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Mireyista candidate José Miguel Alemán, mired in single digits in the public opinion polls, has a running mate. The Arnulfista Party’s junior partner MOLIRENA, now more or less a wholly owned subsidiary of the Rosas family business, held a convention on October 5 and selected Jesús “Maco” Rosas as its member of the Alemán ticket. He’ll run for first vice-president, while the second vice-presidential nominee will go to the Liberal Nacional party. The Nationalist Republican Liberal Movement (MOLIRENA), whose membership rolls have been padded in recent years by the addition of teachers who joined the party in order to get favored treatment from Education Minister Doris Rosas de Mata, held its convention without several of its historic leading lights. Vice-President Arturo Vallarino and many of his followers, who make up more than one-third of the party’s rank-and-file, stayed away. A number of the Vallarino supporters who did attend walked out when the vote on confirming the Rosas nomination was held. Also skipping the session were former Vice-President Guillermo Ford, who accepted Solidaridad’s nomination to run on Guillermo Endara’s slate for the job that Rosas seeks, and Gisela Chung, the MOLIRENA leader in San Miguelito who served as the Moscoso administration’s commercial representative in Beijing and has now also thrown her support to Endara. Rosas, for his part, declared that “There is no division, only unity.” Of course, he has several times in the past declared that those who don’t support his personal leadership aren’t really MOLIRENA members.

Cambio Democratico owner and presidential candidate Ricardo Martinelli is stuck in fourth place in the opinion polls with the support of about three percent of the electorate, and though he proclaims that in the final days before next May’s election voters will swing his way the supermarket baron is finding that a hard item to sell. So hard to sell, in fact, that his campaign manager, Leo González, has quit Cambio Democratico and the Martinelli campaign to throw his support to the Solidaridad ticket headed by Guillermo Endara.

Well, that’s a relief. PRD presidential candidate Martín Torrijos told La Prensa that “I won’t come to government to steal.” He also said that he’s not making any deals to divide up government posts and won’t look to his cabinet or the legislature to find the Attorney General or Supreme Court magistrates he’d appoint. Torrijos also softened his position on the Truth Commission, which has investigated human rights abuses under his late father’s dictatorship. He said that he’s not against a truth commission per se, but that any such body must be impartial. “We don’t agree with the death of any Panamanian,” he said, “but we want it investigated with the impartiality that the case requires.”

Panama’s wags and editorial cartoonists are having fun with Guillermo Endara’s courting of the youth vote. Endara often goes on the campaign trail dressed informally, and the soft-spoken, self-deprecating former president is not the sort of politician to exude stiff formality. Still, he’s a gray eminence, and his wearing a baseball cap backwards and grooving to a reggae beat does seem incongruous to some. In any case, it’s the stuff of some fun editorial page cartoons. Unlike former President Ernesto Pérez Balladares and former Vice-President Ricardo Arias Calderón, Endara isn’t charging any caricaturist with a crime.

Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
Scenes from the Social Security protests
Billy Ford bolsters the Endara ticket
Ambassador Watt's bombshell
On the campaign trail

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