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The flood waters that drove more than 6,000 people from their homes in the Cemaco region of the Embera-Wounaan Comarca naturally made their way downstream. As in to the town of Yaviza, where the Pan-American Highway ends. In all, about 8,000 people had to flee the flood waters, and although most of the flooded homes remain standing, they were inundated with polluted water and otherwise damaged and a lot of crops, farm animals, work tools and other personal property was lost. The national government has thus declared about half of the Darien a disaster area. It is estimated that, in addition to replacing some of the lost homes and personal property, people in the area will have to be fed at public expense for about six months.

The little Catholic church in San Francisco de las Montañas in Veraguas is a big national treasure, but one that has been badly cared for in recent years. The church has been closed for repairs since 2000, in the course of which some of its baroque furnishings were left exposed to the rain and sun. The building itself is from the 18th century, but some of its carved wooden furnishings are older than that, dating back to the first generations of indigenous sculptors who converted to Christianity. These artifacts, although poorly guarded and badly conserved over many years, are priceless. The church has been listed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a world cultural heritage site. The Moscoso administration had contracted Lesso Construction to rehabilitate the church but after community protests over the company's leaving the building's contents unprotected against the elements their work was discontinued. The new committee is headed by Monsignior Oscar Brown, the Catholic bishop of Santiago, and includes, among others, representatives of UNESCO, the municipal government, the National Institute of Culture (INAC), the IPAT government tourism office and First Lady Vivian de Torrijos’s office.

In a controversial appeals court decision in Nicaragua, kleptocratic former President Arnoldo Alemán has been let out of prison but remains under house arrest there while facing a plethora of corruption charges. Meanwhile, prosecutors in Panama have filed money laundering charges against Alemán and six other officials of his administration. It is believed in Nicaragua that Alemán washed at least $30 million here, but anti-corruption prosecutor Cecilia López has only been able to identify and freeze 40 Panamanian bank accounts, containing a little more than $9 million, and sequester other assets with a combined estimated value of about $390,000.

On November 25 the legislature’s chambers became the scene of an Evangelical revival, when before the morning’s session began about 15 legislators and suplentes, all of the Evangelical Protestant faith, conducted a prayer session, calling on God to bless and protect Panama and exorcise its evil spirits. Leading the session were deputies Agustín Escudé (PRD-Cocle) and Vladimir Herrera (MOLIRENA-San Miguelito), while Reverend Manuel Ruiz, an unsuccessful MOLIRENA legislative candidate, led a crowd in the spectators’ gallery in singing religious hymns and delivered a sermon denouncing political corruption. The prayer service was widely criticized in the media and across the political spectrum, including by the Catholic Church. The previous day, Evangelical legislators submitted proposals to declare September to be “Bible Month” in Panama and to begin each day’s legislative meeting with a prayer. The latter proposal was ruled out of order after the assembly’s secretary general, Carlos Smith, pointed out that it would violate the legislature’s established rules.

Although no formal charges have yet been filed, the Public Ministry is going through the first motions of a criminal investigation of Mireya Moscoso’s pardons of four anti-Castro terrorists who had planned to set off an explosion during the Cuban dictator’s November 2000 appearance at the University of Panama. The four men, three of them US citizens, were convicted of lesser charges of endangering public safety and serving sentences of seven and eight years in prison when Mireya Moscoso pardoned them during her final days in office. According to Tocumen Airport videos that have been published, the men received a cordial sendoff from former Government and Justice Minister Arnulfo Escalona and former National Police Chief Carlos Barés themselves. On December 3 Escalona and Barés appeared before prosecutors for questioning along with the former deputy director of Immigration, Javier Tapia, in an investigation that might lead to charges of abuse of authority and exceeding official powers. The three former officials, invoking their rights not to testify against themselves, declined to answer questions and denounced the case against them as lacking legal merit. The prosecutors’ actions may be just a show for the benefit of the Cuban government, which broke diplomatic relations with Panama after the terrorists were freed. The leader of the group, Luis Posada Carriles, is an escapee from a Venezuelan prison and wanted by authorities in both Cuba and Venezuela for the 1970s bombing a Cubana civilian airliner, killing all 73 crew members and passengers aboard, including the Cuban national fencing team and several diplomats. After his escape Posada Carriles worked with then Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North organizing death squad activities in Central America’s civil wars of the 1980s. When those wars concluded, he lived in El Salvador under an assumed name and directed a 1990s series of attacks on tourist facilities in Cuba, which included a hotel bombing in which a young Italian vacationer was killed. After their sendoff from Tocumen, Posada Carriles went underground somewhere in Central America and the three Cuban-Americans flew to Florida, where they received a heroes’ welcome.

A consignment of 29 AK-47 assault rifles seized by police in November in Chilibre was headed to the United Farmers’ Self-Defense (AUC), a right-wing Colombian paramilitary that’s purportedly demobilizing after amassing a sordid record of notorious massacres. Of the three men arrested when the weapons were seized, one Colombian has been identified as an AUC member and a Panamanian was employed at the Legislative Assembly.

The Second Penal Court has called four individuals to trial for a 2000 attempt to rent a helicopter at Albrook Airport using false identities, with the intention of stealing it for use by Colombia’s AUC paramilitary. It would not have been the group’s first aircraft theft from Panama --- AUC leader Carlos Castaño has boasted about his minions’ Panamanian air piracy exploits on Colombian television, but despite that has never been charged in connection with these crimes by this country’s authorities. At the time of this case, five Colombians and three Panamanians, including a Colombian diplomat and a retired Colombian Air Force pilot, were implicated in the crime.

According to his lawyer Frank Rubino, former Panamanian strongman Manuel Antonio Noriega has suffered a mild stroke while in a federal prison in Florida and has been hospitalized. The general is serving a 40-year prison term on drug trafficking and conspiracy charges, but is accorded the Geneva Convention benefits and protections of a prisoner of war under an order by a US federal judge.

In some places --- as has been shown in a few instances in the recent US elections --- it is an invitation to fraud. In other instances it has been the opposite. For better or worse, however, when Panama goes to the polls in 2009 voters will use electronic touch screens rather than paper ballots. In the recent US elections, a few precincts had electronic vote counts that were erroneously or intentionally rigged to give inaccurate results. Some US electronic voting systems leave a backup paper record of the vote, while others do not. It appears that the results of neither presidential nor congressional voting were affected by electronic voting irregularities in several states, but a few local elections may have been affected by the problems. This past August’s Venezuelan recall election, which President Hugo Chávez won by a wide margin, was also conducted by electronic touch screens. In that case the opposition alleged fraud but international observers dismissed those claims. Venezuela’s electronic voting stations create paper backup records. A problem in Panama has been that, purportedly to protect the secrecy of the ballot, once the votes on paper have been counted the ballots have been burned, with the only record of the result then being the official actas or tally sheets. This has opened the possibility of fraud through the substitution or alteration of these documents, something that happens in at least a few precincts in every election here, including the one that was held this past May. The switch to electronic voting in Panama is being made with the help of the Organization of American States, which has signed an agreement with the Electoral Tribunal.

The Electoral Tribunal is considering the legality of a petition drive headed by former legislator and 2004 Panama City mayoral candidate Marco Ameglio to call a special convention of the Arnulfista Party. The movement, which has signed up most of the party’s convention delegates, aims to replace Mireya Moscoso and her supporters in the Arnulfista leadership. The leaders say that the party’s bylaws do not provide for special conventions of this sort, but Ameglio and his supporters counter that the nation’s election laws do allow this. The power struggle at first blush takes on an inter-generational hue, but behind the scenes a number of older Arnulfista leaders are also looking to cut the party’s losses by distancing the organization from Moscoso and her inner circle, who are the objects of growing public scandals and multiple criminal investigations as a result of their actions during their 1999-2004 term in office.

A group of 92 MOLIRENA convention delegates who have petitioned for a special leadership convention apparently won’t get what they asked for. Instead, party boss Jesús “Maco” Rosas, who says he’ll remain at his post at least through 2006, is calling for a special party plebiscite to expel legislator Wigberto Quintero and the other dissident delegates from the party.

The Transit and Land Transport Authority (ATTT) says that in the last three months of the Moscoso administration, some 5,800 taxi and bus permits were issued. It’s a very old racket with origins in the 1970s reorganization of the public transportation system, but one that the owner/operators of taxis and buses generally don’t appreciate because it results in too many vehicles competing for a relatively static number of passengers and thus lower incomes for the drivers. Government and Justice Minister Héctor Alemán, who by virtue of his job sits on the authority’s board of directors, is calling for the cancellation of at least some of these lame duck permits.

On November 30 the Legislative Assembly passed on third and final reading a law proposed by legislator José I. Blandón (Arnulfista-Panama City) that would allow depreciable assets seized from crime suspects to be quickly sold at public auction. What has typically happened in the past is that cars, computers and other assets seized in police raids would rust away and become obsolete over the years while the criminal cases wind their way through the courts, after which there would be only junk to sell, and thus crime victims would have less hope for reparations for their losses. Under the new law --- if President Torrijos signs it --- a judge could order assets sold early in the criminal process, with the proceeds deposited in the Banco Nacional de Panama by way of a certificate of deposit. In the event that the accused is acquitted, he or she would be given the certificate in compensation for the auctioned property. The proposed law would not apply to real estate.

The turbidity --- mud content, in this case --- of the water taken in at IDAAN’s Chilibre water treatment plant has been reduced to less than half of what it was in mid-November, when heavy rains washed a lot of sediments into Madden Lake. However, much of Panama City is still getting cloudy water. The stuff that’s coming from the tap is clean in a biological sense, but reasonable and well informed individuals can and do argue about whether the minerals in it can be bad for human health over the long term, and meanwhile many people find the cloudy tapwater undesirable from the aesthetic point of view. The problem has been a boon for sellers of household water filtration devices, which strain out the cloudy stuff, and for the bottled water industry.

An argument that was put on hold in the waning days of the Moscoso administration has flared again. The Cabinet Council has approved a controversial concession by the Interoceanic Regional Authority by which 15 mostly wooded hectares of the former Fort Clayton will be transferred to developer Carlos Pazco and converted into a commercial project. The land, say the project’s opponents, is legally a part the Caminos de Cruces National Park and thus its development would violate the law. Even if the opponents’ interpretation of the law creating that park is wrong, the parcel lies in a corner bounded by Metropolitan Natural Park, Soberania National Park and Caminos de Cruces National Park and is used as a migration corridor for red deer and marmoset monkeys. Thus the opponents have challenged the cabinet’s decision in a lawsuit filed with the Supreme Court. The dispute marks the first major confrontation between the Torrijos administration and environmentalists.

Also in this section:
Former National Bank of Panama director on the lam
Does the Watergate bagman own part of Horoko?
Venezuela: Last interview with slain prosecutor
Panama News Briefs

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