Panama News Briefs

As these news briefs were uploaded Embera country was in crisis, as flood waters overflowed the banks of Darien’s Membrillo, Chucunaque, Urganti, Tuqueza, Tupiza and Chico rivers, driving more than 6,000 people from their homes. Most of the affected areas were in the Embera-Wounaan Comarca. Helicopters from the National Air Service and units of the SINAPROC disaster relief agency moved into the area to rescue stranded people, schools on higher ground were converted into emergency shelters, the Ministry of Health mobilized to prevent flood-related epidemics and a number of public and private organizations, beginning with the first lady’s office, began the work of collecting and delivering food and supplies to the stricken communities.

On January 1 Alvin Weeden will be replaced as the nation’s top financial watchdog by Dani Ariel Kuzniecky, a 42-year-old economist and lawyer who was the nominee of the PRD-Partido Popular alliance and gained the support of a number of opposition deputies as well. The new sub-controller, elected on a straight party-line vote, will be Luis Carlos Amado. In both the 1999 and 2004 presidential election campaigns Kuzniecky played leading roles in the mobilization of independent voters in the business and finance sectors to support Martín Torrijos. He comes to government from a private law practice, having never before held public office, either appointed or elected. Kuzniecky holds law degrees from USMA, Harvard and New York University. Under Panama’s constitution his new job is a legislative rather than a presidential appointment.

Diplomatic relations between Panama and Cuba, broken by Havana after Mireya Moscoso pardoned a group of terrorists who planned to kill Fidel Castro and hundreds of Panamanians during his November 2000 appearance at the University of Panama, are slowly being restored. Consulates have been reopened and the two nations’ governments are talking about full normalization, with the pardons one of the issues on the table. However, the terrorists are now either living openly in the United States or in one case hiding in an unknown place, so as a practical matter Panama can’t do much about the pardons, which Martín Torrijos strongly condemned in his inaugural address.

Othomilton Sánchez, a Martín Torrijos appointee who was serving as acting director of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MICI) office in charge of mining permits, has been jailed on charges that he tried to shake down a company seeking a gravel pit concession for a $3,000 bribe and shares in the company. Enrique Argüelles, the legal representative of Mining & Environmental Advisors SA, secretly recorded the conversation and complained of the extortion attempt, which let to Sánchez’s arrest on corruption charges that could get him a five-year prison term. It was reported in some of the daily newspapers and by electronic media that at his November 24 indagatoria --- formal interrogation for use in the trial dossier --- Sánchez confessed that he had requested the payment. The presiding magistrate, however, ruled the tape inadmissible for use as evidence because it was made without prior judicial authorization.

Jerry Wilson, president of the Legislative Assembly, has had to hire a new bodyguard. His old one, Luis Murillo, has been taken off the government payroll but given at least temporary government housing. Murillo has been arrested and charged along with four other men in connection with the July 19, 2001 gangland-style hit of attorney Roque Pérez at a restaurant on Avenida Balboa. A number of local politicians were on the premises at the time of the shooting, from which the gunman fled in a taxi. The prosecutors’ theory is that Colombian drug traffickers took out the contract on Pérez to keep him from cooperating with a US Drug Enforcement Agency money laundering investigation.

Former Economy and Finance Minister Norberto Delgado is off of one hook, for now. Attorney General José Antonio Sossa says he can’t investigate Delgado’s apparent amassment of a huge fortune while holding public office because looking at financial records is the Comptroller General’s job, not his. This new twist in legal interpretation would mean, if applied across the board, that there can never be prosecutions for financial crimes. But in January Sossa will no longer be the nation’s top prosecutor and this most recent of his many pro-corruption rulings will probably be history as well.

The Mireyistas lost their race against time to award contracts to their friends to widen the road on the Amador Causeway to four lanes, and now the new management at ARI has sensibly declared that, as the $12 million project was both environmentally obnoxious and a bad traffic plan, it isn’t going to happen. Count that as a victory for the roller bladers, bicyclists and others who used the causeway as one of the city’s best recreation facilities.

The Ministry of Public Works has issued its report on the Centennial Bridge, a Mireya Moscoso showcase that has resulted in the loss of the US visa of former Public Works Minister Víctor Juliao. Although at first glance on paper it appears that the bridge was not much over budget, it turns out that corners were cut in several important areas, greatly decreasing the structure’s value. Cables were spaced further apart than in the original plan, and anchored more shallowly. The elevators to the top of the towers, where the cables’ tensions must be periodically checked, were eliminated. Only decorative lighting was installed, and that wasn’t connected to the power grid, which will make the bridge dangerous during the morning mist. Railings that were to be of stainless steel in the original specifications were instead made of cheaper, shorter-lived materials. In all it seems that Panama paid some $25 million more than the bridge we got was worth, with much of the difference being spent on overtime so that Mireya could inaugurate the bridge that’s connected to nowhere before she left office. Another report, by the Panamanian Society of Engineers and Architects (SPIA), is pending, and then decisions about modifications or even demolition, will be made by the Torrijos administration. After the second report comes out the project is also likely to become the subject of criminal investigations.

It’s probably a minor issue compared to the criminal prosecutions that are coming, but Promotora Nacional de Vivienda (PRONAVI) has been fined $1 million by the National Environmental Authority (ANAM) for illegally building the Prados del Este residential development in the Cabra River flood plain. President Torrijos has signed legislation transferring most residents’ mortgages with the Banco Nacional de Panama to homes in other places, and the Housing Ministry is set to demolish the project. The promoters and former officials of the bank, a collection of characters from Mireya Moscoso’s inner circle and in several instances relatives of one another, are the subjects of criminal investigations that may land several of them behind bars.

The Grupo Shahani development company has been fined $117,000 by the Panama City municipal government for cutting down the trees on 13 hectares of land near the National Stadium and the Cerro Patacon city dump. The company had no city permit, and was fined $500 per tree felled. The company appealed to the courts, saying that its environmental impact study was approved by the National Environmental Authority (ANAM), but it was held that ANAM regulations do not void the requirement for city tree cutting permits.

Comptroller General Alvin Weeden was nice about it to former National Maritime Authority director Bertilda García Escalona. Six weeks before the Moscoso administration left office, García Escalona paid herself $30,000 for the costs of living in London while on official business. The fact of the matter, however, is that she never lived in London. Weeden ordered her to pay the money back or face criminal prosecution. People with surnames other than García Escalona, on the other hand, generally get taken away in handcuffs if it is discovered that they have stolen 30 grand from the government. Complicating the question is the fact that, even before the theft was discovered, let alone investigated or prosecuted, Mireya Moscoso issued a blanket pardon to García Escalona, which purports to confer impunity for any and all suc crimes and peculations.

On November 11 President Torrijos sent a message of condolence to Fawhi Fatuh, the interim president of the Palestinian Authority, expressing his and the Panamanian government’s condolences on the occasion of Yasser Arafat’s death. “I am confident that his physical disappearance will serve to unite the resolve of the Palestinian people to achieve complete freedom, democracy, and above all, a definitive peace within a fully sovereign state,” Torrijos said. Reiterating this country’s established policy of support for Palestinian statehood and political solution to the “controversies that have so obstructed its materialization,” the Panamanian president noted that “President Arafat dedicated his entire life to boldly and selflessly struggling in search of this ideal, for which he worthily shared a well-deserved Nobel Peace Prize.”

He did not pass Go, collect $200, land any lucrative noni contracts or get The Panama News handed to him. Instead, scam artist and would-be extortionist Tom McMurrain withdrew his objections to being extradited to the United States as his transfer from the relatively safe PTJ lockup to the hellish La Joya Penitentiary was in the works, and was put on a November 12 flight to Atlanta, where he was taken before a US federal magistrate and ordered held without bail (because he’s a flight risk) while awaiting trial for an alleged ponzi scheme in which he allegedly stole more than $8 million from investors in a chain of Atlanta area loan shark operations. That was several scams before McMurrain’s San Cristobal Land Development real estate and teak and noni planting operation --- a fraud that counted among its boosters the jailed former mayor of Bocas city, Eladio Robinson, former Bocas IPAT director Mauricio López and former Vice-President Arturo Vallarino, the latter of whom now enjoys immunity from prosecution as a member of the Central American Parliament. Another of McMurrain’s criminal activities in Panama was an extortion attempt aimed at forcing the sale to himself of The Panama News. Between the scam for which he is now jailed in the United States and his criminal activities here, McMurrain ran an educational website dot-com hustle in Atlanta and a scheme to colonize a part of Costa Rica and declare it a separate country.

On the evening of November 24 with 36 of 152 polling places reporting and one day of classes to go before finals, University of Panama rector Gustavo García de Paredes declared “victory” in an unprecedented non-binding university plebiscite on a package of proposals that would, among other things, extend his term in office and give him the power to fire tenured professors who criticize his administration. There was a less than 10 percent turnout of eligible voters. The proposal will now be forwarded to the national government, as it is the Legislative Assembly, not the university administration, that has the power to change the law regulating the University of Panama.

Even as its members flee into exile or sweat out corruption investigations here, the Rosas family, which owns the MOLIRENA party and had Panama’s public education system as its private fiefdom during the Moscoso administration, continues a purge of MOLIRENA ranks. The latest to be booted out of the family preserve is former Panama provincial governor Irlena Brown. MOLIRENA barely hung onto its ballot status in last May’s elections and has an inconsequential little caucus in the PRD-controlled Legislative Assembly.

Think “cancer.” Think “unconscionable governmental decision.” Especially if you have been drinking from the public water system in El Volcan. Some 90 percent of the pipes through which that water runs are made of concrete that contains asbestos, one of the best known and most widely documented carcinogens. Thus work is getting underway to replace the toxic ducts with pipes made of PVC plastic.

Also in this section:
Rumsfeld's visit
University of Panama plebiscite
Mireya stripped of her immunity
Assassination unsettles Venezuela
Panama News Briefs