Mireya Moscoso has sounded the alarm about crime as her political swan song.
For the last three weeks or so, large groups of police officers, many of them wearing ski masks, have been swarming over the lowest-income urban neighborhoods, places where foreigners congregate and bars and brothels where prostitutes ply their trade, arresting dozens of people every night. There have also been frequent road stops on the Pan-American Highway, both to check drivers' licenses and to look for fugitives.
A few of the hundreds of people detained in the dragnet were the subjects of outstanding arrest warrants for serious crimes. Mostly, however, those caught in the net have been foreign prostitutes who have overstayed their visas, other undocumented immigrants found working here illegally, members of teenage street gangs, small-time drug dealers, homeless people who were living on the streets, individuals found inebriated in public, those caught holding illegal weapons or drugs and people who talked back disrespectfully to the police.
Meanwhile, the president says she'll call yet another special legislative session to take up tough anti-crime measures, the centerpiece of which is a proposal to increase the maximum penalty for juvenile offenders who commit murder, rape, armed robbery, kidnapping or drug offenses to 20 years in prison.
(Kids with the proper family connections who run over little boys in daddy's BMW, dragging them 200 feet to their deaths and then fleeing the scene will, however, apparently retain their full immunity during what remains of the Mireyista regime.)
Mireya also proposes to increase the maximum penalty for adults who commit murder from 20 years in prison to life imprisonment, but it is unclear whether that, too, will be on a special session agenda.
In the last published figures on Panama's prison population, from a count taken late last year, this country held 11,229 inmates in facilities built for a maximum capacity of 7,348. Most of them were being held in preventive detention awaiting trial. Much of the pretrial detention phenomenon comes from drug cases, for which, except when special arrangements are made for people with special connections, there is no bail.
In Panama crime statistics are not published in a regular and timely fashion, but rather selectively revealed or concealed according to the political requirements of the politicians in power. Thus claims about how the present administration's "mano dura" has reduced crime must be taken with a grain of salt. It is true, however, that the street gangs are laying low at the moment and it certain neighborhoods it's not as easy to buy drugs as it used to be.
Those of Panama's human rights groups, juvenile judges, sociologists and criminologists who have discussed the matter with the mass media have nearly unanimously denounced the crackdown and proposed tougher juvenile laws as public spectacles that will do little to solve any real problem. However, President-Elect Martín Torrijos has commented that some parts of the "mano dura" are welcome and overdue and there is widespread public support for the proposition that teenagers who commit violent crimes should be kept out of society for longer than they currently are.
Meanwhile, Mireya has prepared a new list of prisoners to whom she will grant early release. There are 11 murderers on it.
Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
Special legislative session on the constitution
Mireya's "mano dura"
Scandal and anti-Semitism in Honduran church
