Where to begin?
Perhaps with an economic recession that began sometime in the latter part of 1998, accelerating on its way down to alarming depths until it bottomed out in about the middle of 2002.
Perhaps with the perception, fed by the claims of competitors for ad revenue in Panama’s media, that with the closure of the last US military bases in December 1999 there were no more gringos, and hence no more English-speaking community, and thus advertising in The Panama News was a total waste.
Perhaps when I assumed ownership of this paper in 2000, continuing my labors as a reporter and editor and leaving most of the management to other people and not paying the attention that I should have.
Perhaps when the economic crisis could no longer be ignored, and when the ad saleswoman we had on salary stopped selling ads (and, I was later to learn, worked for someone else while collecting a salary from us), then announced that she was pregnant and we couldn’t fire her.
Perhaps when I took the advice of a major international accounting firm --- one that has been touched by the scandals that have afflicted most of the biggies in that sector --- that we couldn’t reflect the pay cuts that the staff had taken in our monthly declarations to the Caja de Seguro Social (Social Security Fund, or CSS).
But surely a major milestone was that January 2001 decision that printing the next issue took priority over paying Seguro when there wasn’t enough money for both. It’s a decision I made on my own, with the knowledge that it could come back to haunt me. It did.
In the summer of 2001, after we had ceased print publication and were hanging on with an Internet version of The Panama News which had hardly any ads, we were called down to Seguro about the debt. I paid what I could, candidly explained the circumstances, and the people at CSS insisted on monthly payments that substantially exceeded our monthly income.
By this time nearly the entire Panamanian economy was in free fall, and operating as if The Panama News were part of the informal economy was the alternative to shutting down. Now downsized to just me and a couple of very part timers and located in low-budget digs in Perejil rather than the old place on Via Argentina, with me sleeping on the office floor, I did what thousands of other small businesses did. I ceased payments to the government and hung on tenaciously for this newspaper’s life.
But still, every month I filed the paper with Seguro. I figured that the hard times would eventually pass into history, and that I’d pay when I could. Given the depth and breadth of the economic crisis, I estimated that eventually the government would have to cut the thousands of businessses that had fallen behind some slack. But by then the interest and penalties, mostly calculated on the basis of theoretical paychecks to myself that I never received, were getting rather immense.
The recession did ease a bit, we slowly began to sell more ads, and starting in the middle of 2002 our online readership began to climb, nearly tripling over the next year and one-half.
But in mid-2003 I got a call from the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s office. It was not to announce a new offensive against the crooks infesting our government. It was to tell me that, even though my debt to Seguro was a tiny fraction of those owned by some of the Christian Democrat media, and even though The Panama News was but one of more than 15,000 people in debt to Seguro, I was about to be added to José Antonio Sossa’s and Cecilia López’s deceptive list of some 180 corruption cases that they had prosecuted.
Maybe it’s the easy way to pad a phony statistic to deal with an old Panagringo hippie without ties to the rabiblanco aristocracy, an oddball who won’t hide, lie, dissimulate, or come in with a lawyer to pose delaying objections.
So I went down to see Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Cecilia López and she got right to the point. “Why haven’t you closed The Panama News?” she demanded to know.
In that and several other sessions, in Panama City I repeatedly answered that and several other questions. The lady who kept our books through our spectacular economic slide was also confronted with that question.
After that they scheduled some more interrogations, this time by the personeria in San Carlos. The guy was most courteous, and I made his job easier by voluntarily appearing, alone, and answering his questions.
When he got to the point of asking if I admitted to committing the crime of withholding deductions from Seguro Social, I had to plead ignorance. By now the principal was for one thing about paychecks that never happened, and for another about theoretical paychecks to myself. I hadn’t been eligible for or receiving any CSS services. So under the penal law against withholding Seguro Social deductions from employees’ paychecks but not paying that money to Seguro, is it a crime not to pay the fund for paychecks never issued? Is it a crime not to pay Seguro when the alleged offender is also the sole victim? Neither prosecutors nor defense attorneys could answer that question. It has apparently not come before the Panamanian courts.
Then, late this past January, a Seguro Social amnesty law was passed by the legislature. Those who paid up the principal of their debts to CSS before the end of April could avoid prosecution, penalties and interest.
There was, however, an exception. Those whose cases had come to the point of a pretrial hearing wouldn’t qualify for the amnesty.
So within a few days of the amnesty being signed by the president, published in the Gaceta Oficial and going into effect, the Public Ministry went to court and scheduled a March pretrial hearing for my case. I was singled out to get a bit more than a month less than everyone else to pay up and take advantage of the amnesty.
As soon as the amnesty plan was proposed, I went on poverty rations and started dedicating a major part of The Panama News’s income to paying Seguro. I also planned to use the proceeds from our March fundraising appeal to the readers to pay as much of the debt as possible, then see about borrowing the rest in time for the deadline. (March and September are our regular fundraising months, which are somewhat analogous to the way that public TV stations in the states help to finance themselves.)
Now Sossa and López had shortened my window of potential amnesty, and when you consider the 21 business days it takes to clear a US check through banks here, the week or so that it usually takes for letters from the states to arrive here, the fact that a major part of our fundraising drive revenues come from abroad, and the fact that both the appeal to the readers and the pretrial hearing were in March, this created problems.
What I did was restructure the debt, paying all I could and borrowing the rest, paying off Seguro a couple of days before the pretrial hearing. It took me several visits to the CSS offices on Calle 17 to find out exactly how much they claimed that I owed, and when that was finally clarified and paid, this poor clerk got her exercise for the week stamping several years’ worth of receipts.
I had to borrow more that I expected. I figured that by mid-March the checks from supporters would start coming in. But somehow, it was now taking a month or more for mail to get from the United States to The Panama News. One $50 check that was mailed out during the March fundraising drive just arrived in June.
Anyway, I appeared in court on that day in March, showing up about 20 minutes before the scheduled time with folder full of receipts.
But the prosecutor didn’t show up.
Really cute, José Antonio and Cecilia. It said lots and lots about the motives behind your rush to prosecute before the amnesty deadline.
The judge said that if I had paid the case would be dismissed, but that he couldn’t dismiss the matter without a prosecutor present. He adjourned the pretrial until June 15.
With the help of a friend and frequent contributor, and a couple more visits to Seguro, the CSS was convinced to send a letter to the judge, urging him to drop the matter because I had paid up before the amnesty. (And moreover, with a payment schedule now more realistically based on my actual income --- which is modest by Panamanian standards --- The Panama News has kept its payments current since the big arrears payment.)
So on June 15 I again went to court, getting there about 20 minutes before the scheduled 9 a.m. hearing.
The assistant prosecutor came in more than two hours later. They called me back into the judge’s chamber. The anti-corruption prosecutor’s underling hadn’t read the file.
The judge said that he’d received the letter from Seguro, and that under the circumstances the charge ought to be dropped --- EXCEPT THAT, since nobody from the CSS was there in person to say what the letter and my receipts said, the prosecution could insist on such live testimony.
Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.
The assistant prosecutor agreed to provisionally dismiss the case.
Thus went my day in court, and thus apparently ended this case, one of many of Attorney General José Antonio Sossa’s offensives against the press.
I can’t say that I am entirely blameless, and though I may be a bit crazy I’m not so delusional as to fancy myself as some sort of business whiz.
But I did what I had to do to keep The Panama News alive.
And now I need fight Sossa on but one front, the criminal defamation case that a gringo real estate hustler has brought against me, with a curious complaint that fails to specify exactly what it was that I published that was false. Moreover, the complaint seeks to hold me responsible for what the attorney general’s Christian Democrat buddy, former police chief Ebrahim Asvat, published in the necro-porn tabloid El Siglo, something with which I had absolutely nothing to do.
Credit one Tom McMurrain for pressing those charges, although the wimp brought them in the name of his company to avoid exposing himself to defense questioning.
But credit Sossa’s Public Ministry for pressing ahead with McMurrain’s bogus case, even as it carries out a corrupt policy of treating frauds against foreigners as no concern of Panamanian prosecutors.
And this time without any mixed feelings whatsoever, I will continue to resist Sossa’s attempts to shut down The Panama News.
Also in this section:
Frank J. Jeanmarie, Sr., bandleader
Fourth of July picnic
Panamanian Friendship Reunion
The Panama News in court
