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Arnulfista legislator José I. Blandón has introduced legislation to put the question of whether a constituent assembly should be convened to draft a proposed new constitution before the voters in next May’s elections. The “fifth ballot” proposal (the others being for president, legislators, mayors and representantes) is opposed by the PRD and Partido Popular alliance, and may not have the votes from within the Mireyista majority to make it to the ballot either. However, there is substantial public demand for the PRD to reach an agreement with the Mireyistas to put the question up to a public vote.

On November 16 Ricardo Vega, who was critically injured when a firework struck him in the chest and exploded while he was sitting in the National Stadium grandstand waiting for a November 5 baseball game between the United States and Panama to begin, died in a Seguro Social intensive care ward. He was 41 years old, and is survived by a widow and three daughters. The organizing committee that put on the baseball tournament, which was headed by Second Vice-President Dominador Kaiser Bazán, had hired a private company, Pirotecnica Guarare, to handle the fireworks, which it did without taking such usual precautions and separating the launching tubes from one another and partially burying them in the ground to limit explosive hazards. An explosion on one of the tubes set off fireworks in the others, which flew wildly in several directions. The missile that hit Vega injured 13 other people, most of them not too seriously but one other victim, an 11-year-old boy, was burned over about 30 percent of his body.

Bazán says that Pirotecnica Guarare --- which got the job without bidding, according to some published reports due to its owners’ Mireyista political ties --- is responsible for compensating the Vega family and others who were injured. However, the company had no insurance and apparently lacks the funds to pay. Moreover, a contributing factor in Vega’s death and the suffering of the injured was the decision by the organizing committee and the National Police to allow people to park their cars so as to block the access of ambulances to the field. The ambulance was unable to get to Vega for half an hour because of the blockage.

Bazán’s denial of responsibility, and that of the fireworks company he hired, will be tested in court, however. One of Panama’s most prominent attorneys, law professor and former Supreme Court magistrate Aura Emérita Guerra de Villalaz, has taken up cause of the Vega family. The National Consumers Union (UNCUREPA) has filed a criminal complaint for endangering public safety against the company, the organizing committee, the stadium management and leading individuals in all of these groups. Prosecutors have begun a criminal investigation of their own. Meanwhile, there are reports that corporations are being solicited for contributions to relieve the economic distress of the Vega family, which has lost its sole breadwinner.

In a continuation of his feud with Panama City Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro that began when the mayor circumvented Mireyista intentions to keep Rubén Blades from giving an Independence Day free concert, Government and Justice Minister Arnulfo Escalona has ordered the seizure of four containers of Taiwanese fireworks that had been destined for use at the December 14 Mayor’s Christmas Parade. Escalona alleges that some unspecified requirements were not complied with, while Navarro says that all the proper legal procedures and safety precautions had been followed.

As any competent political analyst will say, polls are just a snapshot of public opinion at a particular moment, and there are lots of moments between now and when Panama goes to the polls next May. However, the latest Dichter & Neira poll, taken in the days just after the centennial holidays and in the wake over the controversy about whether Rubén Blades would be allowed to sing on Independence Day, show Martín Torrijos reopening a lead that he had mostly lost to Guillermo Endara in the preceding weeks. The percentages were Torrijos 42.3, Endara 32.3, Alemán 8.6, Martinelli 2.7, undecided 11.2 and 2.0 not responding. In Latin American polling experience, usually there is a group of people who oppose the group in power but who will not admit this to pollsters, and almost all of the undecideds tend to vote against the incumbents. Since the earlier poll Torrijos has risen 7.4 points and Endara .3, while Alemán has dropped 4 points and Martinelli is down 1.3. In October, having lost a large lead over Endara, Torrijos shuffled his campaign organization and started to talk about issues that he had previously skirted. That seems to have paid off, but with this poll it’s difficult to separate the new campaign style factor from public sympathy for Rubén Blades when the Moscoso administration tried to prevent him from singing on Independence Day because he backs Torrijos. Another tactic that Torrijos supporters have been using --- especially in those media aligned with the PRD-Partido Popular alliance --- has been an attempt to pump up Alemán so as to deflate Endara. For example, RPC-TV’s morning “Debate Abierto” talk show now generally features only supporters of Alemán and Torrijos, and not people who back Endara. It seems, however, that even PRD media barons can’t breathe new life into the Mireyista campaign, which at this point appears to be headed toward a defeat of historic proportions for a party that’s in power.

Guillermo Endara has a reputation for falling in love with complicated women, and for sticking by them when all is not well. His wife Ana Mae, whom he met when he was a middle-aged opposition leader on a hunger strike and she was a young law student supporter, has kind of a flamboyant reputation, one that was only good for some 11 percent of the vote when she ran for mayor of Panama City in 1994. When La Prensa commissioned Dichter & Neira --- the Latin American affiliate of the Harris polling organization --- to ask voters about whether they thought the would-be first ladies would help or hurt their husbands’ campaigns, it was no surprise that Vivian Torrijos showed up better than Ana Mae Díaz de Endara, with 61.5 percent saying that Mrs. Torrijos strengthens her husband’s chances against only 20.8 percent saying the same thing about Mrs. Endara. It was also no surprise that Mr. Endara issued a statement --- the last time he’ll have anything to say about the subject, he said --- blasting the poll and defending his wife. The interesting poll, which apparently hasn’t been taken, would be to see how this exchange plays with the women’s vote. The overwhelming reality, however, is that Panamanians don’t pay much attention to candidates’ spouses when casting their votes.

Mireyista presidential candidate José Miguel Alemán, whose campaign commercials show him as the candidate of white youth, is trying to get his message out to that relatively tiny constituency through the country’s DJs. But not by appealing to the DJs, but to the people who employ them. And so it was that at the La Mega radio station, DJ Pukiti (Rafael Terán) was ordered to promote Alemán on his show. Pukiti refused, and left for La Mega’s rival, Wao 97.5. The disk jockey said that he had prior arguments with La Mega’s management about things he had on the air, but drew the line at the demand to let himself be used used as a partisan mouthpiece.

Shortly after joining in a protest against the planned Boquete - Cerro Punta road, coffee producer Cecilia McIntyre had her electricity turned off on one day’s notice. For years, McIntyre had bought power from her neighbor ARKAPAL, the holding company Mireya Moscoso’s Boquete farm, real estate investments and coffee mill, which generates its own hydroelectric power. However, three days after the November 9 anti-road protest, McIntyre was served with a notice that her power would be permanently cut off the next day. McIntyre is a fairly successful specialty coffee grower, so the shutoff was mostly an inconvenience, but in exchange for that the 75-year-old farmer is now something of a heroine to Panama’s environmentalists.

In a November 20 event at the Metropolitan Cathedral that had been planned as an encounter between the Catholic Church and Panama’s political class but which few politicians attended, Archbishop José Dimas Cedeño pointed out that public office is about public service, and advised those who don’t like to serve shouldn’t seek election. He also called upon voters to wise up and learn about the candidates and analyze their proposals to see if they make sense before casting their votes.

The Junta Nacional de Escrutinio is the arm of the Electoral Tribunal that counts the votes, and the Arnulfista Party has effectively vetoed anti-corruption activist Magaly Castillo from being a member of that body. The Arnulfista representative, Vice- Minister of Government and Justice Alejandro Pérez, objected to the appointment of Castillo, who heads the Citizens Alliance for Justice, as well as several others proposed by the tribunal. Castillo then withdrew her name from consideration, and in the aftermath the Electoral Tribunal’s president, Eduardo Valdés Escoffery, pointed out that people on the vote counting board have to be acceptable to the parties. Valdés’s declaration, coming as it does from a board that has recently been plagued by instances of nepotism, conflict of interest, poor management of voter lists and the costly scandal over racketeers getting ahold of blank cedula forms, has in turn raised questions about the tribunal’s impartiality. However, the Electoral Tribunal’s defenders point out that the credibility of the vote count would be even more questionable if one of the parties went into an election believing that the group counting the ballots was stacked against it.

On November 10 Emanuel Santiago Ceballos, a member of Panama’s under-23 national soccer team, was shot in the head while entering a bar in Colon. He later died at Amador Guerrero Hospital. A suspect has been arrested in the slaying, which may have been an accident or a case of mistaken identity. The suspect has gang tattoos, but Ceballos is not known to have been involved with the gang scene or in any dispute with the young man who allegedly shot him. The incident has also had repercussions among the Colon bomberos. Ceballos’s father is a retired firefighter, but when the soccer player was shot and the fire department was called the bomberos declined to send out one of their ambulances and paramedic teams. It is unclear whether Ceballos’s life might have been saved had he received more prompt medical attention. The denial of ambulance service has led to bomberos getting questioned in the community, which in turn has aggravated pre-existing tensions between Colon’s rank-and-file firefighters and their commanders.

Quite frankly, it’s one of the reasons why the briefs in this issue were late being uploaded. (Yes, we know, if it’s not one thing it’s another, but this was the thing this time.) There are a couple of strains of flu virus going around in Panama, the one that kept the editor of this paper out of action on what would normally be a production day being a relatively mild one. It is expected that the flu outbreak will spread and may peak in December. If influenza is a big problem in the US around the Christmas and New Year holidays, then Panamanian college students coming home for the holidays and American tourists visiting at the beginning of peak tourist season typically bring the disease down with them. In any case, the elderly and people with frail health would be prudent to get flu shots, because what’s a minor misery for most can be deadly for others.

The Panamanian Society of Engineers and Architects is pointing the finger at a private bridge over the Matasnillo River behind Calle 50’s “Edificio Intelligente” as a major cause of the river’s recent overflow. The bridge and its pillars, a report by the group alleged, obstructed water flow during heavy rains and that caused flooding upstream near Avenida Brasil. According to the group the bridge is illegal, as it intrudes into the public right-of way for the important urban drain. The building itself --- home to the CrediCorp Bank and the City Club --- encroaches into the right of way, according to the SPIA.

On November 14 heavy rains and a long legacy of deforestation, building on filled-in mangrove swamps and dumping trash in streams combined to send Colon province’s Quebrada Fantasma and the Rio Cativa spilling over their banks, with the flood waters backing up over the Trans-Isthmian Highway. That flooded out schools, businesses and hundreds of residences, and cut the road in and out of Colon city, causing massive traffic jams.

Heavy rains plus poor drain maintenance on the road between Sora and Bejuco have caused the collapse of a major section of that road, which was gradually undermined by water seepage under the pavement and finally washed away during big storms on November 19. While repairs are underway people are getting in and out of Sora by taking a bus to the edge of the washout, walking around the 15- feet-deep hole to where the road starts again, and then taking another bus. Due to the size of the washout and the drainage problem that must be resolved to prevent its recurrence, it may be several weeks before traffic along the road is back to normal.


Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
Powell here to discuss corruption
PECC scandal touches PRD and Arnulfistas, but mostly Toro
Mireya outed on family interest in land along road

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