Panama News Briefs

A CID-Gallup opinon poll commissioned by El Panama America and the RPC radio and television networks found that 84 percent of those responding believe that Panama is “on the wrong road. According to those polled, most (54 percent) believe that unemployment is the nation’s worst problem followed by 15 percent who say that corruption is the principal malady. By CID-Gallup’s way of measuring, Mireya Moscoso’s public approval rating stood at minus 37 percent, the lowest for any national leader since the 1989 US invasion that ousted Manuel Antonio Noriega.

The alienation between environmentalists and the Moscoso administration has deepened with the president’s veto of legislation that would have provided criminal penalties for violations of Panama’s environmental laws. She said that the law was vague in places and objected to the part that would have imposed criminal penalties on corporations and other juridical persons who trash the environment in violation of existing laws and regulations.

National Police Chief Carlos Barés is making the denials on his wife’s behalf after the national ombudsmen of Panama and Colombia issued a joint report criticized the forced repatriation of 109 Colombians who had fled to the Darien village of Punusa to escape from an AUC death squad offensive around the Colombian village of Sapzurro last April. The Colombians, instead of having their claims of refugee status heard, were summarily handed over to Colombian government authorities by Immigration, whose director is Ilka de Barés. The Moscoso administration claims that the refugees were supporters of the FARC guerrillas, and now asserts the bizarre historical revisionist claim that it was FARC, rather than the AUC, that attacked the Darien villages of Paya and Pucuru and assassinated four local officials there. Shortly after those raids, the Moscoso administration jailed a man who warned Pucuru of the imminent AUC attack, but no charges have ever been filed against those who carried out the deadly raid.

Jean Marcel Chéry and Gustavo Aparicio have received one-year prison terms for insulting Supreme Court magistrate Winston Spadafora when he was Minister of Government and Justice. The two reporters wrote a true story published in El Panama America about how a rural road that was built by the Social Investment Fund went by the properties of Spadafora and Comptroller General Alvin Weeden and served almost nobody else. The trial judge, whose superior is now Spadafora, wouldn’t accept the truth as a defense. The prison term can be avoided by payment of a $600 fine.

At 3:29 a.m. on August 13, all but the heaviest sleepers in the Panama-Colon metro area were awakened by an earthquake that registered 5.3 on the Richter scale and had its epicenter just north of the Gatun Locks. Nobody was seriously hurt, but several Colon city slums that had long been condemned sagged or crumbled, and some 300 people applied for emergency housing assistance. (In a typical Colon disaster, a number of those who say they have been left homeless did not in fact live in the affected building as they claim.) There was no damage to the locks or other canal facilities. The tremor was felt over much of the country, and it combined with earlier heavy rains to cause landslides that blocked the roads to several communities in the Santa Fe district of Veraguas.

On August 15 police and Immigration officials swept through Avenida Central and nearby streets, checking for the cedulas of people working in clubs and restaurants or at vendor’s booths. They arrested 58 people, 36 of whom turned out to be illegal immigrants and the others Panamanian citizens who neglected to carry their cedulas, as adults are required to do here.

On August 6 workers from the Elektra Noreste power utility showed up at the home of Arnulfista legislator Francisco Reyes, in order to disconnect his illegal power hookup. Reyes pulled a pistol on the workers and fired shots into the air. The illegal connection was cut anyway, and the company has filed criminal theft charges against Reyes. Now if most other people pulled a gun on someone to consummate a theft, the person would be charged with assault and armed robbery and go to jail for those crimes, which are far more serious than stealing energy from the electric company. However the gunman in this case, who earns far more than the vast majority of Panamanians, has not been arrested or charged for introducing a deadly weapon into the dispute.

One of the most bizarre and petty court cases ever brought by a national government to annoy a city administration headed by an opposing party has ended in a victory for Panama City Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro over Economy and Finance Minister Norberto Delgado. The city passed an ordinance providing fines for dumping garbage, construction debris and other wastes along city streets. Delgado, arguing that his ministry has the right to throw its trash wherever he sees fit, and that the city has no power to control littering and dumping, sued to have the ordinance declared unconstitutional. The case made its way to the Supreme Court, which held that the city does indeed have the power to impose fines of between $10 and $500 for littering and illegal dumping.

The Arnulfistas in the Legislative Assembly have chosen Dr. Elpidio González, a surgeon from San Miguelito, as their caucus leader for the 2003-2004 session. He will succeed José Isabel Blandón.

The Solidaridad party’s presidential candidate may be running second in the polls, way ahead of the ruling party’s candidate, but meanwhile the Solidaridad legislative caucus has almost completely disintegrated. One of its three legislators, coastal Colon’s Laurentino Cortizo, tilts toward alliance with the PRD and isn’t going to run for reelection. Another, Darien’s Haydée Milanés de Lay, will probably run for reelection as an Arnulfista, on a platform of ethnic cleansing of the province’s indigenous population. Now the third, Aguadulce’s Noriel Salerno, who was also vice-president of the party, has resigned from Solidaridad to become a member of the National Liberal Party, which seems intent on going down with the Mireyista ship in next May’s elections.

Alberto Almanza, the president of the follow-up committee of the Presidential Truth Commission, complains that in the wee hours of August 15 someone broke into his home and stole three hard drives from computers at a private office he maintains in his home. The hard drives contained information related to the commission’s investigation into human rights abuses that took place during the dictatorship. He said the intruders also rifled through paper files and took a notebook computer.

The rodent-borne hantavirus has claimed another life in Los Santos. A 33-year-old Tonosi woman died of the disease on August 14. The disease has been a mostly rural problem here, and mostly confined to the Azuero Peninsula. However, unseasonal rains across Panama have prompted migrations of rats and mice into buildings where they usually don’t go (including the Muchachas Guias building in Panama City, where this newspaper’s office is located), and public health officials are concerned about the problems this may cause.

The Instituto Oncologico Nacional, the public cancer treatment facility that occupies part of the former Gorgas Hospital, is crying foul because the Health Ministry won’t let them use a new radiation therapy machine donated by the government of Taiwan. The ministry is withholding an operating permit for the $6.5 million device until an operating manual arrives. Meanwhile, 77 patients who need treatment have to wait. The institute was rocked by a scandal a couple of years ago when it was revealed that at least 28 patients had been exposed to radiation overdoses --- some of them fatal --- by a machine for which there was no operating manual. Several technicians and doctors lost their jobs, and a few face criminal charges, but the administrators went unscathed. (The institute’s director is the brother of the National Police chief and brother-in-law of the Immigration director.) The Health Ministry says that it won’t issue a permit to repeat a mistake that has proved disastrous in the past.

On August 15 there was a mass escape of 13 prisoners from La Joya Penitentiary’s cell block 10, and when this news brief was written only three of the escapees had been recaptured and police were searching house to house in Pacora, Tocumen and Juan Diaz. This was a maximum security cell block, and a number of those who escaped were serving time for violent crimes. Corrections director Concepción Corro told El Panama America that an investigation is underway to see if guards assisted in the escape.

Two University of Panama students, members of the leftist FER-29, have received nine-month jail sentences for their role in a December 2001 street blockade to protest an increase in urban bus fares. Architecture student Keila Cedeño and economics student Ronaldo Ortíz said that they’ll appeal, and FER-29 spokesman Salamón Samudio said that history has demonstrated the validity of the protest for which his group’s members are being punished, because bus fares went up and service didn’t improve.

On August 11 high school students from Artes y Oficios blocked the Trans-Isthmian Highway in front of their school and fought pitched battles with riot police. The cause of the day was a protest against the firing of the school’s principal, former legislator Raymundo Hurtado Lay, for insulting Education Minister Doris Rosas de Mata. The school was closed indefinitely and dozens of the students were arrested by later released to their parents’ custody. Artes y Oficios has a reputation for this sort of thing, and there is something of a public outcry in favor of the school’s permanent closure.

On August 2 customs officers at the Paso Canoa border crossing with Costa Rica seized a suitcase containing 20 pre-Columbian artifacts that may be 10,000 years old. The private possession of Panamanian archaeological treasures is somewhere in a tolerated gray area between legality and illegality, but excavating them, trafficking in them and especially exporting them is a crime. If the item are as Aduana describes, they are priceless and a major find for Panamanian scholars. However, because they were probably dug up surreptitiously and without documentation, much archaeological knowledge will have been lost.

A Panama native who directs the community television operation in Brooklyn, New York is organizing a November through February museum exhibition in her community to show the contributions of black people to Panamanian society, particularly by way of the arts. She’s putting out the call for paintings, sculpture, photographs and memorabilia related to the subject, and looking into the possibility of bringing some Panamanian dancers to New York to participate in the show. If you have contributions or questions, contact Onida by email at Mayers1206@aol.com.

Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
Arias Calderón on Panama's past, present and future
PRD holds it local and legislative primaries
AUC arms case still reverberates

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