely with the Colombian Army. Colombia's most raucous border disputes are maritime, most especially with Nicaragua. Colombia owns San Andres and several other islands in the Caribbean Sea and claims a 200 mile radius around each point of land as its territorial waters. Most of Colombia's land boundaries are in remote and poorly mapped areas over which neither the Bogota authorities nor the governments of neighboring nations exercise much control. The current flap over the Panamanian police posts apparently does not indicate any significant assertion of land claims by either government, but rather a claim that somebody's a little bit mistaken about where the imaginary line runs through the jungle.

One of the constants in Colombia's long-running civil conflict is that neither side shows much respect for the autonomy of the indigenous communities in and around which much of the fighting takes place. Now the community of Arquia, a Kuna village of about 380 people located in Colombia along the banks of the Atrato River, has formally asked the Kuna General Congress to let them move to Kuna Yala, citing the terror in which they live within Colombia. Kuna communities in Colombia have traditionally maintained ties with their counterparts in Panama, and the Kuna General Congress has expressed its willingness to take in Kunas who are displaced by war. However, Panama's national government is likely to have other opinions on the subject.

When the Legislative Assembly passed a financial crimes law earlier this year, President Moscoso vetoed it. She called it "inconvenient" and protested that a section that would have made it a crime for a person to amass inexplicable wealth while holding public office amounted to unfair discrimination against politicians. The problem is that Panama is committed by the Inter-American Anti-Corruption Convention to make inexplicable enrichment by public officials illegal. (You folks in the United States need not worry --- the politicians in Washington haven't and won't ratify this treaty.) Back in the Panamanian legislature, meanwhile, Arnulfista deputy José Isabel Blandón proposed a new version, which would provide that there can be no investigation of public corruption unless the person making the complaint provides "summary proof" that would make an investigation unnecessary. Attorney General José Antonio Sossa is complaining that this would tie his hands, but given his years of hesitating to investigate corruption even when it's obvious and notorious, the public is not rallying behind him on this issue. However, the editorial pages of the daily newspapers and radio and television commentary have been most unkind to Blandón and the Arnulfistas over the proposal.

Gustavo García de Paredes will be back for a third time as the University of Panama’s rector. Winning about 47 percent of the weighted votes of students, professors and non-teaching university personnel, he easily beat incumbent Julio Vallarino and former Comptroller General and ARI director José Chen Barría, who nearly evenly split the rest of the votes. The university is a political universe unto itself, and a lot of political patronage was at stake. Both García de Paredes and Vallarino are PRD members, and each had various of the rival student leftist factions supporting them. Vallarino was hampered by a budget crisis caused by the national government’s budget cuts last year and his unwillingness to reduce university spending accordingly. The day before the election Arnulfista Comptroller General Alvin Weeden released the “findings” of an “investigation” that blamed Vallarino for the budget shortfall.

There are 620 delegates to the June 22 Arnulfista convention in Penonome that will choose their party's presidential candidate. On May 14, the party's Elections Committee passed a new rule, requiring that to have his name considered by the convention, each of the three hopefuls would have to garner the signatures of 150 delegates beforehand. The new rule was a surprise to candidates Marco Ameglio and Víctor Juliao. However, apparently not to their rival José Miguel Alemán. For three days before the rule was announced, Chiriqui party leader Einar Fanovich was collecting signatures from delegates in his province, Juliao alleges. Then, as Ameglio and Juliao began to sign up delegates, those who signed were threatened with being fired from their government jobs, or with having their family members fired from their government jobs. Ameglio and Juliao cried foul, with the latter running ads in which one delegate accused deputy Customs director Eustiquio Vergara of coming to her home to pressure her to drop her support of Juliao. Alemán refuses to discuss his opponents' charges of arm twisting.

Returning from a vacation in Cuba on May 22, Chiriqui Governor Miguel Angel Fanovich said he won't file a complaint alleging that a group of Panamanian and Spanish citizens whom he had honored altered his resolution to turn it into a permit to hunt in the Amistad International Park. On the face of it, Fanovich exceeded his authority and broke the nation's environmental laws by giving the men a permit to hunt in the park, but when the story broke he said that the document had been altered and then took off for Cuba for two weeks. Fanovich, like all governors a presidential appointee, remains in his post and Mireya doesn't appear to be asking any of the obvious questions.

Prosecutor Cristóbal Arboleda has dropped an investigation into the conduct of three PTJ detectives who were accused by Daniel Julio, a witness to the assassination of Panama's consul in Ecuador, of using threats to force him to alter his statements about the ambush slaying. Manuel Ciérvides Lacayo, the Panamanian consul general in Ecuador, was killed in a hail of bullets as he left his home in Las Cumbres during a visit here. Neither the persons who committed the crime nor their motive have been identified, but shortly after the murder police announced that Julio was involved and had identified others. However, Julio is somewhat mentally retarded and does not have the vocabulary skills to have made the statement that the PTJ attributed to him. Julio's lawyers filed the charge against three detectives who claimed that he had made the statement, but Arboleda said that a person's testimony that he was threatened and that false statements were made in his name does not amount to sufficient evidence to begin an investigation. Meanwhile, the public is in the dark about why the consul and close friend of President Moscoso would have attracted the attention of gangland-style killers.

The Supreme Court has decided to consider the Truth Commission's petition to reopen the case of Rubén Miró Guardia, who was murdered and found by the side of the road in Chepo on New Year's Eve of 1969. The Truth Commission that has been investigating politically motivated slayings and disappearances during the dictatorship had asked that the case be reopened, as they had found further evidence. However, Attorney General José Antonio Sossa said that because more than 30 years had gone by the statute of limitations would apply. By the terms of a treaty to which Panama is a party there is no limitation in cases of forced disappearance, and the commission argues that when someone is abducted and left dead by the side of the road by government forces that comes within the ambit of the treaty. Sossa has come up with a number of excuses to refuse all requests to conduct formal investigations of crimes committed by the dictatorship.

The Electoral Tribunal has ordered the removal of the Moscoso administration's public works director for Veraguas province, Roderick Cornejo Brugiatti, after finding probable cause to believe that he was using government assets to favor Arnulfistas. Cornejo Brugiatti says it's not true and blames his trouble on PRD legislator Pedro Miguel González, who had complained.

In a "controversy" that lasted a few days, it was announced in Caracas that Miss Venezuela wouldn't be attending the Miss Universe pageant here because her country's economic and political crisis would not allow it. The Venezuelan part of Miss Universe is owned by Gustavo Cisneros, the billionaire golfing and fishing buddy of former US president George H. W. Bush and owner of the Miami-based Univision cable network and the Venezuelan Venevision TV network. Venevision has for most of the past year stopped taking commercial advertising, as part of the opposition's attempt to shut down the Venezuelan economy. In April of 2002, Venevision urged viewers to march on the presidential palace and overthrow president Hugo Chávez, and after a violence broke Chávez was abducted and a would-be Chamber of Commerce-military junta briefly declared itself to be in power. Here in Panama the commercial media reported the Cisneros organization's claim that Miss Venezuela couldn't attend because of currency export controls imposed by the government, without mentioning Cisneros's role in the dispute or noting that in fact the billionaire with ample assets already outside Venezuela was by no means too broke to send his candidate to the pageant. Within Venezuela opposition media blamed Chávez for ruining Venezuela's Miss Universe hopes, while Chávez supporters sneered at the political ploy. In the end it seemed that most Venezuelans were not convinced by Cisneros's tactic and Miss Venezuela flew to Panama in a private plane to sign in for the competition after all.

Three men and a woman accused of stealing $45,000 in cash and jewelry from the freezer of presidential secretary Dalvis Xiomara Sánchez have been given prison sentences ranging from 14 to 17 months. Three others who were accused were acquitted. President Moscoso has been indignant about media speculation over why her secretary would be keeping what's possibly more than a year's salary in cash in her freezer. We don't know what Sánchez's salary is because under Mireya's "have an interest in knowing" regulation that effectively nullifies the Transparency Law, the public is denied information on what Ministry of the Presidency employees make, or even who they are. Sánchez said that the money was her life's savings and that she doesn't believe in banks. It is not a crime to keep large amounts of money in a freezer, but if anyone without the right political connections is discovered doing so it would generally lead to a money laundering investigation, being a suspect financial transaction that could be related to a crime such as, for example, the bribery of public officials. Prosecutors, however, took Sánchez at her word and did not open an investigation about the provenance of the money.

Over the past two weeks heavy rain isolated more than 10,000 people from the rest of the country for several days at a time, mostly in the Atlantic side provinces of Bocas del Toro and Colon. The worst of it was in Bocas, where the Sixaola River overflowed its banks and landslides cut the road between Almirante and Rambala. In Colon province the rains made the dirt road along the Costa Abajo impassable in places.

Laurentino Cortizo, the Solidaridad legislator for the single-member coastal circuit 3-2 of Colon, has announced that he won't seek reelection. He's popular in his district, but he doesn't agree with Solidaridad's nomination of Guillermo Endara as its presidential candidate. In the legislature he has aligned himself with the PRD while the other two deputies from his party have usually voted with the Arnulfistas. If Martín Torrijos becomes the next president, Cortizo would be a likely suspect for an important appointment in the new administration.

As had been expected, Panama City Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro has officially entered the PRD primary to be the party's nominee for another term as mayor. Flanked by Martín Torrijos and other party leaders, Navarro filed his papers on May 20 and expressed confidence that he'd beat the Arnulfista candidate in the general election. He may face a primary challenge first, but most likely not a strong one. The most commonly mentioned opponents are legislator Sergio Gálvez, the man with the worst attendance record in the assembly, and legislator Marco Ameglio, who may get the Arnulfista mayoral nod instead of Gálvez if as expected he is not chosen as the party's presidential candidate. The biggest question mark in the mayoral race is whether the woman Navarro defeated, Mayín Correa, will stage a comeback bid. Some of the smaller parties may also field different candidates. Current polls show Navarro leading Gálvez by a narrow margin, but mayoral politics can be quite volatile.

The PRD's National Executive Committee has decided not to hold primaries for several legislative seats, and to leave suplente posts open in some races, so that its allies the Partido Popular (former Christian Democrats) will have a better chance to pick up a few seats in the assembly. There will be no PRD legislative candidate in Panama's single-member circuit 8-3 (San Carlos and Chame) and the party won't run full slates in the multi-member circuits 8-1 (Arraijan), 8-6 (San Miguelito), 8-8 (Betania and Pueblo Nuevo) and 8-10 (Las Cumbres). In most other provinces some suplente nominations are being left open so that PRD legislative candidates can have Partido Popular running mates. Some members of the PRD old guard have voiced their displeasure with the alliance, but for now Martín Torrijos has the votes and the two old enemies and recent allies will go into the 2004 elections together.

Of course, according to the Mireyistas neither of them is a "real Arnulfista," but banker Alberto Vallarino, a nephew of Arnulfo Arias with roots in the party bearing his uncle's name, has as expected announced his support for Solidaridad presidential nominee Guillermo Endara, who was a protege of Arnulfo Arias and a founder of the Arnulfista Party. This time last year, Endara had expected to be announcing his support for Vallarino's candidacy, but Vallarino dropped his 2004 presidential aspirations. The endorsement means three main things: first, it adds substantial new financial resources to the Endara campaign; second, it accelerates the subtle but real and massive movement of rank-and-file Arnulfistas away from the Mireyista camp and into Endara's; and third, it brings a number of non-Arnulfistas who backed Vallarino's 1999 "third force" campaign into the Endara organization.

Prosecutors have petitioned Panama's Second Penal Tribunal to try Marco Manjarrez for murder in the stabbing death of Monsignior Jorge Altafulla. The fact that Manjarrez killed the Catholic cleric is not in dispute, but the accused man's state of mind at the time is. Manjarrez, who has sometimes blamed Altafulla for problems in his life, suffers from severe mental disturbances and has attempted suicide several times while in jail awaiting trial.

Benny Hinn, the white-suited American faith healer, claims to make the crippled walk, but he doesn't make trash go away. At a recent revival at the National Stadium Hinn worked such miracles as he could muster, but left behind a lot of trash for the athletes who practice on the field to remove or dodge. Hinn's worldly contract with the stadium called for him to clean up afterwards, but apparently the Lord didn't provide for the laying on of enough hands to pick up the trash.

Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
Endara at Excedra Books
Misguided way to punish a hated monopoly

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