At midnight on
December 31, fireworks went off all over Panama City, drunken
revelry accelerated to a frenzy and the Legislative
Assembly’s list of things to do became moot. Well, sort of
moot, anyway.
By law, business
not finished in the regular legislative session that ended with
the year must be started from scratch in another session. There
are always proposed laws that get killed by the clock at the end
of a session, but this time there were more than usual,
including some issues of high priority for President Moscoso.
These matters are dead letters until the next regular session
begins in March.
Unless, of
course, Mireya Moscoso calls for a special session.
Since the
outbreak of the bribery scandals that reduced public support for
the legislature to single digits, Mireya has more often than not
called for special sessions. That was for the purpose of
extending legislative immunity, which in Panama is nearly
absolute, lasts from five days preceding a regular or special
legislative session until five days afterwards, and protects
politicians not only from arrest and prosecution but also from
investigation. Mireya’s strategic special sessions were
mostly contrived and mostly unproductive, but they did delay
investigations of whether she bribed legislators to approve the
Supreme Court nominations of Winston Spadafora and Alberto
Cigarruista, and they did prevent the prosecution and removal
from office of erstwhile PRD deputy Carlos Afú, who not
only admitted receiving $6,000 to approve the contract for the
CEMIS airport expansion and multimodal container handling
project, but alleged that a bunch of his colleagues received
payoffs as well. Unlike the other renegade PRD solons who sold
out to Mireya, Afú went farther and pointed the finger at
his own caucus, and so his PRD colleagues moved against him
alone to invoke the party’s constitutional right to throw
him out of the party and remove him from the assembly. Without
Afús vote and with an expulsion to brandish over other
undisciplined PRD legislators, Mireya wouldn’t have the
votes to control the Legislative Assembly. However, the Supreme
Court first refused to uphold that part of the constitution that
allows parties to remove their members from the legislature, and
then obviated Mireya’s need for more special sessions last
September by prohibiting investigations of the legislative
bribery scandals.
There was a
firestorm of public criticism after that court decision, and
afterward many legislators assumed such low public profiles that
for weeks the assembly couldn’t put together a legitimate
quorum. Several measures were “passed” by legislators
pushing colleagues’ electronic voting buttons or
legislative aides doing likewise, a practice that may or may not
come before the courts, as nothing highly controversial was
allowed to be approved in this manner.
Compounding the
legislature’s image problem was the behavior of certain
deputies outside of the assembly’s chambers. As in Sergio
Gálvez, who hardly ever showed up for work, switched from
Ricardo Martinelli’s Cambio Democratico party in hopes of a
Mireyista nomination for mayor of Panama City, and took the
September to December session off to campaign for a nomination
that eventually went to colleague Marco Ameglio instead. As in
Francisco Reyes, the Arnulfista deputy who was stealing
electricity at his home and pulled a gun on utility workers when
they came to cut off his illegal connection to the power grid.
As in Haydée Milanés de Lay, who quit the
Solidaridad party to join the Arnulfistas and advocated the
ethnic cleansing of indigenous communities outside of the
Darien’s comarcas, including by inciting land invasions in
the Embera community of Arimae. As in Miguel Bush, the Colon
legislator who was denied a chance for another term by PRD
primary voters and who also in 2003 definitively lost his claim
to an exemption from the law that prevents a public official
from holding a concession to exploit public mineral
resources.
In none of these
cases did any member of the Legislative Assembly see fit to
stand up in the chamber and opine before the Panamanian people
that such conduct is unbecoming.
This ethical
crisis, however, did not develop in a vacuum. Panamanians looked
on in disgust. In last August’s PRD primaries, many
incumbents did poorly, with a few having been definitively
ousted and many more just barely winning renomination. Polls
suggest the public revulsion is such that most incumbent
legislators would have been thrown out of office were the vote
to have taken place in late 2003. Although a number of deputies
are switching party labels and there is still a lot of money to
be spent on legislative campaigns between now and the May 2
vote, the indications are that there will be a bloodbath,
possibly on a par with that of the 1994 election, in which about
five of every six legislators who ran for another term were
dumped by the voters.
All of the
deputies’ tickets to the gravy train will expire at
midnight on August 31, and the way it now looks, most passes
won’t be renewed. This, in turn, gives legislators a good
reason to support a special session, because they get extra pay
for attending such events.
But it’s up
to the president, not the assembly, to call a special
session.
The way for
legislators to force the president’s hand is to leave
business that she urgently wants done undone, and considering
that the countdown is also underway for Mireya and her friends
and relatives, that creates a sense of urgency at the Palacio de
las Garzas. The Mireyistas are on their way out, and though the
rigging of the Supreme Court and the possibility of another
Attorney General as corrupt as José Antonio Sossa may add
up to their tickets to stay out of prison, these people are
politically just as ruined as Manuel Antonio Noriega and his
inner circle. They need to gather what they can while they can,
because the odds are that they’re never coming back.
The president
really wants to create a “Special Economic Zone” at
and around the former Howard Air Force Base, and she wanted it
done in the recent legislative session. Every delay means that
lucrative concessions for the contemplated tax-free
manufacturing, air cargo handling and import/export zone might
not go through befroe the next government takes over. Every
delay reduces the Mireyistas’ control over the lucrative
real estate at the former US base. There are many millions of
dollars worth of illicit income for Mireya Moscoso’s
family, and her friends and their relatives, riding on a prompt
approval of the project. There are bribes to be extorted for
concessions and real estate, and there are lands, buildings and
business permits to be misappropriated from the Panamanian
people. It can’t all be digested before the government
changes hands, but the assets at stake are valued in the
hundreds of millions of dollars.
So one good way
for legislators to collect extra pay is to make it necessary for
Mireya to call a special session to get her Howard project
passed in time for her and her in crowd to maximize their
profits. The Legislative Assembly’s president, Arnulfista
deputy Jacobo Salas, has thus asked Mireya for a special session
to take up the Howard Special Economic Zone and other unfinished
business from 2003.
The “other
unfinished business” includes constitutional reform, but
that may not come before a special session. Last year Mireya
Moscoso jumped onto the constituent assembly bandwagon and
advocated the inclusion of a “fifth ballot” referendum
about whether to call for the election of such a body in the May
election. PRD presidential hopeful Martín Torrijos, at
the time dipping in the polls, said that he’s for
constitutional reform too. Thus there were Arnulfista and PRD
proposals before the assembly, but there was no compromise and
although the former legislation made it through committee it
never came to a vote on the assembly floor. It may now be too
late to pass such a bill in time to get a referendum on the May
ballot.
Another of
Mireya’s pet projects, an amnesty that would allow people
and companies that owe arrears to the Social Security Fund to
pay part of what they owe and make arrangements to pay off the
rest in exchange for the cancellation of penalty fees and
interest, also was extinguished with the onset of the new year.
Given that the list of Seguro’s debtors is some 15,500 (a
few dozen of which have been selected for criminal prosecution),
the amnesty is a matter of some urgency not only for the
administration. If there’s a special session, the subject
is likely to be included on its agenda.
Mireya also
wanted a package of subsidies for Panama’s tiny
manufacturing industry that was variously estimated in the
ballpark of a $300 million hit to public coffers. That, too,
died when the clock struck midnight.
At the end,
there was barely a quorum in the assembly chambers for a session
scheduled to end at midnight on December 30 but which extended
into the wee hours of the 31st. Of the 122 proposals brought up
in the September to December session, only 32 were passed.
Legislators make
$80,000 per year in base pay, counting neither tax exemptions,
cell phone subsidies, travel expenses and other legal perks, nor
the proceeds of various illegal rackets in which some of them
indulge. Legislative salaries are paid whether or not the
legislators actually show up for work. Deputies receive $250 per
day for attending special sessions, if they do attend.
Mireya may or
may not have the votes to get what she wants out of a special
session. She won’t have much trouble rustling up a quorum
if she does call the Legislative Assembly back to work before
its next regularly scheduled meetings.
Also in this
section:
Panama News
Briefs
Legislature leaves much
undone
Looking back on
2003
Arrests in Costa Rican radio
pundit's murder
On the campaign
trail
Venezuelan soldiers killed in
Colombian incursion
