Panama News Briefs

At the September 1 opening session of the new Legislative Assembly year, President Moscoso’s supporters assured that she would retain control for the last year of her administration by electing her choice for president of the body, Jacobo Salas. The vote was 35-34, with Arnulfista brothers Marco and Francisco Ameglio and PRD deputy Abelardo “Lalo” Antonio abstaining, PRD renegades Carlos Afú, Arcelio Batista and Manuel De La Hoz voting with Mireya’s faction and the PRD-led opposition picking up the votes of both Partido Popular deputies and Solidaridad suplente Raúl Cortizo. As business got underway in the new assembly, 54 proposed laws were submitted by various deputies at their first opportunity. Arnulfista legislator Francisco Reyes, who is facing charges of stealing electricity (but has not been charged for pulling a gun on the electric company workers who came to his house to cut his illegal hookup and who will enjoy immunity from prosecution while the legislature is in session), submitted a proposal to cut funding for the Public Services Regulating Board, and accompanied it with a rant against the electric company that prompted a rebuke from Salas. This will be an assembly year of much election posturing, but a few major bits of legislation will come before the body, the first of which will be a free trade pact with Taiwan.

Panamanian entertainer and activist Rúben Blades has won the Grammy for the best contemporary tropical album (a category that in the past he has called somewhat ridiculous) for his album “Mundo.” This was the fifth time that Blades has won a Grammy award. This year’s awards were presented at a Miami ceremony that was marred by the Bush administration’s refusal to grant visas for a number of nominated Cuban artists to attend. Blades, who ran for president in 1994 and is supporting Martín Torrijos for president next year, has said that he will take a break from his music and acting and return to Panama to take a post with the government if Torrijos wins.

Legal and public policy research has just become easier. Under the auspices of the Legislative Assembly, all past issues of the Gaceta Oficial, in which all laws, decrees, cabinet resolutions and certain other important government documents are published, have been compiled into an online database. The Gaceta, going back to Panamanian independence in 1903. is available through links on the assembly’s website, http://www.asamblea.gob.pa.

Arnulfista activist Antonio Domínguez, who served as Immigration director during the Endara administration and is facing criminal charges of falsification of documents and trespassing in connection with his attempt to wrest the former Fort Randolph from a group that already had the concession, has been appointed to the Interoceanic Regional Authority (ARI) board of directors. He replaces the board’s outgoing president (as a director, not necessarily as president), Jorge Federico Lee. Theoretically the Legislative Assembly could refuse to approve the nomination, but President Moscoso most likely has the votes, even if the opposition makes an issue out of the nomination of someone with criminal charges arising from a concession in the former Canal Zone to the very board that oversees the disposal of such real estate.

Three firefighters were hospitalized on September 5 after inhaling PCBs from leaking transformers that were left in a shed at the Parque Natural Metropolitano, by the Spanish-based Union Fenosa electric utility. Police suspect that two men broke into the shed and were dismantling the transformers in search of materials to recycle.

On the afternoon September 5 Panama City got a heavy tropical cloudburst with a bonus --- a waterspout in Panama Bay that veered close to touching land along Avenida Balboa. The maritime twister did not land, however, and no particular damages or injuries were reported. The heavy rains did cause some localized flooding in parts of the city.

On August 29 anti-corruption activist Enrique “Chito” Montenegro and legislator Noriel Salerno fought a two-rounder at the Italia restaurant on Tumba Muerto, where Montenegro was holding a press conference to air Aguadulce taxi drivers’ complaints that Salerno has been selling taxi cupos and making it harder for existing drivers to make a living. Salerno, who threw the first punches, didn’t specifically deny the allegation. The fisticuffs came in two distinct assaults, and people who were at the restaurant generally scored the bout as a draw. No really good punches were landed, and both combatants are markedly deficient at shouting in Chinese. This was the second time in less than one month when one of Mireya Moscoso’s supporters accused of corrupt practices showed up to disrupt one of Montenegro’s press conferences.

The old cedulas that featured an image of the Panama Canal became invalid for official purposes as of September 1. Many banks and merchants had already been declining to accept them as identification. UNISYS, the US-based corporation that had the contract with the Tribunal Electoral to provide the forms for the cedulas, had diverted thousands of the blank forms to Colombian gangsters, which led to the company’s contract being cancelled, criminal warrants for the arrest of two UNISYS executives who fled the country before the orders were issued, and an expensive process of replacing all cedulas that had used UNISYS’s forms. Between the discovery of the problem and September 1, it was possible to get a Panamanian passport or conduct other business with the government using one of the old form cedulas.

Pastor Carlos Manuel Morales has turned $14,145 over to anti-corruption prosecutor Cecelia López because it was donated to the chuch he leads, the Ejercito de Dios, by one of the suspects in the Banco Nacional de Panama embezzelment scandal. The pastor said nobody in the cs been assaulted.” So far 29 people have been jailed in the affair, 15 of them bank employees, and the amount of money missing from the state-owned bank is unknown but in excess of $600,000.

Pedro Hernández Rabadán, a 77-year-old retired Catholic priest, has been acquitted by a jury of homicide charges in connection with the 1997 death of nine-year-old Elvita Góngora, but convicted for possessing cocaine. Hernández took part in a scheme to smuggle liquid cocaine in grape juice boxes through his Grupo MEF wholesale company. An employee at the company’s warehouse, the girl’s father, took several boxes of juice home and the girl drank one of them and died. Hernández remains in El Renacer Penitentiary awaiting sentencing on the drug conviction.

Anti-drug agents, operating on a tip that had them watching a Panama City cooking oil importer, followed a container of supposed vegetable oil from Importadora Hogar to the entrance to Manzanillo International Terminal in Colon, where it was to be loaded on a ship bound for Mexico. Instead it was stopped and inspected, and 1,245 kilos (about 1.37 tons) of cocaine were recovered from the container. The seizure came a day after cops arrested five people and waylaid 770 kilos of coke at Pier 6 in Cristobal and two days after 500 kilos of coke that came ashore at night on Playa Grande in the San Carlos corregimiento of Las Uvas were followed down the road and seized in Gorgona.

North American TV viewers will soon get to know something of Panama’s Perlas Islands via the Survivor “reality television” competition, but there’s another reality on the sparsely inhabited islands. In Panama private land will be confiscated by the government if drug crops are found growing on it, so most of our national marijuana production (the quality of which isn’t very good by world standards) happens on public land, particularly on uninhabited islands. Thus Panama’s police and prosecutors recently swept across the Perlas, finding and destroying marijuana crops on the islands of San Miguel, La Guinea, Martín Pérez, La Esmeralda, Isla del Rey and Isla de Pedro González. A lot of the pot was interplanted with corn or rice to make it hard to see from the air. In all, about 2,000 square meters of marijuana fields were cut down and burned.

Xiomara Hubbard, known professionally and Madame Thonya, has received a three-year prison term for selling the services of underage prostitutes. For many years people in Rio Abajo had complained to authorities about her operation, but when an undercover investigation by a Spanish television network exposed it to an international audience police and prosecutors finally moved in. Two accomplices, Liz Evelyn Ameglio Bolaños and Larry Pinto, were also jailed for three years and two years and three months respectively.

According to a 1994 treaty between Panama and Colombia citizens of each country serving time in the other country’s prisons have a right to be repatriated and serve the rest of their sentences in their respective home countries after having served half of their time. However, Panamanian corrections director Cocepción Corro complains that 85 Colombians who have served the requisite time in our prison and requested repatriation have not been sent back to Colombia because Colombian officials have not responded to their requests. Prison conditions in both countries are notoriously horrible, but in each instance tend to be worse for foreigners.

Chiriqui education director Coralia Rosas de Cervantes, of the extended Rosas tribe that occupies many highly paid positions in the Moscoso administration, most prominently Education Minister Doris Rosas de Mata, says that there was nothing improper about her decision to grant promotions and pay raises to her son Nicanor Cervantes and her daughter-in-law Ingrid de Obaldía, who are teachers at the Colegio Francisco Morazan in David. Rosas de Cervantes is investigating other teachers at the school and their union, the Asociacion de Profesores de la Republica de Panama, for printing and distributing leaflets protesting the promotions.

The controversial decision to build a road through the Volcan Baru National Park from Boquete to Cerro Punta has been challenged by two lawsuits that allege that the road and the procedures used to approve it violate Panama’s environmental laws. One of the lawsuits was brought on behalf of the National Association for the Conservation of Nature (ANCON), the country’s wealthiest environmental group (see the text of that suit in our Spanish-language news section) by the prestigious Morgan & Morgan law firm. The other was brought by the special prosecutor for environmental cases, Giovanni Olmos. It is unusual but not unprecedented to have a government prosecutor challenging a cabinet decision, as the Public Ministry for which the prosecutors work is semi-autonomous and run by Attorney General and former Christian Democrat legislator José Antonio Sossa, whose political faction is supporting Martín Torrijos against Mireyista candidate José Miguel Alemán in the 2004 presidential race. The two leading presidential candidates, Torrijos and Guillermo Endara, say they’re against the road.

The municipal court in Pedasi has dismissed charges brought by the Moscoso administration against four journalists for La Prensa who were observing and photographing the presidential beach house at Punta Mala from nearby on the public beach. Presidential guards detained the journalists, confiscated their photographic equipment, brought them onto the presidential compound’s grounds, and then charged them with trespassing in a restricted area and attacking the integrity of the state. Judge Fernando Bedregal ruled that what journalists Julio César Aizprúa, Alcibiades Cortez, Jean Marcel Chéry and Bernardino Friere was not a crime under Panamanian law.

Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
Movement for a new constitution gains strength
Anti-Castro activists to face trial
On the campaign trail