Jackson, Systemic meltdown?

¡Huy! The most explosive of the latest allegations go like this:

• According to Comptroller General Alvin Weeden, former President Ernesto Pérez Balladares retained a five percent share in the US-based Ports Engineering and Consulting Corporation (PECC), which was awarded a multi-million-dollar buoy and lighthouse maintenance contract under his administration. To support that Weeden produced an $18,000 check made out to the bearer, with a code number and a note that it was for five percent of something and the endorsement of one Ernesto Pérez Balladares on the back. As of the time these words were written, Toro had not denied the document’s authenticity, nor had he claimed any forged addition. His defense was that the money was a campaign contribution for the 1998 ballot proposal that would have allowed him a chance to run for re-election, had it passed. The problem with that, other than the cryptic five percent notation and the number that's identical to a code in PECC's corporate ownership documents, is that the check was dated in 1997, well before that proposal had been placed on the ballot.

• According to Charles Jumet, the American CEO and claimed owner of PECC, he contributed $25 grand to the 1999 campaigns of both Martín Torrijos and Mireya Moscoso, and just before her inauguration he met with Moscoso and several aides at a restaurant on Via Argentina. Shortly after that meeting, he said, two men approached him, one a fifty-something man whose name Jumet couldn’t recall claiming to represent incoming National Police chief Carlos Barés and the other a maritime authority functionary named Eduardo Cummings claiming to represent incoming National Maritime Authority director Jerry Salazar, and between the two of them they demanded $300,000 per year for their respective alleged principals for PECC to continue otherwise unmolested with the buoy and lighthouse contract. Barés was unavailable for comment, Cummings refused comment, and Salazar claimed that he never met Jumet --- something that has never been alleged --- and on that basis threatened prosecution for criminal defamation. The Torrijos campaign acknowledged the donation. The Moscoso campaign had no comment.

So is Weeden the big hero? Hardly. Although some of the allegations that he has made in this affair seem on target, others are not supported by the documents that he claims as proof. What we have here at first blush is a systemic scandal involving both the PRD and the Mireyistas over two administrations, but what we’re getting is one-sided partisan sniping.

Indeed, along with Attorney General José Antonio Sossa, Comptroller General Alvin Weeden is one of the twin pillars that supports the facade of a shaky political class. Without those two looking the other way, all pretense of the political class’s legitimacy in this era of rampant corruption would have collapsed long ago.

Jumet’s allegations can be and are being denigrated as the words of a man himself under investigation for wrongdoing. Weeden’s allegations can be and are being denigrated as the words of a discredited political hack. And while the suspicions are reasonable, these particular allegations have the ring of truth.

Isn’t Toro a man who while holding public or partisan offices amassed a substantial personal fortune in a manner that was not visible to the public and that has never been explained to those who would like to know? And moreover, I have heard too many stories of small percentages of businesses that won contracts under the Pérez Balladares administration going to Toro’s friends or relatives to automatically the allegations on the basis of their maker’s sleazy reputation. Maybe I hear it wrong, and I know that I won’t hear the truth once the investigation gets into the hands of Toro appointee José Antonio Sossa. However, in my opinion Ernesto Pérez Balladares has not yet dodged this particular bullet, even if his seat in the Central American Parliament makes him immune to criminal investigation or prosecution.

The modus operandi that Jumet alleges with respect to officials of the Mireyista regime sounds remarkably similar to stories I have heard directly from two other executives of unrelated businesses, and indirectly about a third. Now it so happens that all of these businesses have had their legal problems with the current government and these executives all decline to speak on the record, but none of them are related to one another they all say the same thing. The story, as told by Jumet and at least three other big-time business execs, is that the Moscoso administration is at its bottom line just a shakedown racket.

In the face of this, both the PRD and the Arnulfistas, and even more ferociously the leading figures of their respective Partido Popular, MOLIRENA and Liberal Nacional junior partners, give us long, convoluted and unconvincing legalistic arguments. In the face of a growing public demand for prompt and profound constitutional change, they give us illusory proposals for reform processes that they expect will never come to pass. In the Legislative Assembly the Mireyistas and Martín Torrijos’s backers could give us the referendum that people demand in an instant but seem inclined to posture instead, while we really don’t know the substance of where Endara stands on key constitutional issues and Martinelli’s pronouncements are both irrelevant and to be taken with a boulder of salt in any case. The entire Panamanian nation is being taken for suckers by a tacit agreement among a handful of tiny political cliques whose members are only concerned about their personal tickets to the gravy train.

Possibly the worst offenders are found in the partisan-aligned media. With respect to the PECC affair, RPC-TV’s Sunday morning talking head Dorita de Reyna is directly implicated. That shouldn’t be surprising, given that she was Toro’s press flack and her husband was deputy director of the port authority under the previous administration, and given that the network’s parent MEDCOM corporation is mostly owned by Toro and his relatives and friends. But let us not miss the facts that what is supposed to be an “Open Debate” is anything but and that the scandal that has enveloped our political class has also tainted Panamanian journalism. The dithering in the face of a national crisis is all about media owners who derive a substantial part of their income from government advertising and pundits angling for lucrative jobs in the next administration.

The weak point of the drive for a constituent assembly is that in that process, too, those of us who demand a better fate for this society will have to fight all of the same entrenched creeps who are defending this or the previous administration and telling us bogeyman tales of the horrors of change. However, these people have screwed up far too badly for them to safely assume that the fix is in. It is the task of this generation of Panamanians to shatter the in-crowds’ smug assumptions into a million pieces, and give this society a dignified new constitutional order as a belated centennial present.

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Jackson, Systemic meltdown?

opinion

Systemic meltdown --- we should hope