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The final televised debate among the four presidential candidates, scheduled for April 20, isn’t happening. Or at least, not as a debate involving those with a chance to be president. First, PRD-Partido Popular candidate Martín Torrijos opted out, complaining that the last debate was just an attack session and that the rules for the one on the 20th made it inevitable that it wouldn’t be any different. Once Torrijos was out, Solidaridad candidate Guillermo Endara also announced that he wouldn’t participate. Endara said that he’d have liked to debate Torrijos on the issues, but doesn’t see any reason to debate with two candidates (the Mireyistas’ José Miguel Alemán and Cambio Democratico’s Ricardo Martinelli) who have no chance to be the next president. The basic political calculations are that Torrijos believes that he has a safe lead and is trying to sit on it and coast to victory, while Endara thinks that he can catch Torrijos but that giving Alemán or Martinelli more public attention in a debate where the PRD candidate is absent wouldn’t help his chances.

With the May 2 Election Day approaching, Papal Nuncio Giacomo Guido Ottonello took the opportunity of the elevation of two new Catholic bishops to complain about the tone that Panamanian electoral discourse has taken. “We are shaken by the egoisms, hatreds, lust for power and desire for vengeance” of this year’s crop of political candidates, he said.

How bad is the Mireyistas’ plight? So bad that instead of going out and winning votes, the rump faction of MOLIRENA, which is a junior partner to the rump faction of Arnulfistas in the Moscoso administration, is spending the final days before the election by conducting a purge trial. Not just a little expulsion of some minor party activists, mind you. Jesús “Maco” Rosas, the owner of what’s left of MOLIRENA, proposes to expel his nephew, Luis Benjamín Rosas, and Marilyn Vallarino, wife of First Vice-President Arturo Vallarino, along with former legislators Gisela Chung and Raymundo Hurtado Lay, and the former governor of Panama province, Plutarcho Arrocha. The offense is supporting Guillermo Endara. Polls suggest that the Rosas family --- that is, what remains of MOLIRENA --- is in danger of losing its ballot status. Thus this may well be Maco’s last chance in public life to say “Take them away!” Under a normal totalitarian regime it might be up to his sister, Education Minister Doris Rosas de Mata, to oversee the deviationists‘ brainwashing at a re-education camp. However, she can’t be bothered with the details of running the regular educational system, let alone a special project like that. In any case, the purge makes it kind of difficult for José Miguel Alemán to convince anyone with his “jump on the bandwagon” appeals.

The Alternativa Patriotica Popular, a leftist umbrella group whose most important member is the SUNTRACS construction workers’ union, has called upon Panamanians to cast spoiled or blank ballots on May 2. “With a vote of protest and struggle, abstention, the spoiled ballot or the blank ballot you will say NO! to the political parties of the dominant class,” the movement urged in leaflets distributed in working class neighborhoods.




Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
Mireya battles electoral prosecutor
Honduran death squads
On the campaign trail

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