Panama News Briefs

At least 5,800 Arraijan residents were forced to flee their homes on July 12 and 13, when heavy rains flooded them out. Although Panama usually has sunny weather when tropical storms gather in the Caribbean --- our rain clouds tend to get sucked into the storm systems and then dumped on someone else --- this time we caught the edge of a storm and had weather more typical of what we see in November. In Arraijan the problem was compounded by newer housing developments without proper drainage, people building in flood plains and sewers clogged with garbage.

On July 14 police confiscated a weapons cache that included 144 AK-47 assault rifles, 10 PKM machine guns and supplies of bullets and grenades from private property near the former military airstrip in Rio Hato. The arms were packed in plastic bags for shipping. Nobody has been arrested in the case and it’s not known whether the arms were bound for left-wing terrorists, right-wing death squads or drug traffickers’ private armies, but law enforcement’s working assumption is that these are leftovers from Central America’s armed conflicts of the 1980s, bound for use in Colombia’s ongoing warfare.

Eleven of the two and one-half ton military trucks that came down here with the US Army National Guard for this year’s Nuevos Horizontes engineering maneuvers have been given by the US Embassy to the National Police. The purpose is to increase the police force’s mobility, especially in case there’s a need to rush reinforcements to the Darien due to the spillover of Colombia’s civil conflict across our borders. The US also recently gave Panama four 82-foot patrol boats and a surplus 180-foot cutter to improve the National Maritime Service’s vigilance of our coasts, plus a $7 million grant to improve this country’s policing.

President Moscoso has signed legislation that provides a 20-year prison term for any person who participates in, finances or otherwise materially supports acts of terrorism, here or abroad. As is the case in most places, determining exactly what constitutes terrorism is a loaded legal and political question, but with the new law the Financial Analysis Unit will have the power to investigate suspicions that Colombia’s FARC guerrillas and AUC paramilitaries do their banking in Panama.

After a prolonged series of negotiations, the Cabinet Council has approved a no-bid sale of some 17 hectares of land on the former Fort Clayton to the United States government for $5.6 million. The real estate will be used to build a new embassy and consulate compound which, unlike the current facilities on Avenida Balboa, can be properly defended from truck bombs. There is no word yet about when construction will start or when the US diplomatic missions will move.

The Electoral Tribunal says it has more than 700 allegations of election law violations in various stages of investigation or prosecution, and on top of that some 1,200 changes of voter registrations have been challenged, generally by political parties. Most of the impugned voter registrations are about people allegedly planning to vote where they don’t live, and most of the finger-pointing has been against the PRD by its foes.

The Electoral Tribunal has announced new restrictions on campaign signs that effectively favor the candidates with more money. The traditions of painting campaign messages on buildings and highway overpasses are now banned. The ban on posting things on trees that stand on public property, long in place but often ignored, continues, as does the prohibition on signs that obstruct drivers’ view of traffic signs. Also banned are political messages painted on or affixed to schools, churches, stadiums or cultural institutions. That leaves the rental of billboards and the purchase of advertising in the newspapers or on radio or television as the principal legal means for a candidate to advise the voters of his or her existence.

A Dichter & Neira poll commissioned by La Prensa finds only 4.2 percent of Panamanians giving President Moscoso an “excellent” rating for job performance and 28.6 percent saying that she’s doing a “good” job. She gets a “poor” estimate from 39.8 percent and a “very poor” grade from 24.3 percent. In keeping with trends that were evident in the 1999 election and have persisted throughout the present administration, Mireya’s much more popular in the Interior than in the Panama-Colon metro area.

According to a Dichter & Neira poll commissioned and published by La Prensa, embattled Social Security director Juan Jované gets positive job ratings from 62.7 percent of Panamanians. Very few Panamanian public officials, and none of Jované’s staunchest critics, get positive job performance ratings from a majority of Panamanians these days.

Documents dating back to early 1969 have been found in the Coiba Penal Colony archives that suggest that General Omar Torrijos and the rest of the military junta that took power on October 11, 1968 knew of the tortures and disappearances of opponents and in some cases promoted those responsible. One memo to the general published by La Prensa was from a Sergeant Melbourne C. Walker, recounting the capture of two guerrillas (Dorita Moreno and Heriberto Manzzo) who were later secretly and extrajudicially executed, and requesting a promotion for his role in the affair. Purported witnesses have claimed that Manzzo and Moreno were tortured and that Morena was repeatedly raped by soldiers before the two were killed. The two guerrillas’ bodies were found in a secret grave in 1982. Walker got his promotion and was later convicted in connection with the disappearance of Father Héctor Gallego. Martín Torrijos has criticized the reports, alleging that a memo purportedly by Sergeant Walker, even if it may be genuine, doesn’t mean that his late father received it, and opining that the publication of this material now amounts to a campaign smear against the PRD and himself.

The Truth Commission is appealing to the Supreme Court to overturn lower court rulings that prosecutions in the case of Alcibiades Bethancourt Aparicio, an anti-dictatorship political activist who was abducted by security forces in 1971, are barred by the statute of limitations. The lower courts held and Attorney General José Antonio Sossa maintains that because the maximum penalty for any crime in Panama is 20 years in prison, there can be no prosecution of any crime that happened 20 or more years ago. Others argue either that there is no statue of limitations for murder, or that if there is the time count does not begin while the existence of the crime is being concealed.

Assuming that forensic anthropologist Ann Ross and other experts got it right, a moment of truth may be at hand in the protracted struggle between the Truth Commission and the Public Ministry. Based on records of the man’s size and measurements of bones found, and more positively on comparisons between dental records and teeth found, the Truth Commission for which Ross has been working on Coiba has identified skeletal remains found on the island as those of Jerónimo Díaz. The young man was not a political activist, but rather a detainee for an ordinary crime. He went missing in 1985 and the police told the family that he had escaped from the penal colony on a raft. The Truth Commission, looking on Coiba for the remains of activist Floyd Britton, found Díaz instead. The case’s legal significance stems from the attorney general’s argument that the cases brought forward by the Truth Commission are barred because there’s a 20-year statute of limitations on murder cases. This young man died about 18 years ago.

Now that an audiotape that purports to feature the voice of PRD legislator Manuel De La Hoz discussing the distribution of bribes paid for the approval of the CEMIS project has been made public, one might think that it’s an easy enough matter to take recordings of the deputy’s voice from the Legislative Assembly’s electronic archives and the tape in question, send them to a competent and impartial crime lab, and determine with a fair amount of certainty whether it’s De La Hoz’s voice. (Voiceprints are not as definitive as DNA or fingerprint evidence, but they can almost always rule out an imitation of someone’s voice.) However, Attorney General Sossa is doing something else. He has asked Administrative Prosecutor Alma Montenegro de Fletcher for her legal opinion about whether he should do anything with the tape at all, given that the tape was made by an unidentified party and without any sort of a warrant. Compare this procedure with the move to impeach former Supreme Court magistrate José Manuel Faúndes, which Sossa initiated on the basis of an anonymous tape of the judge talking on the phone with an allege drug trafficker’s defense lawyer.

Ilka de Barés, the nation’s Migration director and wife of National Police chief Carlos Barés, is reported by El Panama America to be calling for immigration quotas for Panama because the country is approaching the point when “there will be more foreigners than Panamanians.” Immigration from Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean is and long has been severely restricted, but those regulations merely serve to increase the bribes that public officials charge from illegal immigrants, especially those from China.

A seven-member parliamentary delegation from India recently paid a visit to Panama to meet with legislators here, and in the process they stated their concerns that the special visa requirements that this country imposes on Asians creates problems for commercial ties between the two countries. The visa issue is politically sensitive here, but the Indians’ official host, Arnulfista deputy Marco Ameglio, said that some sort of adjustment might be possible.

The corregidor for the San Miguelito corregimiento of Belisario Porras, a Mr. Almengor Torres, has been arrested by the PTJ and charged with a fraudulent scheme in which bank loans and subsidies for the elderly aged were allegedly diverted into the corregidor’s own pocket. The official, an appointee of San Miguelito Mayor Rubén Darío Campos who had been vested with certain judicial powers, has a Noriega-era criminal record for fraud, for which he had served four years in prison.

Three alleged hit men and a cop are in jail after those who are said to have intended a double murder approached a prosecutor and a witness at a hotel restaurant on Avenida Cuba with firearms in their possession. Prosecutor Estela Uribe was meeting a reluctant witness in the restaurant at the Hotel Discovery on the evening of July 17 when the men approached their table, but were subdued by a group of PTJ agents and Public Ministry security guards who were also in the restaurant. Later a PTJ agent was also arrested for allegedly informing the supposed hit men that the meeting would be taking place. The alleged assassination plot is a spinoff of a case involving the falsification of credit cards. Four businessmen, including two Colon Free Zone merchants, were previously arrested in connection with the alleged false credit card scheme. During a raid on a Villa Lucre home that resulted in one of the businessmen’s arrest last February, police found three of the artifacts that had been stolen from the gold room at the Reina Torres de Arauz Anthropology Museum. They hadn’t made the connection with the museum heist, but encountered the artifacts while pursuing the credit card case.

A court has ordered the release on bail of Ariel Arrocha, the security chief at the Reina Torres de Arauz Anthropology Museum. He is one of several employees who were jailed after last February’s inside job theft of nearly 300 pre-Columbian artifacts from the museum’s gold room. Six of the 13 people who were arrested are now out on bail, while the other seven remain in jail. At least one other suspect remains at large.

According to Panamanian investigators, Guatemalan President Alfonso Portillo’s repeated denials that he has money stashed in Panama are false. An account was opened at the old Banco Internacional de Panama, since merged with the Banco Continental, in the name of Inversiones Segovia, SA, with Portillo and his secretary the signatories on the account. Between $450,000 and $900,000 passed through that account every month, beginning in 2001. The account was found when Guatemalan prosecutors investigating Portillo for corruption asked for Panamanian assistance in their probe.

Panama has frozen some 40 bank accounts, with some $10 million in them, which belong to or were controlled by former Nicaraguan President Arnoldo Alemán or his tax director Byron Jerez. Alemán skimmed millions in assets from his nation while he was its chief executive and is facing the prospect of a prison term for it. At the moment he has immunity as a member of the Nicaraguan parliament, but that’s in the process of being stripped away by his colleagues.

Administrative Prosecutor Alma Montenegro de Fletcher has issued an opinion that the anti-money laundering Financial Analysis Unit does not have the right to see the police records of Panamanian citizens. It might clarify things for the unit’s investigators if checks from a drug dealer with a long criminal record keep coming into somebody’s bank account, but according to the procuradora that’s not allowed.

On July 7 the bodies of two COPA airline pilots who had gone missing over the previous weekend were found by the SINAPROC disaster relief agency at Gorgona. There are some tricky currents and undertows in the area.

On July 16 President Moscoso presided over the dedication of a new sea turtle aquarium at Amador. The project, in cooperation with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, highlights Panama’s diverse but threatened marine wildlife and will likely become one of the capital’s popular tourist attractions.

Colon Mayor Matilde Rosales de Ardines has campaign signs up around town, but the first great obstacle to her reelection has been moved back. She, the former city treasurer and four city council members are accused of fraud in an abortive attempt to issue municipal bonds, and when she went to trial on July 7 it turned out that one of the co-defendants had not been notified and the proceedings were thus postponed until mid-August.

A wee hours raid on July 6 at a house in Las Acacias netted more than a ton and one-half of cocaine --- 1,500 kilos --- and resulted in several arrests.

Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
US charges against Anderson echo here
On the campaign trail