news

On a motion by former President Ernesto Pérez Balladares, Supreme Court magistrate José Troyano has ordered anti-corruption prosecutor Cecila López to stop her criminal investigation of the contract by which the US-based PECC company acquired the contract to maintain Panama’s lighthouses and buoys during Toro’s administration. Comptroller General Alvin Weeden has alleged, and backed his claim with some fairly convincing and so far unrefuted documentary evidence, that Pérez Balladares himself is part owner of PECC. There are a number of civil cases arising from this scandal, and for a time assets belonging to Toro himself, former National Ports Authority director Hugo Torrijos (the president-elect’s first cousin) and Torrijos’s deputy at the time Rubén Reyna. The latter went directly from government service to a job with PECC, while his wife, a current RPC-TV talk show host and then Toro’s press aide Dorita de Reyna, became PECC’s landlady. The order was most unusual because the investigation had named nobody as a suspect and thus under the ordinary scheme of things Toro would not have had standing to bring his petition to the Supreme Court to halt the process. But then Troyano served as Toro’s Minister of Commerce and Industry, and Troyano’s wife was the former president’s secretary. In the legal systems of most countries Troyano himself would confront corruption charges for his failure to recuse himself from the case due to conflict of interest.

On July 9 Panama province’s Governor Irlena Brown tightened the curfew on minors, ordering minors off of the streets and out of public places by 9 p.m. on Sundays through Thursdays and 11 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. The curfew applies across the province, with exceptions for kids who are traveling with a parent or guardian. Brown ordered fines for the parents of kids caught out after curfew and police cars went around Panama City’s residential areas announcing the new hours on their loudspeakers.

In the wake of public protests against a rash of murders of women, police and prosecutors assured Panamanians that the cases were unrelated and that there probably is no serial killer loose in this country. However, police now say that one Carlos Meneses Lambiz is the prime suspect in the killings of both Leticia González Gaitán, whose body was found in Veracruz in June, and Rafaela Abrego, whose body was found in a wooded area of Panama City’s Betania corregimiento. Because they tend to be psychopaths who calmly wipe away evidence of their crimes and because murders in which the victim and perpetrator do not know one another are hard to solve anyway, serial killers around the world tend to go unapprehended and in many cases unsuspected. Thus, if it turns out that Meneses Lambiz is a serial killer, he would be only the second one ever detected by Panamanian law enforcement, though there may well have been others. Police are looking for Meneses Lambiz, who is described as a young adult of about 5 feet 7 inches tall, 170 pounds, of brown complexion, with short black curly hair and brown eyes. A $1,000 reward is being offered for information leading to his apprehension.

The sale of sailors’ certificates regardless of whether the buyers are qualified is an ongoing scandal and a lucrative business for the criminal organization known as the Moscoso administration. The most notorious example, when the consulate in Manila sold a first mate’s certificate to an unqualified British maritime union leader who was buying as an undercover operation to expose the corrupt practice, has basically gone uninvestigated and unpunished. (Of course it has --- the Panamanian consul in the Philippines was an Escalona, a family that enjoys impunity under the Mireyista regime.) However, one Diana Lay has been charged with similar illegal sales from the consulate in Miami, and the case is now before the Ninth Penal Court. There, the judge is not necessarily playing along with the game. The court has ordered a more respectable investigation than Attorney General Sossa’s minions have been so far been willing to conduct, including inquiries about the roles of Ms. Lay’s superiors in this matter.

An appeals court has upheld the criminal conviction of journalist Jean Marcel Chéry for “injuria” --- writing a true story that was published in El Panama America about how the government’s Social Investment Fund build a road that served the farms of Supreme Court magistrate Winston Spadafora (then Mireya’s government and justice minister) and Comptroller General Alvin Weeden but almost nobody else. Usually the charge against journalists is “calumnia e injuria” --- literally falsehood and injury --- but in this case the complainant, Spadafora, didn’t deny the truth of the report but successfully sought to have Chéry and his colleague Gustavo Aparicio sentenced to a year in prison for because it made him look bad. So can Chéry realistically hope for justice by appealing to a high court on which his accuser sits? He doesn’t think so. On the basis of the futility of appealing to his accuser, and also on the basis of another calumnia e injuria case against him --- for his report on a citizen’s allegation of a jewelry theft in the course of a police raid, in which Attorney General José Antonio Sossa was the complainant --- Chéry is appealing to the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, which by treaty is the highest court of appeal for Panamanian cases that have human rights implications. The appeal is broadly attacking this country’s criminal defamation laws, and also the conflicts of interest when a justice minister, attorney general or high court judge invokes them.

On July 13 Arnulfista legislator Haydée Milanés de Lay had her day before the Electoral Tribunal, where she faced charges of using government funds to buy votes. Electoral Prosecutor Gerardo Solís impugned her election, arguing that Mireya Moscoso turned the Social Investment Fund into a slush fund for Mireyista politicians to buy votes and that Milanés de Lay did so most flagrantly. The legislator’s lawyers argued that the law does not provide for the nullification of an election just because the winning candidate bought votes with public funds. The tribunal is expected to announce a decision sometime in the middle of August. That decision could become a template for several other similar cases around the country.

First, Mireya Moscoso said that her government would not attend this year’s International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting in Sorrento, Italy. This was seen as something of a victory for environmentalists, because at the last IWC meeting Panama sided with Japan and Norway for a motion to stop all “research” whaling and and against a motion to create a southern no-whaling zone. Then a number of environmentalist groups and anti-whaling Latin American governments urged Panama to attend the meeting to lend support to Brazil and Argentina, which are two of the main proponents of the southern anti-whaling zone. So Mireya sent a delegation to the IWC, saying that it would vote against whaling. However, as the IWC business got underway Japan made a procedural motion for a secret vote on the resumption of whaling, which was defeated 29 to 24. One of the votes to to conceal nation’s votes from the international public was Panama’s. Líder Sucre, who heads the National Association for the Conservation of Nature (ANCON), said that although the vote was not on whaling itself, it is a disturbing indication that despite assurances to the contrary, Panama --- which has never had a commercial whaling industry --- continues to vote with the pro-whaling bloc.

In a July 18 incident 27 people were injured when two buses racing down Avenida Justo Arosemena came upon a scene in which the bomberos were fighting a fire and one of the buses slammed into a fire truck, which in turn caused a pile-up with several more crashes. Most of the injured were on the bus that crashed, but nine bomberos were also sent to the hospital. Both the damaged bus and the other one participating in the race were impounded by traffic cops pending further legal proceedings.

The Saturday night yeye games on Calle 50 and elsewhere are going to be more costly for those who are caught. Fines of $2,500 to $5,000, six-month driver’s license suspensions and public service in the nation’s morgues have been approved by the directors of the Land Transportation Authority. Transito cops will also impound any car caught racing on the streets which they find has been modified for the purpose of racing, only returning it after the modifications have been removed at the owners’ expense.

American dive enthusiast Warren White clearly discovered the sunken remains of a vessel that may be Christopher Columbus’s caravel the Vizcaina. The editor of The Panama News was present more than six years ago when White informed archaeologist Carlos Fitzgerald of the find. At the time Fitzgerald declined to look into it, claiming that other sites had prior claims on Panama’s meager budget for archaeological research. Then White showed Nilda Vásquez, who was working for the National Institute of Culture (INAC) at the time, the find. She went to her superiors and was also told that the 16th century ship was not a priority. Then it was arranged that Investigaciones Marinas del Istmo SA (IMDI), a company formed by Vásquez’s son and nephew, would get the salvage contract from INAC. Salvage work began and the evidence mounted that the ship was the Vizcaina. At that point then-director of INAC Rafael Ruiloba asserted the claim that HE had discovered the ship, a thoroughly ridiculous boast, and meanwhile the Ministry of Economy and Finance was demanding huge sums to allow salvage work to continue. After a couple of years of delay, IMDI is back at work, Fitzgerald is trying to stop them, and now IMDI’s Ernesto Cordovez is claiming that White did not discover the Vizcaina. Cordovez claims that White was just an employee of IMDI’s, and that the discovery hasn’t happened until it’s verified. And thus, according to Cordovez’s new twist, event though White showed The Panama News a stone mortar ball from the site years before IMDI was founded, his company and not White deserve credit for finding the Vizcaina.

Purportedly with permission from the Interoceanic Regional Authority (ARI), developers have been putting in a landfill next to the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s (STRI’s) marine research center on the Amador Causeway, according to STRI causing disruptions to their work. It seems that the developers of that and other Amador Causeway projects have been working without having submitted environmental impact statements for approval by the National Environmental Authority (ANAM), apparently after having been told by ARI that these are not necessary. But ANAM has issued an order for the land filling to stop. The order was disobeyed for a few days, then finally stopped. The realities of Amador’s development are that many of those who have gained concessions from ARI have done so by making fraudulent misrepresentations about their financing, that a large percentage of the projects that have been built have failed to make the payments required in their concession contracts, and that ARI’s planning for Amador has been grossly lacking --- to the extent that the authority now wants to start work on a four-lane highway which would destroy the causeway’s popular recreational uses. ARI’s mishandling of Amador predates the current administrator Alfredo Arias, who owes his job to being the nephew of Mireya Moscoso’s late husband Arnulfo Arias, as the pattern was set under previous ARI director Nicolás Ardito Barletta, the man who “defeated” Arnulfo Arias in the fraudulent 1984 election. ARI, which was created to manage and dispose of the properties that Panama acquired under the 1977 Carter-Torrijos Treaties, is set to go out of business next year, but the president of its board of directors, University of Panama rector Gustavo Garciá de Paredes, says he’s hoping that the next administration extends its existence.

Which Mireyista insiders and favored families got service and professional contracts with the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MICI)? The ministry said it was none of the public’s business, but the administrative bench of the Supreme Court, granting a petition by Ombudsman Juan Antonio Tejada, has ordered the ministry to release the information. The court held that the Transparency Law requires the disclosure of this information.

Four teenage boys have found two unexploded missiles near their homes in the Calle Larga neighborhood of La Chorrera’s Barrio Colon corregimiento. The ordnance is left over from the many decades of American war games on the isthmus, and probably washed out of nearby old military maneuver areas into the residential district over the course of several rainy seasons. Unexploded ordnance is the subject of an ongoing dispute between Panama and the United States, with the former claiming that the Americans breached their treaty obligation to remove all hazards from the former Canal Zone so far as is practicable and the US government responding that all treaty obligations have been met and the case is closed.

Former President Guillermo Endara, who came in second in a four-way presidential race running on the Solidaridad ticket this past May, is creating a new political party rather than sticking with Samuel Lewis Galindo’s organization. Called the “Vanguardia Moral de la Patria,” the group’s provisional secretary general is Dr. John Hoger, the former mayor of San Miguelito who had the signal distinction of being fired as a regional health director by the Moscoso administration on witchcraft charges. (No, this is neither a misprint nor an invention of The Panama News!) Anyway, Hoger has put out the call for people with suggestions for the new party’s colors, flag, anthem and other symbols. Suggestions may be sent by email to Professor Bertilo Mejia at bmejiao@yahoo.com.



Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
Special legislative session on the constitution
Mireya's "mano dura"
Scandal and anti-Semitism in Honduran church

Back to top

Panama Information, Hotels of Panama - Executive Hotel
Panama Information, Real Estate in Las Cumbres - Villa Concordia
Panama Information - Online guide to information about Panama - www.panama-information.executivehotel-panama.com
Panama Tourism - Online info for the Tourist Panama - www.travel-to-panama.com
Panama Pictures - Collection of pictures of Panama - www.panama-pictures.com