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On January 15 the PRD met at ATLAPA to finalize its slate of candidates for May's election, and Martín Torrijos in many respects took the path of least resistance.

The PRD standard bearer’s running mates will be businessman Samuel Lewis Navarro, who resigned from the Solidaridad party that his uncle Samuel Lewis Galindo heads in order to accept the nomination, and Partido Popular legislator Rubén Arosemena. Lewis Navarro is one of Panama’s richest individuals, a major stake holder in nation’s banana and food packaging industries, and a former member of the Panama Canal Authority board of directors. He received his undergraduate education at Georgetown and an MBA from American University. Arosemena has a law degree from USMA and an LLM from Southern Methodist University and has held a variety of elected offices since 1984.

Although before the convention Torrijos had pointedly stated that in his administration there will be no divisions of posts and political patronage plums among parties and factions, in the end the PRD’s Partido Popular junior coalition partners got the second vice-president slot on the ticket as expected. By nominating Lewis Navarro the PRD brings money to the campaign and hopes to cut into the support for the coalition backing Torrijos’s closest rival, Guillermo Endara. However, Torrijos spun it as a matter of adding economic expertise to his team.

In his speech at ATLAPA Torrijos set an upbeat “jump on the bandwagon” tone, blasted the current administration for corruption and inefficiency, and promised to do better in many specific respects. Most notably, he called for “zero impunity.”

At and before the January 15 meeting the PRD leader stepped around a number of potentially divisive situations, but in the process managed to shed some heavy baggage that he wouldn’t want to carry into the campaign.

For example, when during the previous week Torrijos announced the members of his campaign committee, entertainer Rubén Blades and prominent PRD and Partido Popular activists figured among them. Missing, however, was his cousin Hugo Torrijos, who is mired in a scandal involving kickbacks from a buoy and lighthouse maintenance contract granted to Ports Engineering and Consulting Corporation (PECC) while he was head of the old National Ports Authority. For much of last year Hugo Torrijos served as Martín campaign manager.

The principal politician caught in the PECC scandal, former President Ernesto Pérez Balladares, is a member of the Central American Parliament (PARLACEN) by virtue of having been Panama’s previous president and had stated his intention to run for another term. PARLACEN does little or nothing, and though the pay is nice it would mean little to Toro, who flaunts great wealth of obscure origin. The real benefit that the ex-president has derived from his membership in PARLACEN is immunity from criminal investigation and prosecution for things like the PECC affair and the sale of Panamanian visas to Chinese citizens intending to sneak into the United States during his administration. Putting Toro on the slate for another term in PARLACEN would thus make Torrijos’s call for zero impunity ring rather hollow, but opposing the Pérez Balladares candidacy would divide the party just at the time when it holds a big lead in the polls.

Thus a quiet arrangement was reached, wherein Torrijos loyalists voted for Pérez Balladares’s inclusion on the slate of candidates for PARLACEN, and immediately after having handily won his spot on the ticket Toro stepped down. That means that come September 1 Ernesto Pérez Balladares won’t have any immunity by Mireya Moscoso will, and meanwhile Martín Torrijos has one less campaign liability going into the May 2 election.

Also the week before the convention at ATLAPA, Torrijos reversed an earlier political stance with respect to the murders and disappearances of dissidents during the 22-year dictatorship. The candidate’s father, General Omar Torrijos, presided over the military regime from 1968 through his death in a 1981 plane crash and was the founder of the PRD. Now the son, Martín Torrijos, says that he supports the recent Supreme Court decision that those responsible for political murders during the times that his father and successor military officers ran the country are not protected by the statute of limitations. This policy shift also lends a bit more credibility to the PRD candidate’s zero impunity pledge.

One final hazard that Torrijos avoided was any consideration of some party activists’ call to rescind the nominations of legislators who won their PRD primaries last August but who frequently vote with the Mireyista bloc in the assembly. These include Chiriqui’s Carlos Alvarado, Colon’s Abelardo “Lalo” Antonío and Panama City’s Olivia de Pomares. However, that argument didn’t come up at the ATLAPA session. Judging from the primary results, Lalo’s possibilities for getting back in the legislature are not good, and judging from repeated opinion polls, most incumbent legislators are likely to be thrown out of office. Thus Torrijos is in a good position to ignore this problem and let the voters sort it out for him next May.



Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
PRD picks its slate
Alleged drug lord nabbed here, sent to US
On the campaign trail
FARC leader's bust in Ecuador and what it means for Panama

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