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In an unusual show of unity, former Presidents Arístides Royo, Nicolas Ardito Barletta, Guillermo Endara and Ernesto Pérez Balladares sent a letter to President Mireya Moscoso protesting plans to build a road through Volcan Baru National Park between Cerro Punta and Boquete. The letter, which was also signed by a number of former government ministers and other public figures, pointed out that the park has been recognized by the United Nations as an important biological asset.

At a May 28 meeting hosted by President Moscoso, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has signed a contract with the Hazen & Sawyer engineering firm to draw up plans for a new sanitary sewer system for the metro Panama City area. The project is financed by a $3.7 million loan from the Inter- American Development Bank and will be administered by the UNDP. The entire sewer and sewage treatment plant system would take 12 years or more to complete, but Mireya would like to get the work started under her administration. Panama City Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro, who attended the ceremony, said that it's a positive step for the city.

A proposal to take control over development in Coiba National Park away from the National Environmental Authority (ANAM) and give it to a board composed of four Moscoso cabinet members has passed on first reading in the Legislative Assembly, and then been held up after strong protests from virtually all of Panama's opposition groups and political figures from across the political spectrum with the exception of Mireya Moscoso's inner circle. The one group outside the Mireyista crowd to support the proposal is the nation's commercial fishing lobby, which wants access to the restricted areas around Coiba. The main point of the plan is to build large hotels and the suspicion is that the concessions will go to wealth individuals closely aligned with the Moscoso administration. However, the legislation would also allow logging, mining and other extractive industries in the park. The Coiba archipelago is home to a number of unique species and has the region's largest Pacific coral reefs. Many biologists say it's sensitive and cannot withstand large-scale development without sustaining serious damage.

Panama City Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro, in El Chorrillo to supervise a cleanup day on June 1, found his day's schedule disrupted by something out of the ordinary. Two rival youth gangs decided to shoot it out to determine who's turf that part of Calle 21 is, and the mayor was caught in the middle. A gang member and a city sanitation worker were wounded, and Navarro complained that the Moscoso administration devotes too few police resources to low- income neighborhoods like El Chorrillo.

It started on May 30, a few days before the Miss Universe pageant, with some street-blocking protests by university and high school students and labor activists. Then, to avoid further disruptions, President Moscoso and University of Panama rector Julio Vallarino called off school until after the pageant. On June 4, however, the Instituto Nacional and Artes y Oficios, the high schools most involved in the street fighting, did not reopen. They remained closed because the teachers stayed off the job, at the former school to protest alleged police brutality that left a student with a serious eye injury, at the latter to protest a lack of educational materials.

Having just signed a government-brokered land compromise with 45 families from the Interior who chopped farms out of lands ceded to the Embera communities of Arimae and Embera Puru when General Omar Torrijos was in power, the people of Arimae discovered that new invaders had come. Angry Arimae residents seized one of the invaders, who turned out to be a Colombian citizen, and subjected him to the Embera form of justice until the National Police arrived several hours later. Like all Embera communities Arimae has its cepo --- stocks made of two heavy logs with notches cut into them for the ankles of those confined. Dealing with outsiders is considered men's work in the Embera culture, but maintaining order in the village --- for example by ordering somebody confined to the stocks --- is the job of the women elders.

The San Judas Tadeo Hospital, a formerly private facility that was bought by the Social Security Fund, is now open and using six dialysis machines to purify the blood of patients suffering from kidney failure. The new facility came online shortly after Seguro's Arnulfo Arias Medical Center had announced that it could no longer accommodate new patients. As part of Panama's economic crisis, the private health care system has withered and demands on the public system have grown.

Entertainer and activist Rubén Blades says that he'll take a break from show business to come back to Panama next year and work for Martín Torrijos's presidential campaign. He appeared at a June 4 PRD forum on economic issues, and had previously he announced that if Torrijos is elected he would move back here and would be disposed to accept an appointment with the new government.

San Francisco representante Astrid Wolf, who was reelected as an independent and later joined Ricardo Martinelli's Cambio Democratico party, is now a Solidaridad party member. She quit the supermarket baron's party because she's supporting one of Martinelli's opponents in the 2004 presidential race, Guillermo Endara.

Businessman Samuel Lewis Galindo, who founded the Solidaridad party and was its 1994 presidential candidate, has touched off a row by saying that "from the President of the Republic Mireya Moscoso on down, there's a group of maleantes in government." The president and her ministers were quick to demand proof of specific crimes, and the Roman Catholic archbishop of Panama, José Dimas Cedeño, called on the politicians to be more dignified in their campaign rhetoric. Solidaridad presidential nominee Guillermo Endara, however, backed Lewis Galindo's assertion and said that the Moscoso administration's notorious corruption is giving Panama a bad international reputation.

Panama's consul in Vietnam, Plutarco Arrocha, has been fired from his lucrative post. Consuls get a percentage when sailors buy Panamanian seamen's papers or ships register under the Panamanian flag, so even though Vietnam and Panama have few commercial ties and there's not much of a Vietnamese community here, the consulate in Vietnam has done a brisk business. Arrocha, however, is thought to favor Guillermo Endara for president, and according to Vice-President Arturo Vallarino, that amounts to "conspiring against the government."

The Transparency International corruption index, based upon polls of how business people perceive things to be, says Panama is the 67th most corrupt country of 120 surveyed --- not as corrupt as Argentina, Venezuela, Nicaragua or Haiti, but worse than most other Latin American countries. The TI index is by its nature subjective, as data like convictions for acts of public corruption will not exist in the worst places, where a culture of impunity reigns.

The number of people under arrest is up to 28, two suspects are on the lam and the amount of money said to be taken is also growing in the National Bank of Panama (BNP) embezzlement affair. Bank employees had been diverting tax payments, giving taxpayers receipts with a forged seal, cashing their checks through private banks and splitting the money among themselves. There appear to be several spin control efforts underway to direct the political fallout from the scandal. BNP director Bolívar Pariente says that the bank management caught on to something fishy a year ago and took the matter to prosecutors, but because the checks passed through private banks it wasn't possible to detect the scope of the problem without alerting those involved and allowing them to cover their tracks. In a leak to La Prensa, someone close to the investigation indicated that the racket dated back to the 1990s. Former Administrative Prosecutor Donatilo Ballesteros, whose two sons are under arrest, had to step down from his own post at the bank when he came under question but has, according to newspaper reports that cited his lawyer as the source, been "exonerated" because one of those under arrest said that she never dealt with him. At latest leak the amount of money known to be missing from the national treasury is $800,000 but the figure is likely higher.

Some $8 million in deposits in the Panama branch of the GTC Bank have been frozen at the request of Guatemalan authorities. The money was paid into the Guatemalan social security fund, but corrupt public employees allegedly diverted the money to private accounts in the name of an offshore investment company in the Panamanian branch of the Guatemalan bank. In Guatemala it is alleged that some $30 million was stolen, but only $8 million of it was traced to Panama and frozen.

Just as the National Institute of Culture's (INAC's) Reina Torres de Arauz Anthropology Museum was getting set to reopen in the wake of last February's gold room heist, there was another theft from INAC. On June 2 someone broke into the offices of Historical Patrimony Director Carlos Fitzgerald, leaving a number of more valuable items but taking two computers. The theft, at INAC headquarters at Las Bovedas in the Casco Viejo, may have something to do with the investigation of the theft of nearly 300 priceless pre-Columbian artifacts from the anthropology museum. Most of the stolen huacas have now been recovered. Fitzgerald said that his computers had no information relevant to the case store in them.

There have been 478 malaria cases identified in the Ngobe-Bugle Comarca this year, nearly have of them in the few weeks since rainy season began. The Ministry of Health, fearing an epidemic, has dispatched 180 workers to the semi-autonomous indigenous region that encompasses nearly 10 percent of the national territory. Mostly the workers will be looking for and eliminating mosquito breeding places and conducting a public education campaign.

Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
Venezuelan Embassy presents the other side of the story
Horror on the way to Houston
Torrijos runs cautious campaign
Miss Universe 2003
Instability in Ecuador

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