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Panama News Briefs
PRD sweeps back into office
Posada Carriles gets eight years
Law students stand up for their professor
Scenes from the big Torrijos rally
Gangs: the lethal urge to belong
Bleming closes the circle
Alabama rape suspect's Chiriqui real estate career cut short
Supreme Court blocks presidential secret fund investigation
   
   
Panama News Briefs
Jaime Arias to head transition team
Martín Torrijos, who says that come September 1 his team will be ready to govern, has nominated attorney Jaime Arias to head his transition team. Jaime Arias is the brother of former Vice-President Ricardo Arias Calderón, who is the founder and spiritual leader of the Partido Popular, a junior partner in the coalition that backed the Torrijos campaign. Educated at Yale, the University of Paris and Tulane, Jaime Arias was the nation’s tax revenue director in 1967 and 1968. Also on the team are Daniel Kuzniecky, Héctor Alemán, Luis Blanco and Ubaldino Real. Torrijos has set a June 10 date for the announcement of most of his cabinet appointments.
San Carlos police captain busted
On May 11 Police Captain Eduardo Pérez, who headed the San Carlos police station, was arrested along with seven other cops and nine civilians with 282 kilos of cocaine. The arrests took place on Playa Raton, which is between Rio Mar and the town of San Carlos. According to a report in La Prensa, the drugs had been seized from an intercepted Colombian speedboat by the group composed of the eight police officers and members of an El Chorrillo street gang. It turned out, however, that a special unit from the National Police’s Office of Police Investigation and Information (DIIP) had been watching the smugglers and thus stumbled across the police corruption case.
Trial in Monsignior Altafulla’s assassination
On May 10 Marco Manjarrez went on trial for the 2002 murder of Monsignior Jorge Altafulla. Manjarrez has confessed to the stabbing, but the young man’s mental state will be an issue for the jury to decide. While in prison he has attempted suicide several times, and at some of his pretrial court appearances he seemed to be in a daze. The defendant was at one time a seminary student, and his lawyer Rafael Rodríguez has suggested that his client’s rage that resulted in the loss of the monsignior’s life may have been provoked by abuse on the church’s part. During the investigation the Catholic Church complained of this defense tactic, but as the trial began Archbishop José Dimas Cedeño limited his comments to a statement that he hopes that all the facts will come out and that justice will be done.
Paramilitary incursion into Venezuela
may have implications for Panama
Colombia’s right-wing AUC paramilitary has repeatedly attacked Panamanian communities in the Darien and Kuna Yala adjacent to the Colombian border since the mid-90s. The group, which is according to human rights groups and former military officers an unofficial appendage of the Colombian Army, has staged similar raids into other countries bordering on Colombia. Now a group of 70 armed and uniformed AUC members has been arrested at a safe house in the southern suburbs of Caracas. The Venezuelan government claims at least 80 more AUC members escaped the raid and that the paramilitary group was there to stage a US- and Colombian-backed coup against the government headed by Hugo Chávez. The Bush and Uribe administrations and the Venezuelan opposition all deny this, but the AUC presence so far inside Venezuelan territory is a clear sign that the paramilitary has escalated from actions against leftist guerrillas and their alleged supporters along Colombia’s borders to direct attempts to overthrow a government in a neighboring country. With tacit support from the Moscoso administration the AUC has been allowed to maintain a support network within Panama, such that if the policy of overthrowing the governments of Colombia’s neighbors is extended beyond Venezuela it would pose a serious threat to this country.
Legislator’s citizenship impugned
Darien legislator Haydée Milanés de Lay has more than one legal problem these days. Her re-election has been challenged by Electoral Prosecutor Gerardo Solís because it was allegedly procured by passing out checks from the government’s Social Investment Fund (FIS) to voters in the district, a charge that is being vigorously denied by all who are allegedly involved. But more fundamental than that, anti-corruption activist Enrique Montenegro is challenging Milanés de Lay’s right to vote and hold public office because he says that Catholic baptismal documents prove that she was born in Colombia and thus isn’t even a Panamanian citizen. The legislator says that Montenegro’s allegations are false.
Colombian woman deported, arrested
Lorena Henao Montoya, who earlier this year was detained in a raid on a Panamanian farm owned by her alleged Colombian drug lord brother Arcángel de Jesús Henao Montoya, won her court case in this country --- sort of. It was determined that there was insufficient evidence to try her for crimes committed in Panama, so on May 4 the Supreme Court ordered the criminal charges against her dropped. However, she had entered this country illegally so was declared persona non grata and put on a plane bound for Bogota. There she was arrested by Colombian police for drug trafficking. Some of the charges that our high court dismissed were potentially explosive --- literally and figuratively. The farmhouse where Henao was arrested contained an arsenal of military weapons. Also found in her possession when she was arrested were documents detailing bribes paid by the Valle del Norte drug cartel to Colombian prosecutors. Arcángel de Jesús Henao Montoya was extradited to the United States to face drug trafficking charges there.
CARITAS pans illegal alien roundup
CARITAS, the Catholic social ministry, has criticized the government for an April 21 roundup of foreigners who are living or working in Panama illegally or suspected of such. The 318 non-citizens caught in the sweep have been held incommunicado in Gamboa, with requests from Panamanian spouses and relatives to visit them and access to the courts for the purpose of filing habeas corpus petitions denied. Those detained come from a number of countries, mainly Latin American republics and the People’s Republic of China. CARITAS said that the roundup denied the detainees their right to due process of law and complained that has created hardships for a number of Panamanian families that depended on the incomes of those arrested.
High court deposes fire chief
Panama City’s top bombero, Leopoldo Mojica, is on his way out. The Supreme Court has ordered a new election, overturning the September 2000 vote that put Mojica in command because the chief had passed the mandatory retirement age of 70 years. The decision was handed down by the court’s administrative law panel, and the Cuerpo de Bomberos is appealing for reconsideration by the entire court. Meanwhile Mojica remains in his post as an unpaid volunteer. The mandatory retirement age was passed in order to keep former high court magistrate José Manuel Faúndes off of the court after taped phone calls of him negotiating bribes to release drug suspects were made public but sufficient votes for the legislature to impeach him could not be mustered. The “Faúndes Law” was then applied to elderly University of Panama professors and other public employees, but held by Faúndes’s colleagues on the high court to be inapplicable to the man it was supposed to depose. Faúndes returned to the bench for a brief time and then resigned. But meanwhile the Faúndes Law has prompted some ferocious inter-generational conflicts within the public sector.
Court reopens 1969 murder case
On New Year’s Eve 1969, activist Rubén Oscar Miró was killed, according to the Truth Commission by agents of the military dictatorship that took power the previous year. Now the Supreme Court’s penal bench has ordered the case reopened, holding that because the dictatorship had nullified the independence of the courts and prosecutors its years in power can’t be counted toward any calculation of a statute of limitations. In other cases the court has issued conflicting decisions about whether the statute of limitations applies to murder and disappearance charges. Miró’s son Gabriel Miró told El Panama America that the family is inclined to forgive those who killed his father, but they want a court to find and declare the truth of the matter.
Truth Commission wants Britton case reopened
The Truth Commission has petitioned a court in Penonome to reopen the inquest into the November 29, 1969 death of leftist leader Floyd Britton at the Coiba Island penal colony. Forensic anthropologists and other investigators are still searching the island and trying to find and identify Britton’s body, but the commission says that it has enough eyewitness accounts that the man had been severely beaten before his death to set aside the official finding that he died of natural causes.
Norieguista’s confiscated land
in national park transferred?
At the time of the 1989 US invasion Panama Defense Forces Colonel Alberto Purcell had possession of, via a company called PURGIL SA, an 80-hectare farm within La Amistad National Park. That company was accused of illegally logging some 500 hectares of the park, and the property was expropriated and handed to the Direccion de Responsabilidad Patrimonial (DRP), a part of the Comptroller General’s office. The land was in turn handed to INRENARE, the predecessor of the present-day National Environmental Authority (ANAM), with the understanding that it would be part of the park. Now, environmentalists say, a local judge has authorized surveyors to measure and mark the land as the private property of one Luis Antonio Galán and ANAM says it knows nothing about any alleged transfer. One of the salient features of the Moscoso administration has been the widespread appropriation of public and private lands by persons with family or political ties to the president.
Controversial pre-election commutations
Three days before the May 2 elections, President Moscoso commuted the sentences of 321 prisoners at various detention facilities around the country. The early releases were bitterly opposed by Attorney General Sossa and other critics, among other reasons because 11 of those freed were serving prison sentences for rape. All of the beneficiaries of the president’s discretion had served at least two-thirds of their sentences without getting into further trouble while incarcerated.
Landslides and floods in Bocas
Heavy rains beginning on May 5 have caused serious problems on the mainland of Bocas del Toro province. Landslides blocked the road between Chiriqui Grande and Changuinola in three places, while flooding forced dozens of families to flee their homes and destroyed crops in several low-lying areas. The SINAPROC disaster relief agency set up an emergency center to help those affected but was hampered by continuing heavy rains. There have been no reports of deaths or missing persons as the result of the flooding.
Oil spill affects Rio Mar
Rio Mar is one of the closest surfing beaches to Panama City, but just after the Mayday-Election Day weekend it was no fun at all. Surfers and bathers found themselves covered with a greasy film and gobs of black goo washed up on the beach. The National Environmental Authority (ANAM) is investigating the source of the spill. This is the second mystery oil spill in recent weeks, a previous one having taken place off of Galeta Island near Colon. The US government, which maintains an aerial and satellite watch over Panamanian waters to interdict drug smuggling, could if it wished to do so use the same technology to help Panama catch those responsible for oil spills, illegal fishing and other non-drug maritime crimes. However, bilateral law enforcement assistance treaties are mainly designed to address American concerns rather than Panamanian ones and this country’s National Maritime Service notoriously lacks the capacity to patrol its two long coastlines. Thus Panama remains vulnerable to the illegal marine dumping of petrochemicals, medical and industrial wastes and other contaminants.
Leptospirosis in Colon
Health officials report that a 37-year-old Colon woman has been hospitalized for leptospirosis. The disease, which is rarely fatal, is a bacterial infection borne by rodents and usually passed to humans through food contaminated by rat feces or by skin contact with rat urine. Those afflicted get alternating fevers and chills, head and body aches and muscle spasms that typically last for several weeks. Leptospirosis can lead to dangerous secondary kidney or liver infections. The patient in this case was a resident of an overcrowded slum on Calle 12, which health inspectors found to be grossly unsanitary. Leptospirosis is most effectively prevented by cleaning and repairing human habitations in order to deny rats food, water and shelter.
Mosquito spraying season
The Ministry of Health has announced that spraying to kill the Aedes aegypti mosquito will begin shortly in those parts of the country that are worst affected. The insects are the carriers of dengue fever, a week-long flu-like misery that can occasionally worsen into life-threatening hemorrhaging. The mosquitoes can also carry the deadly yellow fever when it exists in the human population, but Panama has not had that problem since the US mosquito elimination efforts that accompanied the construction of the Panama Canal. Unlike the Anopheles mosquitoes that carry malaria and breed in swampy areas, Aedes aegypti lays its eggs in tiny, clear bodies of water, such as those that accumulate in trash or old tires. Thus dengue is mostly an urban problem in Panama, with Tocumen and San Miguelito containing the worst hot spots in the metro area.
Kidney transplant backlog
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