news

Mireya Moscoso’s frequent escort to social events may have to start looking for a job. Winston Spadafora, along with Alberto Cigarruista and their respective suplentes, was approved as a Supreme Court magistrate by way of the defections of several PRD deputies, allegedly procured by bribery. But the new legislature will be under the firm control of the PRD and its allies, as will be the presidency. There are increasing demands from many quarters --- including from the Colegio de Abogados (Panama’s bar association) and former presidents Guillermo Endara and Ernesto Pérez Balladares --- for the incoming assembly to rescind the ratifications of Spadafora, Cigarruista and their suplentes. That would give Martín Torrijos two vacancies to fill and effectively end the 5-4 Mireyista majority on the Supreme Court. If the ratifications are not rescinded and the number of magistrates remains at nine, then Mireya’s nominees would hold a high court majority all through the Torrijos administration. Both as a legislator and a magistrate Cigarruista has been known for his gaffes, but the public perception about Spadafora is that Mireya bribed the legislature to put her boyfriend on the Supreme Court and that’s beyond the pale of acceptable behavior for much of the politician class and most of the legal profession.

Law professor Miguel Antonio Bernal’s petition to the Supreme Court to declare the special legislative session that passed a package of some 67 constitutional reforms null and void because it was called by a decree by the Minister of the Presidency rather than a resolution of the Cabinet Council as specified in the constitution has been rejected. This clears away the main legal obstacle to the incoming Legislative Assembly ratifying the changes and making them part of the constitution.

During his election campaign, Martín Torrijos said that he would “repeal” Mireya Moscoso’s implementing regulations for the Transparency Law, the most notorious was a requirement that one must have a direct and uniquely personal stake in a bit of government information to have access to it. (As in, for example, just because you are a taxpayer or a reporter does not give you the right to know how public funds are being spent.) Now Martín says that he will “replace” the regulations, and this one-word difference has some anti-corruption activists concerned. However, Torrijos says that some regulations are necessary to avoid the disclosure of such things as sensitive national security information and details of ongoing criminal investigations, and promises that the people will not be kept in the dark about how the government is spending their money.

The Supreme Court has ordered outgoing Legislative Assembly president Jacobo Salas to divulge the more than 200 personal services contracts that it has awarded since September 1, 2003. This is for the period after the Mireyistas regained control over the legislature, thanks to several PRD defections. In the previous period, when the PRD-Partido Popular alliance was dominant, this information was published. In each case, it has been or will be shown that when control of the assembly changes hands the winning faction typically redistributes political patronage.

From August 10 through 17 some 3,000 members of the navies, marine corps and coast guards of Panama, the United States and eight other countries conducted war games in the territorial waters off of both Panamanian coasts. The premise of the maneuvers was the defense of the Panama Canal against a terrorist attack. Under the 1977 Panama Canal Neutrality Treaty, the United States has a right and obligation to defend the canal in the event of an attack. Whether the mobilization of a large multinational force is a particularly realistic defense in light of the possibility of the sort of sneak attacks that Osama bin Laden’s people are known to favor is an interesting question, but in any case US advisors have been quietly assisting Panama to bolster its canal security measures ever since the September 2001 al Qaeda attacks on the United States.

A group of American defense and security experts recently conducted a three-day seminar for about 30 Panamanians, most of them about to assume security-related offices with the Torrijos administration, about technical issues related to the defense of the Panama Canal and this country in general. The study sessions, held under the auspices of the US Embassy, in part reflect heightened concerns that the canal may be a terrorist target. The sessions, which took place behind closed doors at the Gamboa Rainforest Resort on August 11 through 13, included presentations by representatives of the US State Department, Defense Department and National Security Council.

The mountainous Rio Hondo area of Chiman district, in the southeast corner of Panama province adjacent to the Darien, has for many years been home to a Wounaan community that claims collective land rights. The government has never recognized this claim and during the Moscoso administration colonos from the Azuero Peninsula have been moving into the area, cutting down forests that the Wounaan claim and destroying local infrastructures in an effort to force the indigenous communities of Chiman to leave. On August 16 the Wounaan struck back, destroying the crops and killing the animals of the colonos and burning down their homes. Gunshots were fired on both sides and a number of machete blows were struck, leaving more than a dozen people injured, at least six of them seriously enough to be hospitalized.

The Cuban government is warning Panama that it will break diplomatic relations if Mireya Moscoso pardons four anti-Castro activists who are serving sentences for explosives possession. The men were convicted in relation to an apparent plan to assassinate Fidel Castro and kill many people in his audience when he spoke at the University of Panama during a November 2000 Ibero-American summit, but the more serious charges against them were dropped and they received prison terms of seven to eight years. Citing rumors of an imminent pardon that it says are circulating among Cuban exiles in Miami, Castro’s government is warning that they better not be true.

The government of Taiwan is accusing the Panamanian embassy in Taipei of tax fraud. According to a report in La Prensa, it has actually gone past the point of mere accusations --- a Taiwanese court has found that our embassy was in the business of selling luxury cars with diplomatic plates, which were duty free, to private individuals who qualified for neither diplomatic immunity nor the tax exemption. A tax bill amounting to more than $30,000 when interest is figured in has been levied against the Panamanian Embassy in Taiwan and the Taipei government is asking Panama to take action against two of our former ambassadors --- Carlos Yap and Carlos Mendoza, who represented the Endara and Pérez Balladares administrations respectively --- for their alleged involvement in the scam.

Darien legislator Haydée Milanés de Lay, whose May 2 re-election by a 148-vote margin was nullified by the Electoral Tribunal after it was found that she had spent more than $200,000 in government funds to buy votes, has suffered another setback in her bid to hold onto her seat in the assembly. A new election is to be held in which she will again face PRD hopeful Geovany Castillo. However, there were four other candidates in the race, who among them polled more than 3,000 votes. Each of these candidates has bowed out of the contest and they have all thrown their support to Castillo. Even Milanés de Lay’s May 2 running mate, Juan Peralta, is now backing Castillo. The equation is likely to change, even more to Milanés de Lay’s disadvantage, on September 1. As of that date she won’t have the legislative immunity immunity she used to block criminal proceedings against her arising from the same facts, and if convicted by the tribunal on those kinds of charges she will probably be stripped of her right to run for and hold public office for a number of years. On the same day Mireya Moscoso will lose her immunity from criminal prosecution and the possibility remains open that she could also be investigated and prosecuted for providing the public funds that Milanés de Lay used to buy votes, or for a number of similar situations in other legislative races.

Former Panama City Mayor Mayín Correa, accused of criminal defamation by her successor Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro, must now face a criminal investigation on those charges, which could get her a two-year prison sentence. She had been protected by the immunity that candidates for public office hold before, during and for some months after the elections --- until the Electoral Tribunal stripped her of that immunity. However, since Correa was elected to the Central American Parliament (PARLACEN) on the Solidaridad ticket, she may acquire immunity from prosecution as a member of that body before the case could come to trial. In the wake of a number of scandals PARLACEN has been moving in the direction of ending its members’ immunity, however, and in any case the body could strip Correa of her protection.

Gonzalo Menéndez, the outgoing director of the National Environmental Authority (ANAM), has issued a report outlining the environmental history of Panama’s century as an independent republic and the challenges that we face now. The report notes that in the past century some 29,000 square kilometers of forest --- about one-third of the land surface of Panama --- have disappeared. He attributes the worst of trend to policies that were adopted in the 1970s, when it was thought that the way toward this country’s economic development was through “the conquest of nature.” Menéndez cites air pollution and the degradation of marine resources as major environmental challenges of our times.

Panama City Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro has asked the Comptroller General to audit city finances for the period of his first term in office. The mayor, who was re-elected in a landslide on May 2, is undertaking a series of policy reviews and personnel changes for his second term and considers an independent general audit to be a useful part of that process.

In an August 12 contest against Enrique Lau, Bombero Lieutenant Colonel Mario Ramírez was elected to head Panama’s Firefighter Corps (Cuerpo de Bomberos) by a 196 to 124 margin. The fire chief is elected by the officers in the fire department, which includes a core of full-time professionals and a larger group of part-time volunteers.

Mireya Moscoso has appointed Carlos Alejo Arellano Lennox as a member of the National Maritime Authority board of directors, effective precisely at the time she leaves office. The authority has been a hotbed of scandals, including many over the improper sales of various permits and licenses and a costly and inefficient monopoly granted to an obscure Florida company for the approval of ship security plans.

On August 7 the wreckage of a Cessna 210 with the body of a 49-year-old Mexican citizen, one Oscar Molina Cámara, was found on Isla San Jose in the Perlas Archipelago. The flight had been unregistered, Molina Cámara was wanted by US authorities on drug smuggling charges and ion scans indicated traces of drugs in the wreckage.

The relatives of Reinaldo Sánchez Tenas, a Guardia Nacional sergeant who was disappeared, murdered and buried in a clandestine grave by agents of the military dictatorship 29 years ago, had planned a belated August 10 funeral. Sánchez Tenas’s remains had been recovered and identified by the Truth Commission. However, even though Attorney General José Antonio Sossa opposes all prosecutions for dictatorship-era crimes, his Public Ministry took possession of the remains and refused to deliver them to the family in time for the planned funeral. On August 18 acting magistrate Raúl Olmos ordered the ministry to give the remains to the family. Finally, on August 20, Sánchez Tenas’s widow and grown children gave the former sergeant a Catholic funeral service at the Don Bosco Basilica and reburied the remains. Before his 1975 disappearance Sergeant Sánchez Tenas had left a sealed letter with his wife, to be opened in case anything happened to him, claiming that his superior had threatened him. To Sossa, however, these circumstances were an occasion not to reopen the investigation into the disappearance and death, but to put the victim’s family through yet another round of government harassment.

Just as the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) has moved to close down the Primate Refuge and Sanctuary of Panama that has operated for more than 20 year on the Tigre and Brujas islands in Gatun Lake, the refuge’s director Dennis Rasmussen has signed the project’s physical assets over to the University of Panama and agreed to work jointly with the university to find a way to ensure the survival of the formerly captive monkeys that have been living on the islands and to continue the research and educational functions that Rasmussen had been directing. Most of the reasons that the ACP have given for the project’s eviction appear on their faces to be bureaucratic pretexts, but it seems that the move is in keeping with a series of other measures to limit non-canal uses of Gatun Lake and thus tighten security against a possible terrorist attack. The transfer apparently does not affect the eviction.

DNA tests have identified skeletal remains found on Cerro Azul in 2001 as those of Swiss banker Hans Jorg-Bosch, who disappeared in 1998, and the Judicial Technical Police have arrested prominent attorney Gilberto Boutin, Jorg-Bosch’s partner in a company known as Enterprise MBB Corporation, for suspicion of involvement in the kidnapping and murder. Boutin was picked up at the ATLAPA convention center on August 21, as he was about to address a convention on procedural law. On the day Jorg-Bosch disappeared he made at least three phone calls to Boutin, and prosecutors say that they have an eyewitness that places the lawyer at the scene of the abduction. However, there is bad blood between Attorney General José Antonio Sossa and Boutin, with Sossa prosecuting Boutin for allegedly defrauding “offshore asset protection guru” Marc Harris. Harris, who enjoyed Sossa’s protection for his criminal activities here for many years, is now serving a 17-year US prison sentence for money laundering and other financial infractions. Boutin maintains his innocence in both the document alteration and fraud case involving Harris and the kidnapping and murder case involving Jorg-Bosch.

Right after his election Martín Torrijos declared that September 1 would be a working day rather than the occasion for elaborate celebrations. However, US Secretary of State Colin Powell and a number of heads of state will be coming here for the occasion, and it has been announced that a $400,000 budget has been set for the festivities. Meanwhile, Mireya Moscoso won’t be attending the inauguration but does plan an elaborate farewell party of her own. There has been no announcement about the cost of Mireya’s celebration.



Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
Mireya's "mano dura" degenerates into macho taunts
Free trade turmoil postponed by hurricane
Chávez wins big in Venezuela
The Torrijos team

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