editorial

Do you believe any of it? In that case, The Panama News’s financial troubles may be a thing of the past --- we can give you this great deal on the Bridge of the Americas.

Two colleagues from El Panama America, Jean Marcel Chéry and Gustavo Aparicio, have been convicted of criminal defamation (calumia e injuria) for truthfully reporting that the Social Improvement Fund (FIS), then under the direction of current Minister of Government and Justice Arnulfo Escalona, built a rural road that went past the farms of then-Minister of Justice Winston Spadafora (now a Supreme Court magistrate) and Comptroller General Alvin Weeden. That road serves the properties of these two public officials and almost nobody else.

Chéry and Aparicio also reported that roadbuilding equipment from the company hired by the FIS to do the road job was seen working on Weeden’s property. But the Comptroller explained that since the machines were in the area anyway, he just took the opportunity to privately pay the contractor in a separate deal to do some work on his own land. Given Mireya Moscoso’s secrecy regulations, Attorney General Sossa’s reluctance to touch the issue of public corruption and the norms of Panama’s prevailing business culture, it is more or less impossible to confirm or disprove Weeden’s version. In any normal country, however, the mere appearance of impropriety under similar circumstances would have led to any other comptroller’s downfall.

But at least Weeden didn’t bring criminal charges. Spadafora did that, and by the time the matter came to trial, he was conveniently in position as trial magistrate Secundino Mendieta’s superior.

We note that President Moscoso and her hand-picked Arnulfista candidate to succeed herself, José Miguel Alemán, are recycling an old unkept promise to repeal the “gag laws” that are used to intimidate journalists in this country. But never mind! On the same day that the criminal convictions of Chéry and Aparicio made the front pages of the daily newspapers, Government and Justice Minister Arnulfo Escalona grabbed the lead in La Prensa with his announcement that “There are no gag laws.”

Yeah, right.

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives. A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both.

James Madison

A career is born in public --- talent in privacy.

Marilyn Monroe

The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their "vital interests" are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the "sanctity" of human life, or the "conscience" of the civilized world.

James Baldwin

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