editorial

As this issue was being uploaded the Arnulfista Party, the overwhelming majority of whose convention delegates hold government jobs, was picking its presidential candidate. Mireya has anointed José Miguel Alemán, and he will be the candidate.

Before the president officially picked her man, Alemán rammed a last-minute convention rule through the party’s national committee, wherein any candidate who wanted to be considered by the convention would have to obtain the signatures of at least 150 of the 620 delegates. Even before the committee passed this regulation, Alemán operatives were out collecting signatures. After the rule was approved, top Moscoso administration officials went around to delegates, telling them that they and their relatives would lose their jobs if they signed for any candidate other than Alemán.

Víctor Juliao cried foul and filed a complaint with the Electoral Tribunal. The case threatened to nullify whatever happened at the convention.

So when picking her candidate, Mireya quashed the signature rule and told delegates that there would be no retaliation against those who support Juliao or Marco Ameglio.

So does that make everything OK?

Maybe from a strictly legal point of view it might, but if the choice of who becomes our next president is to be a matter of law that’s cause for concern. The will of the people, not the opinions of lawyers and judges, should be the most important factor in a democratic process. If it’s the other way around, and especially so given the corrupt legal system we have here, then the issue becomes election fraud, an illegitimate government and several years of chaos and violence.

But that’s a worst case scenario, because it would take a monumental fraud, worse than the one that Noriega pulled in 1984 and even the one that he tried to pull in 1989, to make Alemán the next president of Panama.

Actually, Alemán’s petty little signature ploy has clarified things for the voters better than any campaign speech that he or his opponents might make.

What kind of a man pushes through a last-minute rule change and sends out government officials to threaten people who oppose him? A man who abuses power.

Abuse of power is the principal plank in the Mireyista platform, and now the only remaining question is how badly the voters will punish them for this.

ACourage means going against majority opinion in the name of the truth.

Vaclav Havel

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

Oscar Wilde

If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.

Edith Wharton

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