Claiming that the men would face extradition to Cuba or Venezuela by the Torrijos administration, and then death at the hands of Fidel Castro’s or Hugo Chávez’s government, Mireya Moscoso on the evening of August 25 included four anti-Castro Cuban exiles who had been jailed here since November of 2000 on a list of 169 persons to be pardoned. The men were whisked away on a private flight to Honduras, where one of their number disappeared into the underground existence, and from whence the other three headed to Miami and a heroes’ reception. Cuba promptly broke relations with Panama, Venezuela recalled its ambassador and the University of Panama’s student radicals took to the Transistmica to block traffic and do battle with riot police.
The protests did not stop there. Martín Torrijos blasted the move, arguing in his inaugural address that “for me there are not two kinds of terrorism, one which is condemned and one which is pardoned. Terrorism has to be fought regardless of its origin.” The anti-Castro and normally staunchly conservative El Panama America also editorially blasted the pardons, as did the president of Panama’s bar association, the Colegio de Abogados.
The four men --- Luis Posada Carriles, Guillermo Novo, Pedro Remón and Gaspar Jiménez --- were among a group of eight individuals accused by police, prosecutors and those who claim to have been their intended victims of plotting to set off a massive explosion at the University of Panama’s main auditorium, the Paraninfo, when Castro spoke there during the 2000 Ibero-American summit that was held here. Had the duffel bag full of explosives that police recovered been detonated during that speech, virtually every one of the hundreds of people in the audience would have been killed or wounded and all buildings within a two-block radius --- including the nearby Arnulfo Arias Hospital Complex --- would have sustained serious damage.
At their trial the activists’ lawyers claimed that they had slipped into Panama because they had been told that Castro’s chief bodyguard intended to defect, but that it was just a trap, part of which included the planting of the explosives in question by Castro’s agents. After the pardons, however, the men’s supporters in the United States argued not that they had been framed, but that they were indeed trying to kill Castro and that this was a justified action.
Over the course of a three and one-half year legal proceeding various prosecution errors, a bit of detonating cord that turned up missing from the evidence and some rulings favorable to the defense resulted in the dismissal of the more serious charges of attempted murder, illegal association to commit murder and explosives possession. In the end the men and three of their co-defendants (another died while awaiting trial) were convicted on lesser charges of endangering public safety and entering Panama using false identity documents. Posada Carriles received an eight-year prison term, while Novo, Remón and Jiménez drew seven-year sentences. Their co-defendants received lighter sentences that essentially amounted to the time they had already served in jail awaiting trial.
Posada Carriles is Public Enemy Number One for the Castro dictatorship, on the strength of his alleged role in the 1976 bombing of a Cubana airliner that killed all 73 people aboard and his admitted role in a series of 1990s hotel bombings in Cuba, one of which killed a young Italian tourist. The airliner bomb was placed aboard the plane that was eventually to explode over Barbadian territorial waters in Caracas, and Posada Carriles was arrested in Barbados, extradited to Venezuela and subjected to a long and complex series of legal proceedings that ended with his escape from prison.
People get the death penalty for lesser crimes than these in Cuba, but in response to the Moscoso administration’s reluctance to extradite Posada Carriles to face trial and probable execution, Castro promised that prosecutors would not seek capital punishment in his cases.
As far as the Venezuelan government is concerned, Posada Carriles is a prison escapee who should be returned to face justice. Moreover, there is no capital punishment in Venezuela, whose President Hugo Chávez took great umbrage at Mireya’s suggestion that he intended to kill Posada Carriles. Venezuela, however, did not break diplomatic relations with Panama, but merely called its ambassador home for consultations to last until the Moscoso administration had run its course. The interruption did, however, cancel Chávez’s plans to come here for the Torrijos inauguration.
Nearly half of the other people on Moscoso’s August 25 pardon list were journalists. This reporter was one of them. Also pardoned, in that decree and two subsequent ones, were virtually every Moscoso administration official who had been named in a public corruption scandal over the past five years and all those --- except for Mireya Moscoso --- implicated in Mireyista vote buying scandals with respect to the May 2 elections. A dead man, a man who was serving 16 years for a garden variety murder and several alleged bank embezzlers were also the beneficiaries of Mireya’s pardons.
Panama’s constitution allows for pardons of those convicted of “political” offenses but only commutations of sentences for those found guilty of non-political crimes. However, in a series of Supreme Court decisions that distinction has been held meaningless and arguments that a pardon can’t be granted before a person has been tried and convicted have been dismissed. Nevertheless Attorney General José Antonio Sossa says he’ll appeal the pardons.
Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
Mireya's last-minute pardons complicate Panama's foreign relations
A bitter transition between administrations
Martín Torrijos's inaugural address
