Panama News Briefs

The legislative bribery allegations that arose in connection with the approval of the CEMIS airport expansion and multimodal container handling project and the ratification of two of Mireya Moscoso’s Supreme Court nominees have spun off into several legal cases, two of which have made their way to the high court. One, legislator Jacobo Salas’s criminal complaint against Attorney General José Antonio Sossa for obtaining legislators’ bank records while the assembly was between sessions, has been resolved. Salas argued that it amounted to the crime of abuse of authority for Sossa to look at records without any formal charges pending against those whose accounts were reviewed. The court, meeting as a whole, rejected that argument and threw out the criminal complaint against Sossa. Dissenting were magistrates Winston Spadafora, who voted despite the fact that part of the investigation was about whether renegade PRD legislator Carlos Afú had been bribed to vote for his nomination, and César Pereira Burgos.

In a 5-4 en banc decision, the Supreme Court has punched another hole in Panama’s freedom of information law. They denied Partido Popular activist Guillermo Cochez’s request to see the contract by which Costa Rican citizen Anabella Diez de Rodríguez was hired by the Ministry of the Presidency as one of Mireya’s aides. The magistrates held that since Cochez has no personal stake in the controversial appointment, he has not right to know about it.

Comptroller General Alvin Weeden denied a request by journalist Rafael Jaramillo Pérez for the lists of public officials who have failed to submit the legally required declaration of their assets, and that denial has now been upheld by the Supreme Court. The majority in the 5-4 decision cited the Moscoso administration’s “personal stake” requirement for individuals and the press to obtain government information. Of course, members of the Moscoso entourage who have become rich while holding public office DO have a personal stake, but they’re not the ones requesting the information.

Darien legislator Haydeé Milanés de Lay, alienated from the Solidaridad party on whose ticket she was elected and by and large despised the province’s indigenous constituencies, is playing the race card by encouraging cholos from the Interior and blacks from the Darien and elsewhere to seize land from the Embera communities of Arimae and Embera Puru. After a decades-long struggle sparked when the Noriega regime gave lands that had been collectively given to the Embera community under the Torrijos government to colonos from the Interior, in a government-sponsored deal reached this past June the indigenous community agreed to allow about a dozen colono families 45 hectares each. No sooner was the deal signed when new squatter invasions and protests in front of the legislature by people demanding the Embera communities’ land broke out. Supporting the invasion and the protests, Milanés de Lay claimed that the province’s indigenous communities enjoy special privileges and unfairly receive backing from foreign non-governmental organizations. The legislator was blasted by the province’s Catholic vicar, Vicente Sidera Plana, who said that “the confrontation among blacks, indigenous and farmers, provoked by some politicians, is a mistaken and anti-evangelical path. We consider it a very perverse way to distract the poor from the defense of their causes.”

Antolín Arenas, the representante for La Chorrera’s corregimiento of Puerto Caimito (the hometown of baseball’s Mariano and Rubén Rivera), finds himself facing multiple legal actions for things he’s doing to get himself reelected. Most notoriously, he organized a seizure of 93 hectares of privately owned land by 350 people, whom he charged $100 each and required to change their voting residences to Puerto Caimito. The squatters were later routed by riot police, who arrested 10 of their leaders. One might expect that such a swindle combined with a large-scale trespass would attract the attention of Attorney General Sossa’s prosecutors, but that is apparently not the case. However, the cheated would-be squatters have filed civil claims to get their money back and a complaint with the Electoral Prosecutor, who is independent of the Attorney General’s jurisdiction. Arenas’s home and offices were then raided by police, who were looking for evidence to support a series of electoral law violations in connection with the scheme. Arenas, a member of the MOLIRENA party, said that his legal problems are just a PRD-Partido Popular plot against him.

President Moscoso has signed legislation aimed at reorganizing the prison system. The new law will give guards and wardens, many of whom are political activists who obtained their jobs through political patronage, civil service protection. It also specifies new procedures for the discipline of inmates who violate prison rules and for the issuance of work release permits for those who are incarcerated. The law was signed over the protest of Attorney General Sossa, who considers it impractical.

In her latest act of presidential tourism, President Moscoso went to Monaco to meet Prince Rainier. The trip was widely criticized by those who believe that it was a wrong symbol at a time when many Panamanians are living through economic difficulties, but the president had a different interpretation. She said that during her visit to the tiny principality on the French Riviera she did her bit to promote Panamanian yucca exports, and signed an agreement for the circuses of Panama and Monaco to exchange visits to each other’s countries.

According to an investigative report in La Prensa, the remodeling of the presidential beach house at Punta Mala, Los Santos probably cost about three times the $150,000 that was officially reported. The daily based its story on documents obtained directly or indirectly from private contractors or subcontractors who did the work. The pertinent public documents are a government secret.

After the purchase and remodeling of the Punta Mala beach house ran into strong public criticism, the Moscoso administration resolved to sell that place and belatedly did so --- to the president’s brother Franklin Moscoso. Of course, any informed bid was out of the question because the premises weren’t open for public inspection and the records of what has been spent to remodel the place are state secrets. But beyond that, the Ministry of Economy and Finance is admitting that the first brother didn’t comply with the legal requirement of a sworn statement about his qualifications to submit a bid. Now the government says that it will only apply the sworn statement requirement to foreigners, even though the law says that it applies to anyone bidding for a government contract.

During the renovation of the Ministry of Government and Justice offices in the Casco Viejo, a building that once housed the Palace of Justice and the presidential offices, workers have found, under multiple layers of drywall and paint, 1908 murals by the Italian painter Enrico Corrado. No firm decision has been made about, nor has a budget been appropriated for, the murals’ restoration. It is likely, however, that they won’t be painted over again and will be added to the list of national art treasures to be restored. The find has prompted a lot of public commentary about how it’s a sign of the Panamanian political elites’ lowbrow cultural traditions.

Panama has taken out a $9,275,000 loan from Israel’s Leumi Bank to buy four US-made Bell helicopters with Israeli military accessories to beef up police patrols along the border with Colombia. The contract also provides for maintenance by an Israeli company. The purchase is part of a recent series of arms procurements worth more than $13 million by the government, all of which are designed to contain the overflow of Colombia’s civil conflict across the border into our Darien province.

The International Labor Organization (ILO), a United Nations agency, is conducting a worldwide study of child labor and as part of that process reviewed the situation in Panama City and San Miguelito. Anyone who lives in the metro area knows that child labor does exist --- you need not be here very long before running across kids selling things on the street, for example. The relative harms and benefits from various forms of child labor are also well known and much debated --- some of those kids won’t eat if they don’t work, but those who work too much won’t get an education. What’s new and disturbing about the ILO report was its finding that metro area children as young as eight years old are working in the sex industry, being exploited by well organized gangs for prostitution and pornography. In Panama prostitution is legal but those engaging in it must be at least 18 years old. Pornography, whether it involves adults or minors, is illegal here.

The Asociacion de Amigos de los Animales is appealing a $15,000 fine imposed on it by Juan Diaz corregidora Priscila de Irving for killing dogs and cats taken to its shelter without informing people who left the animals there that this is what they would do if they could not find homes to take them in. The case came to public light when workers for the association, who have since been fired, disagreed with management about the practice. It raises a serious question that city officials and residents would rather not face, what to do about the exploding populations of stray animals living on city streets.

Having been suspended for insulting remarks about the Minister of Education, Artes y Oficios principal Raymundo Hurtado Lay, a former MOLIRENA legislator, has been definitively fired. The high school, which is across the Trans-Isthmian Highway from the University of Panama, has a reputation for violent clashes between its students and those at other schools and for some wild and crazy student traffic blockades. Hurtado Lay had proposed drug testing, with expulsions for kids testing positive, and had that come to pass traffic would have ground to a halt over it.

In a brief in the last issue about restrictions on campaign propaganda decreed by the Electoral Tribunal, some of the measures identified as new are actually long-standing policies that haven’t been well enforced in the past. Moreover, the policy against propaganda on “edificios y monumentos públicos” is interpreted as a ban on campaign messages on “[public] buildings and public monuments,” rather than “[any] buildings and public monuments” --- so if you want to paint your house in your favorite party’s colors, you will be allowed to do so as long as you don’t live in public housing.

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