Panama News Briefs
Panamanian girl slain by abductors in Colombia
Two countries were shocked on September 29
when the body of 14-year-old Daniela Del Carmen Vanegas McLaughlin, the
daughter of a Panamanian mother and Colombian father and a resident of
Colombia, was recovered in a Bogota slum neighborhood. The girl had been
kidnapped in 2003, according to a series of demands made for $2 million in
ransom to the family by leftist FARC guerrillas. The Colombian government
quickly blamed FARC but on the other hand offered a $15,000 reward for
information leading to the identification and arrest of those who
committed the crime. FARC does kidnap people and hold them for ransom, but
Colombia also has criminal gangs who work the abduction business, and from
time to time crimes by ordinary thugs or right-wing paramilitaries are
falsely attributed to FARC. If FARC did kidnap and kill the girl, this
would one of the most brutal acts in its 40-year history. A statement by
the Panamanian Ministry of Foreign Relations did not point the finger at
FARC, but noted that “there is no ideology, nor social nor economic
reason, that has sufficient merit to justify this vile murder.”
Mireya doesn’t show at PARLACEN swearing-in
Under the treaty that created the Central
American Parliament (PARLACEN), immediate past presidents of member
countries have the right to seats in the body. With that membership come
certain immunities from criminal prosecution. After his term was over,
Guillermo Endara declined his PARLACEN seat, but Ernesto Pérez Balladares
did take his seat and has used it to avoid investigation and possible
prosecution in the PECC buoy and lighthouse maintenance contract scandal.
On September 20, Mireya Moscoso was conspicuous by her absence when the
new Panamanian PARLACEN delegation was sworn in, and that amounts to a
renunciation of her seat.
What
if they gave a legislative hearing and nobody came?
Now that they are out of power, various
Arnulfista legislators have decided that now’s the time to reform laws
affecting the press. One proposed to revive a proposal to license
journalists, itself a version on an old law from the dictatorship, which
was passed by the previous assembly by vetoed by ex-President Mireya
Moscoso. That plan has the backing of the Sindicato de Periodistas (which
despite its name is not a union in the sense that it represents
journalists in collective bargaining with media owners) but hardly anyone
else in the profession. Now legislator José Isabel Blandón Figueroa has
another proposal, one that would decriminalize libel and slander, end
public officials’ ability to penalize journalists for disrespect, create a
statutory right of reply for people who feel offended by press coverage
and regulate the ways that the government purchases advertising. A
subcommittee was created under the leadership of legislator Aris De Icaza,
who also owns Radio La Exitosa. A hearing was set for October 4. However,
only the Sindicato de Periodistas received an invitation --- although it
was alleged that the Colegio de Periodistas, the University of Panama’s
Faculty of Social Communications, the Asociacion Panameña de Radiodifusion,
the national Ombudsman, the Public Ministry and Ministry of Government and
Justice and the Colegio de Abogados were supposed to be invited but did
not receive their invitations in time. (That would still leave out the
major new media industry association (the Consejo de Periodismo), the
English and Chinese media, the Foro de Periodistas and online journalism.
Also left out would be the cartel of about a dozen ad agencies, which
would be most interested in the subject of government advertising
purchases. In any case, the hearing was postponed so that there could be a
broader range of advice on Blandón’s proposal.
Migracion firings attract pickets
As part of the Torrijos administration’s
crackdown against abuses --- if you believe the government’s
characterization --- four immigration officials who each had more than 25
years of seniortiy were fired for unspecified corrupt practices. That
brought on an October 1 picket line at Migracion in the capital. Are there
partisan implications? The new Immigration director, Ramón Lima, is a
member of the Partido Popular, the former Christian Democratic Party
that’s a junior partner in the Torrijos administration. All of those fired
were members of the PRD. Both PRD and Partido Popular leaders dismiss any
suggestion of tensions within the ruling coalition. Lima took over an
Immigration office that’s notoriously corrupt and has been so for a long
time, so there’s a very good chance that the motive for the firings, which
he said were the result of an investigation, was as characterized. The
fired employees say they’ll sue to get their jobs back.
007
loses his diplomatic passport
There once arose, in a conversation
between the editor of The Panama News and a British commando, a question
that may or may not have been theoretical: which would be more valuable, a
license to kill from Her Majesty’s government, or a license to steal from
Mireya’s administration? Ah, but there was another possibility: a license
to smuggle from the Mireyista regime --- that is, a Panamanian
diplomatic passport. The Foreign Ministry is in the process of canceling
120 special Panamanian diplomatic passports that the previous government
issued to people who were not diplomats and in many cases are not
Panamanians. Among the citizens privileged with the document of diplomatic
immunity were some of the more sordid characters in Mireya’s inner circle,
as well as a number of prominent athletes, entertainers and business
leaders. Then there was James Bond --- rather, Scottish actor Sean
Connery. In real life Connery never had a license to kill, but Mireya did
give him a diplomatic passport. Whether he used it for such purposes or
not (and there no indications have come to light that he did) that’s more
immunity than Her Majesty’s Secret Service ever gave him.
Solís asks solons to lift immunity from 14 colleagues
Electoral Prosecutor Gerardo Solís has
petitioned the Legislative Assembly to strip 14 of its members of their
immunity from investigation and prosecution for election offenses. The
list includes people from both the government and opposition caucuses, who
are suspected of offenses ranging from the petty to the outrageous. One of
those named is President Torrijos’s aunt, Susana Richa de Torrijos, who is
said to have used equipment belonging to a La Chorrera neighborhood’s
junta communal at a campaign event. Several of the named legislators are
suspected of massive vote buying activities. How the new legislature
reacts to the request will be a key test of the PRD’s “zero corruption”
pledge.
Panama is the stumbling block to PARLACEN immunity reform
The Central American Parliament (PARLACEN),
which has been mired in scandals and in every member country of which
there is a move to withdraw for that reason, is trying to clean up its
act. Among other things, it has approved a package of reforms that would
scale back the immunity from criminal prosecution that its members enjoy
to subject matters pertaining to PARLACEN’s work. The problem is, the
legislatures of all member countries have to approve the reforms and all
but one have done so. The lone holdout for impunity? It’s
Panama. Several members of our PARLACEN delegation are using their immunity to
avoid investigations or prosecutions for election crimes or more garden
variety corruption, and in the previous Panamanian PARLACEN delegation
former President Ernesto Pérez Balladares used his immunity to avoid an
investigation of apparent kickbacks and conflict of interest in a national
buoy and lighthouse maintenance contract.
Small arsenal seized
On September 28 police staged a pre-dawn
raid at the dock next to Panama City’s municipal Mercado de Mariscos and
confiscated 32 AK-47 rifles, a grenade launcher and more than 2,000 rounds
of ammunition. Three men, two Panamanians and a Colombian, were taken in
to custody. These weapons were apparently headed to Colombia’s left-wing
FARC guerrillas.
Then
you “saw” it, now you…
Just before leaving office, Mireya
Moscoso issued a press release about her promised report on the use of
presidential “secret funds.” In it she revealed things only in very
general terms and was strongly criticized for that. El Siglo, however at
least wanted to see the report itself, and asked the Ministry of the
Presidency for the new administration for a copy. It seems, however, that
no copy of the report, such as it was, was left in the files for the
Torrijos administration.
Ministry suspends seven for alleged email hacking
Seven employees of the computing
department at the Ministry of Foreign Relations were suspended after it
was discovered that someone at the ministry has been hacking into the
email messages of Foreign Minister Samuel Lewis Navarro. Lewis Navarro is
negotiating a bilateral trade deals with the
United States and Singapore and
Panama’s possible membership in or alliance with the South American
MERCOSUR trade bloc, so inside information gathered by such hacking could
become valuable on a private black market. The employees will remain off
the job while the investigation into who might be responsible for the
security breach continues.
Israel reopening its embassy here
After about two years without an embassy
here, the Israeli diplomats will be returning in January. Panama and
Israel never broke relations, but the Jewish state closed its embassy here
as a budget cutting move.
Psychiatrist to head prison system
President Torrijos has named Dr. José
Calderón, a psychiatrist who has worked for the past decade in the Public
Ministry’s Institute of Legal Medicine, as the new
director of the nation’s prison system. Calderón, whose sister Leonor is
the Minsiter of Youth, Women, Childhood and the Family, replaces the
Moscoso administration’s Concepción Corro. He inherits an overcrowded and
underfunded prison system, most of whose inmates have been convicted of
nothing but are instead awaiting trial, and in which it is common to mix
hardcore violent offenders with people accused of minor crimes.
“Mano Amiga” to replace “Mano Dura”
Mireya Moscoso left office with a “hard
hand” policy of police sweeps and mass arrests in the nation’s poorer
neighborhoods, which made the sort of people who believe that more blacks
behind bars makes them safer but had no real impact on crime. In place of
Mireya’s “Mano Dura,” the Torrijos administration has announced the “Mano
Amiga” program, which is designed to attract youngsters in the nation’s
most squalid slums away from the gangs that would recruit them. Backed by
UNESCO, “Mana Amiga’s” goals are to ensure that little kids have “a right
to play” and that adolescents in poor neighborhoods pick up some culture
on their way to adulthood. In some cases, to accomplish these ends will
surely mean turf wars between police and street gangs to determine who
controls the playgrounds.
Case
in banker’s murder collapses
Attorney Gilberto Boutin, accused by
prosecutors of playing a role in the 1998 kidnapping and murder of Swiss
banker Hans Jorg Bosch, has walked out of jail after a divided Supreme
Court held that there wasn’t enough evidence to hold him. Boutin was seen
with Bosch on the day he disappeared, and telephone records indicate
several phone calls between the two on that day. The two were partners in
a business venture. Two suspects who were held in connection with the case
testified that Boutin was involved in the crime, but one of these later
retracted his statement, arguing that prosecutors used threats to pressure
him to give false testimony. The high court held, with magistrates César
Pereira Burgos and Graciela Dixon dissenting, that there was not enough
evidence to hold Boutin in preventive detention. Although the ruling did
not technically end the case, for a practical matter it probably did.
Former taxi syndicate leaders convicted
Jorge Shailer, once head of Panama City’s
main taxi syndicate (the Sindicato de Conductores de Taxis Pequeños de
Panama, or SINCOTAPE) and a man who had political ambitions, has been
handed a three-year prison term for stealing more than $60,000 from the
syndicate to finance an unsuccessful 1999 campaign for a seat in the
Legislative Assembly. Two other former SINCOTAPE officials, Evaristo Muñoz
and Ernesto Morales, were also sentenced to prison in the same case.
With
a name like Blades…
Rubén Blades, whom the world knows best
as an entertainer but who now heads the Panamanian government’s IPAT
tourism bureau, was educated as a lawyer at the University of Panama and
at Harvard. Somewhere along the way, however, he may have picked up some
Islamic law. In the legislative hearing about his nomination, Blades vowed
that in cases of corruption involving the shakedown of foreign investors
in Panamanian tourism, “he who sticks his hand in, we’re going to cut it
off.” “We won’t have bribes here,” he added.
Colonial-era crown missing
A preliminary search of the religious
treasures at the Santo Domingo de Guzmán church in Parita, Herrera
province, by its parish priest has revealed that a 17th century gold crown
is missing. The crown and other colonial-era artifacts, though stored at
the church, are considered national property, and thus the National
Institute of Culture (INAC) has been brought in to conduct an inventory to
see if any other items are missing. Meanwhile, the PTJ has opened a
criminal investigation.
