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Heavy rains falling on the Panama City - San Miguelito area on September 17 caused floods and landslides that killed at least 13 people and, as this issue of The Panama News was uploaded, nine other persons missing. Some 10,000 people were forced to flee their homes when rivers in the Pacora, Felipillo and Juan Diaz areas of Panama City overflowed their banks, while a landslide in San Miguelito buried and killed three children. While most of those whose homes were flooded were able to return and begin the clean-up the following day, more than 700 people were left homeless because the floods and landslides completely destroyed their dwellings. A state of emergency was declared in the affected areas and many Panamanians came forward with money and supplies to help those who were affected. An immediate concern was a possible epidemic caused by flood waters tainting or cutting off drinking water sources and fouling living spaces. A longer term safety concern is the problem of houses being built in flood plains and on steep hillsides that are vulnerable to landslides. These latter problems, in turn, are symptoms of the phenomenon of land invasions that is deeply ingrained in the Panamanian economy and culture.

The ACAN/EFE wire service reports that Nicaraguan law enforcement officials are convinced that fomer President Arnoldo Alemán, now in prison for various acts of corruption, laundered at least $82 million through Panamanian banks. The Nicaraguans have asked for Panama’s help in tracking down Alemán’s ill-gotten fortune before, without spectacular results. But about $9.4 million that is said to have been the proceeds of Nicaraguan corruption was frozen, and El Panama America reports that prosecutors are now formulating charges against a group of Panamanian lawyers who supposedly used improper tactics to try to unfreeze some of this money.

A Costa Rican court has asked Panama’s courts to lift the veil of bank and corporate secrecy that would protect former Tico President Rafael Angel Calderón and his close associates. Calderón, under investigation for suspicion that he diverted more than $440,500 from his country’s public health care equipment purchasing funds to his own pocket, is believed to have squirreled the money away in a couple of Panamanian companies that he is said to control. Calderón has denied the allegations.

Panama’s former ambassador and consul general in Havana, Abraham Bárcenas and Oscar Alarcón respectively, are free on $10,000 bail in relation to charges that they illegally sold visas to Cubans seeking to emigrate. Bárcenas had been jailed, while Alarcón went into hiding. Panama is one of the few places in the world where a fugitive who has not appeared before the court will be granted bail.

National Police Second Corporal Bernardo Betancourt died on September 14 at Colon’s Amador Guerrero Hospital, after having been shot in the abdomen while guarding a hardware store in Cativa during his off-duty hours. Three masked assailants fled the scene.

Arnulfista legislator Miguel Fanovich, whose controversial tenure as governor of Chiriqui province attracted plenty of negative press attention, wants to bring back a feature of the old Noriega regime, journalist licensing. He has resubmitted a journalist licensing law that the previous legislature passed but Mireya Moscoso vetoed. At the time the PRD caucus supported the law, so if nothing changes there is a good chance that this time around we will see a licensing scheme which, except for veteran reporters who would be beneficiaries of a grandfather clause, would require that all journalists either have degrees in journalism from the University of Panama or diplomas approved by that school’s Faculty of Social Communications. The University of Panama’s journalism program is most noteworthy for the fact that there is no student newspaper at the university.

Hernán Delgado, the unsuccessful Mireyista candidate for legislator in Chepo, allegedly traded government-owned fuel and building materials for votes and to pay his campaign workers. All became moot, so it seems, when Mireya Moscoso pardoned him on her way out of office. Now, however, Electoral Prosecutor Gerardo Solís is proceeding despite the pardon, using the argument that electoral offenses are not “political crimes” within the purview of presidential pardon powers.

Even as audits and investigations are uncovering myriad abuses from the Moscoso years when public education was run through Education Minister Doris Rosas de Mata as a subsidiary of the Rosas family business, Jesús “Maco” Rosas is continuing the purges of another branch of that enterprise, the MOLIRENA party. This time former legisators Gisela Chung and Raymundo Hurtado Lay were thrown out, and the party officially declared that fomer Vice-President Arturo Vallarino, soon to be a member of the Central American Parliament, does not speak for it.

The Venezuelan ambassador, who was called home for consultations in Caracas after Mireya Moscoso pardoned one Luis Posada Carriles, who escaped from a Venezuelan prison where he was awaiting trial on charges of participating in a 1976 civilian airliner bombing that killed 73 people, has returned to Panama. On his weekly radio show Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez said that relations between his country and Panama are good, now the our government has changed hands. Before the pardon, Panamanian-Venezuelan relations were strained when Mireya was one of the few Latin American presidents who did not oppose the April 2002 coup against Chávez, and when she designated the notoriously corrupt fomer Immigration director Erick Singares to a diplomatic post in Caracas and Chávez refused to accept Singares’s credentials.

There have actually been a few survivors over the years, but generally when one jumps off of the Bridge of the Americas it’s the last thing that person ever does. Such was not the case with Felix Baumgartner, the famous (or infamous) extreme sports enthusiast. On September 10 he jumped off the bridge with a parachute and safely made the descent of about 200 feet. He was then briefly detained by the Canal Area Police. The tallest bridge from which Baumgartner has pulled a similar stunt is the world’s tallest, the 1,115-foot-tall bridge in Millau, France. He also has jumped off of Rio De Janeiro’s landmark Cristo del Corcobado statue.








Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
Mireya's crowd gets audited and investigated
PRD picks up a legislative seat from the Darien
Argentine terror trial revives questions about Panama
Tom McMurrain arrested for massive fraud in the US

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