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A June 10 presidential announcement put the lock on it, and all that lay in between José Miguel Alemán the Arnulfista nomination was a week and one-half of futile maneuvers and muted recriminations by his two intra-party opponents. When she announced her support for Alemán, President Moscoso also announced that the 150-signature requirement for candidates to be nominated at the June 22 party convention in Penonome had been waived in the face of a legal challenge brought for candidate Víctor Juliao. New objections arose about procedures at the convention, as an argument was made that the constitutional requirement of a secret ballot applies to party nominating conventions as well as to election. To avoid legal problems the vote was secret and went overwhelmingly Alemán's way, with the former foreign minister getting some 72 percent of the votes cast. Alemán is now the fourth candidate in the race, along with front runner Martín Torrijos of the PRD, Solidaridad nominee Guillermo Endara and Cambio Democratico leader Ricardo Martinelli.

Such were the percentages of the vote predicted, were the vote held then. A recent CID/Gallup poll published by El Panama America on June 16 showed PRD candidate Martín Torrijos with a big lead in the presidential race and Mireya's man locked in a fierce battle with Ricardo Martinelli for third place. A lot can change over the 10 months or so between now and the 2004 elections, but it looks like the race is Torrijos's to lose and that Alemán's main task will be to avoid a loss of ballot status by the Arnulfista Party.

One June 5 a worker running a backhoe at a sand pit in Penonome's La Candelaria de Río Grande neighborhood uncovered the remains of what appears to be a pre-Columbian building. The National Institute of Culture (INAC) has moved in to investigate the site and the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MICI) has halted sand mining on the site so that archaeological investigation can proceed. When the Spaniards conquered Cocle province they found it well populated by an agricultural society. Catholic missionaries established the oldest church on the mainland of the Americas at Nata, in one of that society's towns. The two best-known Coclean archaeological sites are El Caño, now an archaeological park, and Sitio Conte, now a cow pasture. The American scholars who explored these sites early in the 20th century took many of the artifacts they found out of Panama, and during the Pérez Balladares administration several priceless statues were taken from the museum at El Caño in a theft that appeared to be an inside job. So far neither the nature nor the date of the site in Penonome has been definitively identified.

On June 6 the nation's law enforcement air patrol, the Servicio Aereo Nacional (SAN), discovered a launch in the waters of eastern Kuna Yala, through which a lot of boatloads of Colombian drugs make their way north. The police strafed the vessel and asked questions later. It was one of Cable & Wireless's boats, on loan to the Electoral Tribunal, which was using it to distribute new cedulas to area residents. Aboard was the tribunal's director for Kuna Yala, Linda de Quijano. Nobody was hurt in the incident.

Attorney General José Antonio Sossa's feud with the Truth Commission created to investigate political repression during the military dictatorship reached new heights --- or depths, depending on how you want to look at it --- with a June 18 raid on the commission's offices in Balboa. Sossa's agents seized skeletal remains, evidence files and financial records, using a criminal complaint filed by Edwin Wald, a relative of one of the disappeared and like Sossa an old Christian Democratic (now Partido Popular) activist. Wald generically alleged that the commission had mismanaged public funds, and based on an unsubstantiated allegation of unrelated misconduct in the United States, accused Sandra Anderson, the handler of Eagle, the celebrated who can sniff out long-buried human remains, of planting the bones of disappeared activist Heliodoro Portugal beneath the grounds of the old Puma Infantry Company barracks in Tocumen for her dog to find. This latest move by Sossa, who has refused to prosecute or even investigate cases of murders and disappearances from the dictatorship era, was sternly denounced by the Hector Gallego Committee of Relatives of Panama's Disappeared (COFADEPA-HG).

In an order about which President Moscoso complained in advance, the Electoral Tribunal has prohibited political campaign at the inaugurations of public works projects. (Hmmmmm --- that's an odd concept, given what a ribbon cutting ceremony is.) The regulation was announced on June 23, and the day before in Penonome Mireya Moscoso complained that Ernesto Pérez Balladares was not subjected to similar restrictions. Over the past month or so much of the José Miguel Alemán presidential campaign has, in lieu of him speaking to people on behalf of his own candidacy, been a matter of the former foreign minister tagging along to appear at Mireya Moscoso's side as she inaugurates public works and hands out land titles.

The Legislative Assembly has passed on third and final reading a new version of a prison law President Moscoso vetoed last year. The legislation, if signed by the president, would reorganize prison administration, regulate visitation and work release practices and formally acknowledge that inmates retain certain rights.

Reporters Jean Marcel Chéry and Gustavo Aparicio went on trial on June 24 for reporting in El Panama America on a 4.6-kilometer rural road extension that served Supreme Court Magistrate Winston Spadafora and Comptroller General Alvin Weeden, whose farms near Gatun Lake it bypasses, and just four other individuals. Spadafora brought criminal defamation (calumnia e injuria) charges, although it's difficult to identify anything in the story that's claimed to be false, defamatory and about him in the case. Spadafora does claim that the reporters failed to talk to the Social Investment Fund (FIS) about the facts of the road project before publishing their story. Essentially the legal principle that Spadafora is attempting to establish here is that if the government refuses to talk about a story --- as officials of the Moscoso administration did in this case when Chéry and Aparicio asked about the road before the story appeared --- it's a crime to report it.

A group of anti-Castro activists accused of plotting to kill Fidel Castro during a November 2000 summit here will get their day in court on September 3. The charges of conspiring to kill Castro have been thrown out, but accusations of possession of illegal explosives and associating for illicit purposes are still pending. The Cuban government and attorneys for the groups that sponsored Castro's appearance at the University of Panama argue that Panamanian police and prosecutors have "taken a dive" on the most serious case by holding that since one part needed to set off the explosives was not found, there is no reason to believe that there was a plot to kill Castro and others who came to hear him speak. The defendants argue that they were framed, having been lured to Panama by false word that one of Castro's bodyguards wanted to defect and then set up with material planted by Cuban spies.

The Supreme Court has rejected a challenge to the contract between the government and Constructora Urbana SA (CUSA) to build a 14-kilometer road between Cerro Punta and Boquete, largely through the Volcan Baru National Park. The court didn't rule on the merits of the road, but said that the time to sue to block it is after the environmental impact studies are done and the definitive decision to proceed with construction is made.


Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
Martinelli's economic plan
The Arnulfista nominee

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