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The Ministry of the Presidency has issued a decree that would seal the records of how Mireya Moscoso used her secret presidential funds for 10 years after she leaves office. With the current Mireyista majority in the Supreme Court, which would not change during the Torrijos administration unless the PRD legislates to increase the number of magistrates, impugn some of Mireya’s appointees or otherwise restructure the institution, this decree would be upheld. The odds are, however, that there will be both domestic public demand and international pressures on the next administration to investigate and prosecute members of the Moscoso administration and the secret fund is already under legal attack by the Electoral Prosecutor on suspicions that it has been improperly used for partisan campaign purposes.

Carlos Vásquez, the president of the Colegio de Abogados (Panama’s Bar Association), says that the waning days of Mireyismo are characterized by a “Nero Syndrome.” He told El Panama America that while people are waiting for the new government to take office the nation is witnessing the consequences of budget deficits that were hidden until after the elections, increasing chaos on the streets and unseemly power struggles in the Supreme Court. It all adds up to an “incendiary situation,” Vásquez said.

The Naso, the Bocas del Toro indigenous group sometimes called the Teribe after the river along which most of them live, have a new king. The nation, which got its own comarca --- a semi-autonomous homeland --- as of January 1 this year, is the only monarchy in the Americas if one does not count jurisdictions like Canada and the Netherlands Antilles that consider European royals as their heads of state. Under the law creating the comarca and by tradition the Naso king, a member of the Santana family, actually does rule, except he does not hold judicial functions and is expected to get the nation’s consensus on major decisions. He may be deposed, and traditionally when there is a major change in Panama’s national government the Naso will change kings, generally in favor of a Santana that has a better rapport with the new occupant of the Palacio de las Garzas. This time the old king, Tito Santana, lost a May 31 vote of confidence in the General Leadership Council, mainly over the issue of a proposed hydroelectric dam on the Teribe River that he supported. He had held his office for a little less than two years. The new king, Valentín Santana, was proclaimed at the same council.

On June 5 heavy rains and strong winds buffeted Colon and Bocas del Toro provinces, causing nine deaths. In Colon a landslide in Villa Luzmilla swept a house into a swollen creek, killing two women and three children inside. More than 300 other houses in the Cativa, Sabanitas, Nuevo Mexico, Nuevo Colon, San Pedro, San Mateo, La Tablita, Don Bosco and Villa Guadalupe neighborhoods were flooded out or damaged by winds, falling trees or landslides. All told, some 1,700 people were forced from their homes. A generation ago virtually all of the affected areas were forested, and although back then elemental forces also would occasionally be extreme, the largely haphazard development --- often by way of squatter invasions --- makes these places a lot more disaster-prone. In Bocas two men were killed when trees fell on their houses and another two men drowned.

On May 31 Police Captain Alejandro Vargas was shot in the head and killed, apparently while resisting a street gang that was trying to rob him of his service revolver. Vargas, who was off duty at the time, worked in the traffic division in Colon but was going home after a party with relatives in the Viejo Veranillo neighborhood of Panama City’s Curundu corregimiento. Vargas shot and fatally wounded one of his attackers, and in the shootout a 19-year-old woman also received a gunshot wound that was not life-threatening. Four persons suspected of participating in the alleged robbery attempt have been arrested. A 13-year veteran of the force, Vargas was the 82nd police officer to be murdered since the force was reconstituted after the 1989 US invasion and the second to be slain in two weeks.

On June 1 high school students at the Artes y Oficios vocational school, which is across the Trans-Isthmian Highway from the University of Panama, began their school day by walking out and blocking the road, to protest the lack of materials for their shop classes. As the riot police moved in, masked youths did battle with rocks and bottles, some non-students joined in the fray, and as the riot was dispersed smaller bands smashed car windows, attacked passersby and staged a number of robberies. On of those who was assaulted and robbed was Monsignior Alejandro Vásquez Pinto, who was stabbed in the leg and relieved his cell phone and his thermos bottle. (Vásquez wasn’t wearing priestly garb at the time of the assault, so the maleantes most likely did not realize who he was.) Another gang of youths robbed a nearby gas station. Some 40 individuals were arrested, including a few adults and seven people who are being charged with armed robbery. The Ministry of Education closed the school for a week.

In keeping with traditions, students from Panama’s elite public high school, the Instituto Nacional, blocked the Avenida de los Martires on May 31 and June 1, mainly to protest the elevation of an unpopular assistant principal to replace the suspended rector, Jaime Ruiz. The protesters also complained of a shortage of school supplies and increasing energy prices. There were the usual tear gas against rocks confrontations with police, and on the second day a nearby resident appeared on his apartment balcony with a rifle and began firing warning shots at the students. The Education Ministry closed the school for a week.

On June 2, with Artes y Oficios shut down, a small group of university students closed all but one lane in each direction on the Trans-Isthmian Highway, slowing traffic to a crawl and setting off a chain reaction of gridlock throughout much of the city for five hours. The participating groups were Pensamiento y Accion Transformadora (PAT) and the Movimiento Estudiantil Patriotico (MEP), who said they were protesting increased energy prices. There is a feud ongoing within the campus left these days, so such usual suspects as the Frente Estudiantil Revolucionario (FER-29) and the Bloque Popular Unido (BPU) did not participate. There was off-and-on violence, with one person identified as a police infiltrator getting kicked and beaten, some stone throwing at police observers who came too close, and in one instance a police on a motor scooter who tried to pass by was grabbed and stripped of his helmet. The radicals then played soccer in the street with the liberated headgear. Eventually the protest was dispersed by heavy afternoon rains --- but due to the coincidence of high tide on the Pacific, those caused flooding on some major city streets and rounded out an entire day of urban traffic jams.

Circuit Court Judge Felipe Fuentes has ordered prosecutors to do a more thorough investigation of the Museo Antropologico gold room theft, including by taking the sworn testimony of the current and former heads of the National Institute of Culture (INAC), Pablo Barrios and Rafael Ruiloba, respectively, and the director of the National Historical Patrimony, Carlos Fitzgerald. The judge also wants prosecutors to take the testimony of detectives involved in the case. The February 17, 2003 theft, in which 311 priceless pre-Columbian artifacts were taken, was clearly an inside job involving many people. Most of the pieces were recovered later last year, when detectives investigating a credit card counterfeiting ring stumbled across a man trying to fence the stolen antiquities. Eventually 13 people were arrested, most of them museum employees, one of whom was a man who had been hired due to his Mireyista political connections even though he was out of jail on an appeal bond from another grand theft conviction. Among those arrested were every INAC employee with access to the keys or knowledge of the combination lock numbers that were used in the theft --- except for the people at the top of INAC. Only two of those accused remain incarcerated while awaiting trial.

Ilka de Barés, the head of Migracion and wife of National Police Chief Carlos Barés, has been fined $150 for deporting a Colombian woman after the high court had issued a writ of habeas corpus. The deportee was here on a tourist visa and allegedly working as a prostitute --- which would be legal, had she possessed one of the visas that the Panamanian government issues to foreign women, mostly Colombian or Dominican, to practice the most ancient profession here. But Immigration officials found that she wasn’t a bona fide tourist and immediately put her on a plane back to Colombia. Barés, who was out of the country when the fine was handed down, said through an Immigration spokesman that she’ll appeal the fine.

The Partido Popular’s Rubén Arosemena, elected both as second vice-president and for another term in the legislature on May 2, has declined the latter post. It is expected that he will be given a ministry or some other day-to-day executive job by the incoming Torrijos administration. Occupying the assembly seat to which Arosemena was elected will be his suplente, Jorge Hernán Rubio.

Arguing that the party’s showing in local races means that, despite nearly losing its ballot status, most of its seats in the Legislative Assembly and its representation on Panama City’s city council, MOLIRENA did well in the May 2 elections, party boss Jesús “Maco” Rosas says that he will remain as the group’s leader at least through the end of his term in 2006. The MOLIRENA youth have called for Rosas to step down, but most of the senior party leaders who would say the same have been purged from the party by the Rosas family.

One of the grand figures of Panamanian journalism, Guillermo Sánchez Borbón, has retired. Citing failing eyesight, he said farewell in a June 6 column in La Prensa at the age of 80. Sánchez Borbón wrote for La Prensa for 24 years and was one of the main propagandists in the civilista movement to oust the Noriega regime. Along with Richard Koster he was the author of the anti-dictatorship polemic “In the Time of the Tyrants.” He also wrote several novels. In his farewell column Sánchez Borbón noted that friends had urged him to keep writing, arguing that as the PRD is returning to power his voice is needed more than ever. However, although he still had negative things to say about the party that General Torrijos founded, he said that “if the three stooges is what Panamanians want, we should respect that choice.”

Dutch journalist Okke Ornstein, who works and lives in Panama, doing freelance work and publishing a website, says that his file has been “lost” at Migracion and that a source there has told him that it’s because of his writing and that he’s likely to lose his visa to live in Panama. Ornstein has called Mireya Moscoso “the Queen of Corruption,” which is not especially outside of what the mainstream of Panamanian opinion and what many of this country’s journalists say, but is a bit more strident than the language used by other foreign reporters here. However, his immigration status is different from that of most foreign correspondents in that his right to be here is primarily based on his marriage to and fatherhood of Panamanian citizens. On the eve of the May 2 elections Ornstein didn’t do much to endear himself to the incoming administration either, as he published a tale of Martín Torrijos’s association with hoodlums when the president-elect was in his early 20s. However, due to his family status it would be difficult to legally throw Ornstein out of Panama and he vows to fight any attempt to do so.

On May 25 a maritime chase led to a shootout and a major drug arrest off Isla Brujas near Chiman. A National Maritime Service patrol boat encountered speedboat and ordered it to stop, but reportedly got a fusillade of AK-47 fire in response. The cops opened fire, killing one of the speedboat’s occupants and compelling the craft to stop and be boarded. The dead man was a Colombian, as were three of the suspects who were arrested. A fourth suspect was a Panamanian citizen. On the boat the police found 800 kilos of cocaine.

Francisco Hernández, a member of the Coordinador Campesino en Contra de los Embalses (CCCE, the main group opposing the expansion of the Panama Canal by flooding the Western Watershed), claims that on May 30 in the El Espino corregimiento of La Chorrera he was accosted by two men and beaten unconscious, then woke up in a sugar cane field the following day many miles away in Ocu. After wandering to a gas station in a daze, police were called and Hernández was taken to a hospital, where it was found that he had no fractures. The PTJ (Judicial Technical Police) are investigating Hernández’s complaint.





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