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Panama and Cuba have reopened their respective consulates in Havana and Panama City, and seem to be en route to re-establishing the normal diplomatic relations that Castro’s government broke off when Mireya Moscoso pardoned a group of anti-Castro terrorists who had planned to set off a bomb at the University of Panama when Fidel spoke there in November of 2000. Prosecutors are going through the motions of charging several Moscoso administration officials with abuse of authority for their roles in the convicts’ release, but this seems to be a show for the benefit of the Cuban government rather than a case that might stand up in court.

Former Canal Once public television director Ariel Rosas, whose qualification for that post was that he’s the nephew of former Education Minister Doris Rosas de Mata, fled to Costa Rica last October rather than answer prosecutors’ questions about the more than $2 million that appears to be missing from the network’s accounts, the whereabouts of electronic equipment valued at some $250,000 that the Japanese government donated to public TV and other anomalies. Once across the border, Rosas applied for political asylum. That petition, however, has been rejected by authorities in San Jose. Rosas, who is not being held in detention in Costa Rica, has apparently filed a new asylum claim there, and it is not clear whether Panama has yet made a formal extradition request.

The Cabinet Council has issued by decree a Uniform Code of Ethics for government officials, the main provisions of which are a prohibition against acceptance of gifts from private persons or other public officials and a ban on business dealings which create conflicts of interest. The rules apply both to direct gifts and those indirectly given, for example to family members of public servants whom the givers want to influence. The decree has been praised by anti-corruption activists, but Arnulfista legislator José I. Blandón complained that it was a ploy to head off stricter ethics legislation that the opposition wants and the PRD doesn’t.

A criminal investigation of alleged financial malfeasance at the state-owned Caja de Ahorros has been thrown out of court. The investigation implicated former director Carlos Raúl Piad and several former board members, who allegedly passed out some $45 million in improper loans, began in the middle of this past November. However, Piad is secretary general of the Arnulfista Party, and as such was held to enjoy the same immunity from prosecution that a candidate does, until early in 2005. Piad had not been formally charged in the case, but judge Rolando Quezada Vallespi ruled that his immunity prevents any investigation that might possibly lead to charges. It is not clear whether the ruling will prevent a resumption of the investigation if and when Piad loses his electoral immunity, nor whether the ruling prevents the investigation of those allegedly involved who do not have electoral immunity. In a ruling by the Supreme Court quashing an investigation of alleged bribery in the CEMIS airport and cargo handling center contract, charges against a person with the company who did not have legislative immunity were thrown out because the people he was suspected of having bribed did enjoy such protection from investigation and prosecution.

The 20-30 Club’s annual fundraising telethon surpassed its $3.5 million fundraising goal in its final hour on December 18. The group, composed of Panamanians in their 20s and 30s, holds an annual telethon that takes over the nation’s airwaves for more than a day and brings national and international performing artists onto the stage at ATLAPA, all for the benefit of special projects to benefit needy kids with various disabilities or health problems. This year’s proceeds will build and equip physical therapy facilities in Colon, Chitre, Santiago and David, and fund needed repairs at Panama City’s Hospital del Niño.

Colombian boxer Carlos Meza died at Santo Tomas Hospital on December 7, after having been knocked out in a bout with Panamanian Ricardo Córdoba on December 4. Meza’s widow will receive his purse of $1,000 for bout for the FEDELATIN bantamweight title, plus about $9,000 collected from people in Panama’s boxing circles.

In November of 2003, while all eyes were on Mireya Moscoso’s attempt to build a road past properties owned by herself and her relatives from Boquete to Cerro Punta and through the Volcan Baru National Park, the Moscoso administration, through the Interoceanic Regional Authority, also approved a residential development concession in the Clayton-Cardenas area that would infringe upon some 14 hectares of the Camino Cruces National Park. While environmentalists both opposed the cutting of a forested park and feared yet another development without proper infrastructure in the area, it seems that they could not make an argument about the loss of a virgin forest. In this case we know it’s not an old growth forest because there are the remains of a cobblestone road running through it --- the colonial-era Las Cruces Trail. So now, in addition to local residents who don’t like the development and environmentalists who are trying to hold the line against the development of a National Park, historical preservationists and the local representante, Joaquín Vásquez, are backing the movement to void the concession granted to developer Carlos Pasco’s Inmobiliaria P&P. Pasco says that unlike some of the other projects that have offended Clayton area residents and burdened the infrastructures inherited from the US military, this will be a low-density development that respects the environment. He has an approved National Environmental Authority (ANAM) environmental impact statement to support his side of the story. However, that’s not convincing the opponents, and it seems that this argument will be fought on several fronts, the most important of which will probably be in the Supreme Court.

Because history provides them good reasons to do so, labor and other interest groups have expressed concern about a “madruganzo,” or wee hours political move to jam important and controversial changes through the legislature before those affected know what’s going on. However, in respect to both the tax issue and social security reforms, President Martín Torrijos and Social Security Fund director René Luciani respectively have said that changes will not be pushed through the current legislative session, which ends December 31. There is no word yet whether one or both of these matters will be brought before a special session, but if not they won’t be taken up by the assembly until March.

On December 14 a small group of leftists and labor activists marched to the Presidencia to protest possible changes in the social security system. En route to the presidential palace, at Avenida B and Calle 12, one of the protesters became involved in an altercation with one of the police officers (who were neither deployed in force nor dressed in their riot control protective gear). The altercation began when the protester, a student from the FER-29 campus radical group, spray painted a slogan on the front of a commercial establishment, the cop moved in to arrest him and the sloganeer resisted arrest. The police came to the assistance of their colleague, the protesters started throwing sticks and rocks in defense of their colleague, a few tear gas grenades were thrown and both sides backed away. Later Government and Justice Minister Héctor Alemán said that while the police will enforce the law, it is not this administration’s policy to criminalize protests.

Among the various miseries of Colon City one finds, particularly in parts of Barrio Norte, the persistent smell of sewage. It has been like that for years. But maybe no longer. Health Minister Camilo Alleyne recently moved to Colon for more than a week to direct a citywide cleanup operation, and one of the main components of that is the cleaning of overflowed septic tanks on Calles 15, 16 and 4. As the entrance to the garbage dump that the city uses is under repair, the minister has ordered the refuse sent to Panama City’s dump on a temporary basis. The campaign in Colon also includes testing for HIV and other infectious diseases at the local jails, health outreach programs in the communities along the Transistmica, elimination of mosquito breeding areas and a municipal government crackdown on littering and illegal dumping. However, even as the government was cleaning out garbage that had been dumped amidst the rubble of burned-out buildings, local residents and businesses were dumping more refuse in those same places.

The Health Ministry reports that a boy in San Miguelito has been treated for hemorrhaging related to dengue fever, the fourth such case in Panama this year. Dengue is an insect-borne viral disease, carried by the same Aedes Egypt mosquitoes that carry yellow fever (a disease that Panama has not had in a long time), which breeds in small, clear bodies of water such as the rainwater that collects in trash and junk cars. There are at least four strains of dengue, which is generally a week-long flu-like misery notable mainly for its body aches and rashes. The hemorrhaging is generally a complication that affects people who have suffered previous bouts of dengue and can be life-threatening if not promptly treated. In this case, the boy appears to be on his way to full recovery. Contrary to consistent reports in several of Panama’s corporate mainstream media, there is no special hemorrhagic dengue strain but only the rather rare complication of the usual infections. There is no dengue vaccine, but the mainly urban disease can be largely prevented by eliminating breeding areas, most notably by suppressing the creation and accumulation of litter.

In his last days in office, Comptroller General Alvin Weeden has blasted the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) for allegedly acting as a political patronage pawn in this country. The basic claim is that during the Moscoso administration $90 million that the UNDP had originally assigned to improve the Pan-American Highway in Veraguas and Chiriqui provinces was instead diverted to other road projects, for which the Mireyistas then claimed credit en route to their humiliating defeat at the polls this past May. It’s an interesting charge from a guy who, along with now Supreme Court magistrate but then Government and Justice Minister Winston Spadafora, got a government-funded road to his farm in La Chorrera district, a road which serves hardly anyone other than the two Mireyista political figures. In any case, the UNDP denies any wrongdoing.

Although the government has rushed supplies into flood-affected parts of the Darien, distribution has been a problem. At one point the town of Yaviza, much of which had been inundated, received no food aid for 10 days. The government is going to have to feed much of the Embera-Wounaan Comarca’s Cemaco District, where the flooding was worst and almost everybody is a subsistence farmer, for six months. In Yaviza many people pursue other occupations and unlike in the comarca supplies can be brought in by road, but a lot of the flood victims there also require food assistance. Part of the problem in Yaviza is that, as in all economically depressed areas, whenever there is a disaster unaffected people get in the assistance line and demand benefits too. Another part of it is that some politicians in the area play up racial divisions, alleging that indigenous people get “special rights” like collective ownership of their lands, which typically leads to complaints of undeserved privileges when there are relief efforts for disaster-stricken indigenous communities. In any case Roberto Velásquez, the director of the SINAPROC disaster relief agency, said that changes have been made to address the problems in the food assistance program.

Farmers, most of them rice growers, in the Llanos de Chepo area and people in the fishing community of Coquira at the mouth of the Bayano River are demanding compensation, both through a lawsuit and by lobbying the government, for damages they suffered in late November when the AES power generating company opened the gates on the Bayano Dam after heavy rains. The damages are an ordinary risk of activities in a flood plain below a dam, but those affected claim that AES could have managed Bayano Lake’s water levels more responsibly, discharging lesser amounts of water as rainy season progressed and thus avoiding the big spill that flooded them out. The problem is that the company might have done that, the rains might have been less than what we eventually got, and the dam’s generating capacity during the dry season would have thus been reduced.

On December 14 riot police ousted some 90 squatters who had invaded the grounds outside the La Joya penitentiary complex in Pacora. Some of the invaders had lost their homes when lands that they had previously invaded in the Pacora River flood plain were inundated this past October. The place where they attempted to set up their new shanties was within the prison security perimeter, which authorities try to keep clear to avoid escapes and reduce opportunities for people to smuggle contraband items to the inmates.

The road overpass between Albrook and Balboa remains unused while the Ministry of Public Works is deciding what to do with it. A report by a team from the Panama Technological University says that the overpass is stabilized, while a report from the Panamanian Society of Engineers and Architects says that the structure is still sinking into the soil of what a century ago was a swamp and recommends that the structure not be used. The overpass itself shows cracks and other signs of structural defects caused by the builders’ cost-cutting on the foundation work. Former Minister of Public Works Eduardo Quirós, now a member of the Panama Canal Authority board of directors thanks to one of Mireya’s last-minute appointment, said that he knows nothing about the problems, which are visible to the untrained naked eye of anyone who walks upon or under the overpass.

Police say that they have recovered more than $54,000 in counterfeit US currency that has been passed at Panama City businesses in recent weeks and expect that a lot more of it is circulating. Members of a Colombian gang are being sought in connection with the influx of funny money.




Also in this section:
Fugitive ex-banker stripped of his US visa
University "censures" its founder's descendents
2004 was especially deadly for the world's journalists
Panama's corporate media stir up a Chávez scare
Panama News Briefs

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