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When Adán Arnulfo Arjona was presiding magistrate of the Supreme Court, the judicial system bought him a Mercedes Benz E-240. But since then César Pereira Burgos has replaced Arjona in the top spot, and he has ordered Arjona to hand over the keys and drive a car from the court’s fleet of Monteros instead. Arjona has resisted, and demanded records on the judicial system’s auto purchases. Pereira Burgos isn’t parting with the documents in question.

Usually the legislature doesn’t hold sessions the week before Election Day. This election year, the solons quit more than two weeks before the voting. Actually, most of them stopped working well before that. Assembly president Jacobo Salas threw in the towel on April 14, after several days of being unable to assemble a quorum, and declared a recess until after the election. About 85 percent of the deputies are seeking re-election, but polls indicate that most Panamanians are fed up with the current legislature, to the extent that many are ready to vote against all incumbents. The recess was a labor saver at The Panama News --- most of the pseudo-populist pre-election proposed legislation is now all for naught and that saves us both the work of reporting it and the ethical dilemma of deciding whether to publicize flagrant demagoguery on the eve of an election. Yeah, yeah --- they’re for motherhood and against crime and want to give working people a break, but no doubt they’ll be too busy for any of that when they get back together for a lame duck session of self-interested deal-making and partisan maneuvers.

The IDAAN water and sewer utility had a group of San Carlos fishermen reaching for their machetes on April 14, when it moved to cut off water to the fishing village on Playa Ensenada. After the IDAAN crew was confronted with an angry crowd, some waving machetes, the water shutoff was suspended. The village has been on the beach for decades, but somebody has come up with a 1922 deed and asked the government to eject the fishermen so that the place where they launch their boats can make way for a tourist development. Of course, under the rule of law the fishing village residents would have squatters’ rights to that part of the land that they have long used and which is legally capable of being owned, while neither party to the dispute could claim ownership to that part of the beach below or within 100 feet of the high water line. The Moscoso administration is siding with the developer --- besides taking a favorable view toward an application for a tourism development concession sent out IDAAN to cut the water to the one residence in the area that it directly serves, that of the fish processor who buys most of the fishermen’s catch. Santiago Ortíz, the president of the local fishermen’s association, told El Panama America that the people of Play Ensenada will “fight to the death for their right to work and for free access to the sea.” Attempts by politically connected developers to grab beaches from fishing communities that have been established for many years is one of the salient features of the Moscoso administration, and in many cases these attempts have been accompanied by the falsification of official maps.

Attorney Jorge Fonseca, who bought the residue of the development company that established Santa Clara in the 1930s and then claimed that the purchase made him owner of the town’s streets, parks and public access to the beach, died suddenly on Easter Sunday. Fonseca, who with the help of forged official maps moved to take over a small public park with a decades-old Catholic chapel in it, was not the most popular man in Santa Clara. Though the rumor around town is that the death was due to a drug overdose, no official ruling on the cause of Fonseca’s demise has been made public.

Dalvis Xiomara Sánchez, the Ministry of the Presidency secretary who made headlines a while back when some $35,000 in cash, in 1996 bills in sequential order, was stolen from the freezer in her El Dorado home, is building a new home. This one, near the beach at Costa Esmeralda in San Carlos, will cost more than $120,000, according to El Panama America. So what’s newsworthy about that? Well, just like the durodollars case, it IS odd that somebody on a government salary of $1,500 per month, who’s not from a rich family and who didn’t leave an executive post in the private sector to be a government secretary would have the resources for such a mansion.

The organic law by which the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) was created provides that the public authority shall have a “freedom of information policy.” However, as implemented by former Minister of Canal Affairs Ricardo Martinelli, the ACP information regulations go into great detail about how employees can be fired for divulging information and say nothing at all about the public’s right to information about the nation’s most valuable public asset. There is, however, now a crack in the Martinelli-Moscoso wall of silence about canal affairs. One Raúl Escoffery Alemán requested information on the cost of the nuclear waste ship Pacific Swan’s June 20, 2003 transit, and for the authority’s 2002-2003 financial report. The ACP blew him off, saying that the Pacific Swan data is “confidential” and that the economic figures for 2002-2003 are unavailable. Escoffery filed a habeas data suit, and the Supreme Court has ruled in his favor on the first point, holding that the authority can’t withhold information from the public simply by putting a “confidential” label on it. On the second point the court ruled against Escoffery, holding that a government agency can’t be compelled to produce information that it does not have.

The Inter-American Human Rights Commission, a tribunal that meets in San Jose, Costa Rica and by treaty is the highest court of appeal for many Panamanian cases, has accepted the lawsuit filed by Patria Portugal over the 1971 disappearance of her father, leftist activist Heliodoro Portugal. The commission has issued an opinion deploring the government’s failure to prosecute the soldiers who abducted and killed Heliodoro Portugal, whose skeletal remains were found buried on the grounds of the former Puma infantry company barracks in Tocumen. However, the commission has jurisdiction over states and not individuals, so that opinion does not affect criminal liability but rather was cited as proof that Patria Portugal had exhausted her legal remedies in Panama and thus had a right to bring her case to the commission. The survivors of Mr. Portugal may be awarded damages by the court. However, under the Moscoso administration Panama has developed a reputation for not paying when the Inter-American Human Rights Commission orders compensation for individuals found to have been wronged by the Panamanian government.

On April 6 law professor Miguel Antonio Bernal showed up at the Dental Faculty for a disciplinary hearing to face charges that he criticized rector Gustavo García de Paredes’s budget cuts, but found his way blocked by supporters of the rector who were demanding Bernal’s expulsion from the university. The picketers, like García de Paredes, were in the main people with jobs in the university administration. Bernal, who in 1979 was beaten nearly to death by some of the former dictatorship’s most violent cops, decided to leave rather than try to cross a hostile picket line. Academic discipline committee chief Omar López said that the hearing would be rescheduled. Then next day, however, Bernal began a process that may require López and García de Paredes to themselves sit in a defendants’ dock. Bernal filed criminal charges of abuse of authority and exceeding official powers against them. Of course, Attorney General José Antonio Sossa despises Bernal, supports government corruption and always finds a way to side with his PRD political allies, and thus can be expected to oppose Bernal in this case. However, Sossa will be leaving office at the end of the year. The university’s action against Bernal has elicited widespread protests from many quarters here and abroad.





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Mireya battles electoral prosecutor
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