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Panama News Briefs
Unsigned campaign sleaze
Ombudsman wants to close La Chorrera jail
Reporter's journal: Honduras
Second presidential debate
PRD stronghold
Anderson pleads guilty to falsifying evidence
Toro discloses secret fund expenses
   
   
Panama News Briefs
US pulls visas of three of Mireya's diplomats
Mexican construction contractor Máximo Haddad, who is a naturalized Panamanian and runs the controversial PYCSA corporation, along with husband and wife Manuel Cohen and Luz Esthela de Cohen, are the first members of Mireya Moscoso’s entourage to be stripped of their visas to visit the United States. Haddad had been appointed as Panama’s consul in Tampa, while the Cohens had each served as this country’s consul in Miami. All three are implicated in the Hamilton Bank scandal, having received large unsecured or inadequately secured insider loans from the failed Florida bank. Manuel Cohen now serves as one of Mireya’s aides. Haddad’s PYCSA company, which runs the Corredor Norte, is heavily financed by the state-owned Banco Nacional de Panama and Caja de Ahorros savings bank. All three have Panamanian diplomatic passports, none of which are now valid for visits to Disney World. Coming just a little more than a month before national elections, the US decision may turn into the final nail in the political coffin of Mireya’s choice for a successor, José Miguel Alemán. It’s probably also an indication that after her term of office is over Mireya herself will no longer be welcome in the United States.
“I had to lie,” legislator says
Legislator Manuel De La Hoz, who was elected as a PRD deputy but is now trying for another term as an Arnulfista, says that he lied to prosecutors when he told them that he knew nothing about bribes allegedly paid to gain approval of the CEMIS project to build an Atlantic side multi-modal cargo handling facility and expand France Field airport. De La Hoz claims that he was obliged to lie as part of PRD party discipline. Ordinarily, lying to prosecutors amounts to the crime of perjury. However, De La Hoz is protected by legislative immunity.
Anti-Castro activists tried
After some three and one-half years of waiting in jail, six anti-Castro activists, five Cuban-Americans and one Panamanian, have had their day in court on charges of conspiracy and explosives possession as part of an alleged plot to kill Fidel Castro --- and probably hundreds of other people --- during the dictator’s November 2000 appearance at the University of Panama. A seventh defendant died awaiting trial. The verdict, which will be handed down by Judge José Ho Justiniani, has not been announced. Whichever way the verdict goes, it is likely that someone on the losing side will appeal. Throughout the proceedings it has often appeared that prosecutors have been pursuing the case half-heartedly, but a number of student leftist groups, labor unions and the Kuna General Congress, who were Castro’s hosts at the event, also filed private charges in the case and their attorneys have pursued the matter much more zealously. The Cuban government wants the alleged leader of the group, Luis Posada Carriles, for allegedly masterminding a series of 1990s hotel bombings in Cuba that killed an Italian tourist and for allegedly taking part in the 1976 bombing of a Cubana airliner, which blew up over Barbadian waters killing all 73 people aboard. Another of the accused, Guillermo Novo, was convicted of setting off a bomb on the streets of Washington DC, which killed former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and American activist Ronnie Moffitt, but that conviction was overturned on appeal and the George H. W. Bush administration decided not to retry the case. Panama has spurned Cuba’s extradition requests, primarily because Posada Carriles would face the death penalty if sent to Cuba for trial.
Explosives bust in Colon
A National Police undercover operation has resulted in the March 18 seizure of some 80 kilos of Lodex high explosives along with detonator cords and blasting caps, and in a separate but related raid, 441 kilos of cocaine. The industrial explosives were seized from a truck on the road in Colon, while the coke was found in a Cativa workshop that the truck had just left. Ten Panamanians, a Colombian and a Costa Rican were arrested in the case, which police say was the breakup of a gang that trades weapons and explosives bound for Colombia’s civil war for cocaine and heroin.
Back to school traffic crackdown
On March 22, the first day the new public school year, the Transito Police set up checkpoints at key intersections around Panama City to check bus and taxi drivers’ licenses, issue tickets to drivers not wearing seatbelts, and confiscate sound equipment from school buses. The crackdown on stereo systems also took place at various places in the Interior.
UXO found in allegedly cleared bridge approach
The western approach to the second bridge across the Panama Canal, which is under construction near Paraiso and Contractors Hill, cuts through the old US Army Empire Range. Despite a Panama Canal Treaty provision requiring the United States to remove all hazards from the former Canal Zone insofar as practicable, this firing range was left uncleared of unexploded ordnance (UXO) when the American troops withdrew and the matter has been disputed between Panama and the United States since then. A subcontractor, Isthmian Explosive Disposal, was hired to clear the UXO from the site and had certified that it had done so. However, after the alleged cleanup, construction workers encountered 14 pieces of UXO during their labors. None have exploded, but that remains a possibility. Over the years several Panamanians have been killed by explosives left on US military firing ranges. The greater risk in this case is probably to come, as squatters usually move in along any new roadway and if they do so in this case would be setting up homes in completely uncleared areas. The main construction contractor, German-based Bilfinger-Berger, has plenty of experience working around UXO because it has built a bridge on an old Vietnamese battlefield and in Germany construction projects often run into leftover munitions from World War II.
Psychologist says she was threatened for anti-gay article
Psychologist and newspaper columnist Geraldine Emiliani complains that she has received abusive and sometimes threatening emails and that someone threw rocks at her house, all after she published an article in El Panama America’s “Siete” supplement that opined that homosexuality is a mental illness. After many years of often ferocious debates, the psychiatric associations in most of the industrialized countries have removed homosexuality from their lists of mental diseases and now many mental health professionals consider it cruel and unethical to try to “cure” gay men or lesbians by turning them into heterosexuals.
Constitutional referendum passes hurdle
The Legislative Assembly’s Government Commission has approved legislation that would authorize the holding of a referendum on whether to convoke a constituent assembly. As passed by the committee, the referendum would be held within three months of passage by the entire assembly and signature by the president --- as in the lame duck period of the Moscoso administration, possibly in tandem with a Panama Canal expansion referendum. The proposal would still need to be passed twice by the entire assembly, and all sorts of amendments are likely to be proposed. Basically what happened is that the legislature blocked constitutional reform and the voters are set to throw most deputies out of office, so now the belated move is on to try to repair some of the political damage. The PRD boycotted the committee session at which the proposal was approved.
Coiba remains identified
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