We find the lovely Nuvia Ceballos, Panama City’s Panameñisima Reina Negra. Her Majesty Nuvia I, mind you, is not the country’s ONLY black Carnival queen, but one of several proofs that our country’s modeling, advertising and television industries’ exaggerated preference for blondes is a case of severe tunnel vision.
The official Panama City Carnival, this year as throughout the Moscoso years celebrated under the ugly cloud of political censorship of the arts, is nevertheless well represented by a stunningly foxy chola, Her Majesty Queen Debbie I. Banished from the Mireyista celebration, however, are the works of Panama’s favorite musical satirist, Pedrito Altamiranda. The prohibition, imposed on one day’s notice on the opening night dance act, has served mainly to boost sales of Altamiranda’s hot new record “La Doña.”
It has been a bad couple of weeks for Panamanian satire. La Cascara’s Ubaldo Davis, already appealing a prison sentence for a satirical photo montage of Mireya and her usual social escort at the time, Winston Spadafora, imposed on the bizarre legal theory that all satire about politicians is criminal because it denigrates public figures and is not factually true, has received an additional six-month jail term for the same act. This time the purported crime is “attacking the security of the state” --- treason, that is.
The ban on Altamiranda, one more offense in a long train of abuses that includes the prison sentences handed out to Davis, the attempted ban on the Rubén Blades centennial concert and Government and Justice Minister Arnulfo Escalona’s thuggish physical assault of Panama City Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro on the City Hall steps, will surely harm the already hopeless chances of the one presidential candidate who promises us five more years of this sort of thing.
Ancient wisdom --- like most other kinds --- is all Greek to La Doña. But the Greek writers of antiquity whose works survived the torches of early Christian fanatics (and later Muslim ones) knew human nature very well. Despite the advent of industrial society, weapons of mass destruction, television and the Internet, mankind has not really changed all that much since Homer's times. Back in ancient Greece, the wise elders noticed a certain common progression in human affairs: whom the gods intend to destroy, they observed, they first drive mad. And so it seems in Panamanian politics.
But who am I to start pointing a finger and talking about madness? I’m from a long line of manic depressives and touched a bit myself. In fact, this issue comes to you late, and the last issue was full of uncorrected errors and empty spaces, in large part because I lost nearly a week to depression and another couple of days to mania.
What happened was that, soon after I sat down in front of my computer on Monday, February 9 to do the last few articles and corrections on the last issue, a man from the prosecutor’s office came to the office and handed me a piece of paper.
It was a weird little document, summoning me to some sort of proceeding on the morning of February 20 --- Carnival Friday. The form was one of those “cross out one alternative” things, the two possibilities being a “diligencia” --- interrogation by prosecutors of a person who hasn’t been accused of anything --- or an “indagatoria” --- questioning for use at trial of a person who has been accused. Indagatoria was crossed out, but I was listed as an accused and there was this note about a notification of charges against me.
My animalistic alleged crime? Calumnia e injuria --- criminal defamation.
The Panama News office is just a few blocks from the prosecutors, so I went to see the file. Before I was allowed to see it, I was subjected to this degrading routine by an assistant prosecutor about whether I’m a real Panamanian.
Let me first say that in the Public Ministry, which these days is a Partido Popular - Christian Democrat political patronage fiefdom, there are some honorable exceptions to the trend I am about to describe. But as both a US-Panamanian dual citizen who speaks Spanish imperfectly as a second language and as a veteran observer of this country’s public affairs, I see this amazing duality in the green star crowd. The Partido Popular - Christian Democrats usually go well out of their way to be the most servile sycophants of the US government, even when Washington’s policies are toxic for Panama. But on a one-to-one individual basis, these people tend to be grotesquely anti-American, much more so than the radical leftists whom you find protesting on the streets against this or that US policy.
There are also some dishonorable exceptions to the trend. The most notorious has been one Marc Harris, now in a Florida jail awaiting sentencing after his conviction on money laundering, tax evasion and conspiracy charges. Harris ran a Ponzi scheme and corporate shell game, promoted over the Internet to mainly American suckers using a series of misrepresentations so as to add up to the crime of wire fraud under US law, using Panama as his base. In doing so, Harris enjoyed the active support of Attorney General José Antonio Sossa. It wasn’t merely a matter of the procurador not taking action in the face of Harris’s flagrant violations of both Panamanian and US laws. It was also a matter of Sossa using the power of his office to prosecute journalists from La Prensa who dared to report on Harris’s scams. It was also a matter of Sossa deputizing Harris’s goons to make arrests in Panama.
It seems that Sossa is making another exception for me. It turns out that the charge against me is by San Cristobal Land Development, a real estate operation run by a gringo named Tom McMurrain. The criminal libel charge is, according to a page in the four-inch-thick file that I was allowed to see, about two stories by Okke Ornstein on McMurrain and his operation that The Panama News ran last April and May.
There are three exceptionally odd things about that file.
First, the complaint alleges that our stories were based upon San Cristobal’s own documents. This is true. We are dealing with a guy who alienates people who work for him, some of whom provided us with copies of emails, internal memos and other damning proofs. However, and maybe I’m thinking in gringo legal norms that don’t apply here, though Panamanian lawyers tell me otherwise, it seems improper that the complaint did not attach the documents to which it referred. Of course, if they were included in the file they would be admissions that would destroy San Cristobal’s case.
Second, the complaint does not point out any specific paragraph, sentence, phrase or word in either of those stories which it identifies as false and defamatory. It generally avers that the articles say that San Cristobal defrauds its customers. (And, although the articles don’t specifically say that, this is the general tenor and I have no qualms whatsoever about being able to prove that this is the case. Yes, San Cristobal has taken some of the grossest misrepresentations that have been pointed out off of their website and that of its accomplice escapeartist.com --- but then they don’t know what we have copied and saved, do they? And yes, I know that having proof is one thing, and getting it before the court is something entirely different --- but McMurrain and Sossa are hallucinating if they think that The Panama News will restrict its battle against them to the rigged Panamanian legal system.)
The third and most bizarre anomaly of all is that most of those four inches of legal papers refer not to what The Panama News published, but to a series of stories in El Siglo about the same subject. But I do not now have, nor have I ever had, the slightest thing to do with what El Siglo publishes. The publisher of that necro-porn tabloid is the Partido Popular - Christian Democrat former National Police Chief Ebrahim Asvat. And of course Asvat isn’t charged. Basically Sossa has set me up to answer for what his party comrade has published.
Now I can psych myself up for a good fight, but all I really want to do is to produce a good newspaper. Silly charges like the one lodged against me are an annoying distraction at best. But in this case, bipolar as I am, they were the trigger to set me off into a nearly week-long depressive haze, out of which I then snapped into a manic fury that cost me a couple of nights of sleep. I didn’t get much work done in the few days after Sossa’s man slapped the papers on me.
When the emotional roller coaster ride ended, my friend and colleague Michelle Lescure took me aside, gave me her best advice, made a few phone calls on my behalf and sent me over to talk to Rafael Pérez Jaramillo at the local chapter of Transparency International.
Michelle, Rafael, Miguel Antonio Bernal, Bobby Eisenmann and several other fellow journalists --- all of them, like me, among the more than one-third of the Panamanian members of our profession who are facing or have faced criminal defamation charges --- have come through with support and assistance for which I am very grateful.
In the course of consultations with cooler, more experienced and better educated heads, it was pointed out to me that if I am already accused, they can’t do a diligencia. Moreover, it was noted that one of the new tactics that Sossa’s prosecutors are using is to send people cryptic summonses, and when they arrive thinking the appointment is for one purpose the victims are told that it’s for an indagatoria. In that circumstance, objecting that one must then have assistance of counsel results in a jailing for contempt. Were such a thing to happen to me on the morning of a Carnival Friday, the courts wouldn’t be open again to hear a habeas corpus motion until the following Thursday.
So I postponed my pre-appearance press conference and didn’t show up for whatever it was that the prosecutors had in store for me on February 20.
But I still had a paper to put out. (Had Carnival and the production of The Panama News not coincided, my decision might have been different. I’d rather not be locked up, but the prospect of a week in jail isn’t all that terrifying to me.)
And thus this issue of The Panama News comes to you a bit late, but not as late as it would have had I been jailed on Carnival Friday.
Herein there are scenes from the first race of the cayuco season and the annual Antillean Fair. This edition has larger than usual Review and Science sections, the former including a couple of things that should have been in the last issue but were left out after the summons disrupted my work.
The Opinion columns touch a number of controversies on the national and international levels. One of them is by the Committee to Protect Journalists, which is challenging the whole notion of criminal defamation laws before the Inter-American Human Rights Court by way of an amicus brief submitted in a case that arose in neighboring Costa Rica. In my own column I momentarily divert my attention from things isthmian to the American furor over gay marriage.
Our lead News story is about an ominous battle between Mireya Moscoso and the Electoral Tribunal. Let us hope that it does not presage a hardcore fit of madness --- the theft of a presidential election --- that would surely tear this country apart.
Our lead Business story is a more uplifting tale, about a small business adapting to technological changes that could destroy it, and even growing in the process.
Let me leave you on that note, because even though it’s my job to report about matters that might discourage some of us from getting out of bed in the morning, I really do prefer to disseminate good news.
Enjoy.
