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At about 7:20 p.m. on November 7 the 325-year-old Flat Arch (Arco Chato), part of the ruins of the Casco Viejo’s Santo Domingo Convent, collapsed and was shattered into tiny pieces. The arch, an architectural marvel because by conventional notions of architectural science it wasn’t supposed to stay up at all, was a major Panama City tourist attraction and played a role in the creation of the Panama Canal, when it was used as a proof that Panama is not prone to earthquakes to convince US politicians who were divided over whether Panama or Nicaragua provided a better interoceanic canal route. Carlos Fitzgerald, the Historical Legacy director for the National Institute of Culture (INAC), said that the arch will be rebuilt. Some of the people who live near the now-fallen arch believe that loud noises from the centennial celebrations may have caused the collapse, while others chalk it up to old age and humidity. INAC has a poor record of monitoring and protecting Panama’s architectural treasures in recent years, and in this case if the structure was deteriorating to the point of collapse, there were no regular inspections to detect the problem.

Attorney General José Antonio Sossa, who opposes investigations and prosecutions for murders and disappearances during the dictatorship, had his Public Ministry seize control of a spot on the Punta Barco beach where skeletons were found and destroy evidence at the crime scene. The first set of human remains was found by construction workers digging to make a retaining wall at a property that once was used by Manuel Antonio Noriega and registered under his secretary’s name. The Truth Commission, which Mireya Moscoso set up to investigate repression under the dictatorship, demanded that its anthropologists be allowed to work the crime scene, a laborious task that involves working with small tools and making careful notes and measurements of everything that is found and where it is found. President Moscoso ordered that the commission should have access to the site. Instead Sossa’s crew moved in with large shovels and dug up the site, with half a dozen shovelers standing in a small area so as to contaminate the scene. The procedure used was shown on the front page of La Prensa on October 22. Now Sossa’s ministry has possession of the skeletal remains belonging to at least four individuals and the Truth Commission is being denied access to this evidence.

The president’s sister-in-law Ivonne Young has stepped down from the Ministry of the Presidency to run for a seat in the Central American Parliament (which would give her legislative immunity if she wins and the next government begins to ask questions about various scandals). Also resigning at the end of October in order to run for political office were governors Miguel Fanovich of Chiriqui, Mario Forero of Veraguas, Luciani Policani of Colon and Lesbia de Martínez of Darien, National Sports Institute director Roberto Arango, Colon Free Zone director Jorge Fernández and IPHE director Alicia Franco. That’s a relatively small number of resignations to beat the legal deadline to run for office, and is probably an indication of pessimism within the Mireyista camp about its possibilities to win even legislative and municipal office in next May’s elections.

In a 6-3 vote that broke exactly along the lines of the majority that voted to quash the investigations of alleged legislative bribery and the minority that dissented, César Pereira Burgos has been elected as the new presiding magistrate of the Supreme Court. José A. Troyano is the court’s new vice-president and head of the civil bench, while Pereira Burgos will head the penal bench and Winston Spadafora the administrative bench. “If there is an independent magistrate, that’s me,” said Pereira Burgos, who was an aide to President Moscoso before being appointed to the high court.

President Moscoso has designated Mirtha Vanegas de Pazmiño as the suplente (alternate) to the Supreme Court’s presiding magistrate César Pereira Burgos. That’s because Pereira Burgos’s old suplente, Jaime Jácome, is becoming Vice-Minister of the Presidency. However, in keeping with the Mireyistas’ nepotism policy, it’s still all in the family. Mirtha Vanegas de Pazmiño is the sister-in-law of Jaime Jácome, who in turn is the cousin of Minister of Commerce and Industry Joaquín Jácome. The new high court alternate magistrate’s sister also holds a post with the Moscoso regime, as a circuit notary. The nomination is expected to pass through the Legislative Assembly without too many problems, but it will surely add one more stanza to the litany cited by members of the growing national movement in favor of a new constitution.

The Panamanian ambassador in Thailand, Xiomara de Arrocha, has been fired because her husband Plutarco Arrocha, who had been one of the top leaders of the MOLIRENA party, is supporting Guillermo Endara rather than José Miguel Alemán for president. Alemán’s running mate, Jesús “Maco” Rosas, has established himself as maximum strongman within MOLIRENA and padded the party’s membership with teachers who had to join the organization and pay dues in order to get desirable school assignments from the Education Ministry headed by Doris Rosas de Mata. However, led by party founder and former Vice-President Guillermo Ford, there has been a mass exodus from the Rosas-owned rump of what was MOLIRENA into the ranks of the Endara campaign.

One of the most persistently recurring scandals in the public school system run on the political patronage and nepotism system by Education Minister Doris Rosas de Mata is academic fraud by school administrators, wherein students who have legitimately won academic honors are denied them, generally in favor of the kids of better connected parents. And so it was with the RPC-TV “Letras de mi Patria” elementary school essay contest. By the judgment of a “blind” jury, the winner for Panama Oeste was 10-year-old Ary Vera Rodríguez, from the Escuela Primaria El Espave in Chame district. However, after the list of winners had filtered through the Education Ministry, the boy was “replaced” as winner by a girl who hadn’t even figured among the runners-up in the jury’s judgment. Vega’s winning work was read on television and attributed to the girl. After the truth of the matter was revealed RPC said it would make things right with Ary Vega and demanded an explanation from the Education Ministry. That explanation has not been forthcoming.

Peruvian journalist Gustavo Gorriti, who’s being prosecuted for criminal defamation against Attorney General José Antonio Sossa in connection with a story published when the former worked for La Prensa, came to Panama to speak at an October 27 anti-corruption seminar. While here he was served with a court order preventing him from leaving the country. However, an appeal was filed, within a few days the travel ban was lifted, and Gorriti went on his way.

Panama’s enemies are not the AUC paramilitaries who invaded the Darien and assassinated four Kuna sahilas earlier this year, nor the FARC guerrillas who occasionally cross our borders, but non-governmental organizations that advocate on behalf of Colombian refugees, according to Government and Justice Minister Arnulfo Escalona. Might some political candidate care to dispute this characterization? Candidates must not talk about national security issues, Escalona warned in an interview with El Panama America.

Arnulfista legislator Haydée Milanés de Lay, who has been criticized by the Catholic Vicarate of the Darien for advocating the ethnic cleansing of indigenous people who live outside the comarca, is now blasting back at the church. She’s accusing the vicarate of promoting the movement of Colombian refugees across the border and trying to usurp the role of the government. “We can’t allow them to continue exposing the province,” she told La Prensa.

At an October 25 convention in Aguadulce, the Partido Liberal Nacional chose Aníbal Galindo to be the candidate for second vice-president on the Mireyista slate that includes José Miguel Alemán and Jesús “Maco” Rosas. That ticket is running at less than 10 percent in public opinion polls, and a fair number of National Liberal members are following the lead of their rank-and-file Arnulfista and MOLIRENA counterparts and crossing over to the Endara campaign. In 1999 the party supported Martín Torrijos, but then switched its support to Mireya Moscoso after the election.

On October 22 President Moscoso rejected the appeal of former Social Security director Juan Jované’s firing as expected, upholding the ouster for, among other things, a shortage of medicines caused by Comptroller General Alvin Weeden’s refusal to sign purchase orders. The procedure of Jované’s September 10 firing was at odds with administrative rules, so on that basis there may be further litigation that could get the economist a substantial sum for back pay. However, if that comes to pass --- “if” because the letter of the law is only theoretical under our court system, and because Jované may not choose to fight the decision --- it won’t happen while Mireya Moscoso is still president. In any case, Jované won’t be back at Seguro.

MOLIRENA founder Guillermo Ford, who’s running against MOLIRENA party boss Jesús “Maco” Rosas for first vice-president, has been expelled from his old party. Polls indicate, however, that Ford has about triple the support in public opinion polls that Rosas has, and that’s probably because Rosas has help from Mireya Moscoso’s coat tails.

Eleven current or former members of the National Police, including the ex-warden of the now demolished Carcel Modelo, have received two and one-half year prison sentences for their parts in the systematic beatings of nude inmates with baseball bats and rubber hoses after a July 1996 disturbance at the facility. The beatings, in which inmates were forced to strip and run a gauntlet, were captured on video by Telemetro news videographer Samid Botello.

On November 4 a double-decker David to Panama bus lost one of its front wheels on a patch of rough pavement on the Pan-American Highway in Remedios, then swerved off of the road. Five passengers, all of them women, were killed and 30 other people were injured.

At 3:30 a.m. on November 7 a tanker truck carrying a load of about 10,000 gallons of gasoline slammed into a toll gate on the Corredor Norte, then exploded. The 35-year-old driver, who screamed for assistance but could not be helped due to the intense flames, was incinerated. The fire also burned up two cars that were parked nearby, but a toll gate worker managed to flee to safety.

Flooding caused by heavy rains coinciding with a Pacific high tide made the Tonosi River overflow its banks on October 21, and as a result some 300 people were forced from their homes in the Los Santos town of Tonosi. In all 75 houses, two businesses and a road were damaged by the waters, but there were no deaths or injuries.

Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
Independence Day parade scenes
Endara, Martinelli debate economic policy
New questions raised about chemical weapons here

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