Panama News Briefs

There was some doubt as to whether the capital would celebrate Carnival this year, after IPAT director Rubén Blades announced that his institution had no money budgeted for that purpose and would not be sponsoring the Panama City festivities. But the Ministry of Commerce and Industry has issued a decree setting up a Carnival committee for the capital and providing tax breaks for private businesses that contribute toward the party. Blades said that IPAT would participate in Panama City’s Carnival, with a stage and a float, and by promoting this country’s Carnival in general to foreign tourists. Usually the nation’s biggest Carnival celebration is in Las Tablas rather than Panama City.

In 2000 the biggest Carnival celebration of them all, the one in Las Tablas, was called off due to a hantavirus outbreak. We have had a number of cases of the sometimes fatal rodent-borne illness, in most parts of Panama, since then. Now two scientists for the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta are surveying conditions in the Azuero Peninsula, which is the most affected part of the country, and will make recommendations on preventive measures before February’s Carnival. There is an outside chance that it could affect Carnival itself. In general, people should reduce the risks by cleaning up their surroundings to deny food and water to rats and mice, and by wearing gloves and dust masks when cleaning areas that have been infested by rodents. The government has ordered restrictions on the drying of Azuero grain and bean crops in traditional sheds in order to deny food to rodents. The hantavirus problem is not so much a sewer rat phenomenon --- which is good news for the metro Panama City area, where the rats greatly outnumber the people --- but of rodents that live in fields and forests and occasionally migrate into or around human living spaces due to droughts, floods, fires, urban sprawl, changes in food supplies or other factors that alter their normal populations and habitats.

Heavy rains in the Chiriqui highlands have swollen the Caldera River, which runs through Boquete, in places causing it to overflow its banks. One of the places where it has overflowed is in many of the flower gardens that form a large part of the attraction for the Boquete Flower and Coffee Fair. Thus on January 10 the fair was suspended, which will be a major blow to the area’s tourism business.

As these briefs were written floods resulting from two days of out-of-season heavy rains in Bocas del Toro province and adjacent areas of Costa Rica had routed some 13,000 people from their homes, 7,000 of them in Panama, and drowned two Panamanians while leaving five Costa Ricans missing. A number of communities on the Bocas mainland were left cut off by the flood waters, which have also seriously damaged the area’s banana crops. The floods also affected the remote Caribbean coast of Veraguas province, but the extent of the problem there was less clear because communications with that area are difficult in the best of circumstances. The SINAPROC disaster relief agency has mobilized rescue and aid efforts across the affected region.

At many beaches on both of Panama’s coasts property owners, many of them foreigners, are laying claim to the land right up to the waterfront, despite laws reserving the beaches as public property. Thus the Ministry of Economy and Finance’s Catastro office is conducting a review with the intention to end private infringements on public beaches and to require landowners of beachfront property to provide for public access to the beaches where none exists. Part of the problem lies in old property titles that go back to before the 1946 constitution, which reserved the lands up to 22 meters from the high water line for the public domain. People who buy titled land with old descriptions conferring ownership down to the ocean do not in fact get ownership rights to the public beaches. There are extra complicating factors about what constitutes proper public access. Many communities seek to exclude or limit bus access to the beaches, or to charge people entry fees in order to raise the money to hire local people to pick up the trash that beach users leave behind. Plus, if there’s a road to the beach reasonably close to a beachfront property owner’s land, there is no legal requirement for the owner to provide access across his or her property. But the law specifies free public access to the beaches without resolving some of these gray areas.

Years of lobbying and census taking by the Panama Audubon Society have resulting in the designation of Panama Bay as part of the Hemispheric Shore Bird Reserve Network. That will make it easier to get international and corporate grants for conservation projects and make it harder for private or public institutions to make changes that would destroy or diminish the migratory birds’ habitat. Although the proposal had its origins in the Audubon Society and was supported by bird census data collected by the group, the formal application was made by the Panamanian government, through the National Environmental Authority (ANAM). To get the designation Panama had to promise to protect the area, but those promises are not self-executing parts of this country’s law. However, in any court case they would be persuasive evidence of public policy.

Results of a Dichter & Neira poll commissioned by La Prensa suggest that by a huge margin the Panamanian people want Mireya Moscoso to retire from public life. However, that’s not necessarily the case within the Arnulfista Party. Within that political collective there is a younger generation, most prominently led by former legislator Marco Ameglio, that wants Mireya to step down as party president. However, at the January 16 Arnulfista convention a number of other party leadership positions will be filled but not the presidency. Unless, of course, Ameglio wins his case before the Electoral Tribunal, in which he has challenged Mireya’s decision to put off a party president election until another convention in September of 2006. Many observers, both inside and outside the Arnulfista Party, doubt that Mireya will be able to hang onto her post for that long. It seems likely that she will have the votes to maintain her leadership at this month’s convention, but the meeting may nevertheless be an opportunity for the anti-Mireyista factions to show their strength.

At a January 8 meeting of more than half of MOLIRENA’s 200 national leadership committee members the delegates voted to depose Jesús “Maco” Rosas as party president and nullify his extensive post-election purges of the party ranks. The Rosas family has for the past several years controlled the Nationalist Republican Liberal Movement (MOLIRENA) and used it as an extension of the family business. A junior partner in the Moscoso administration, MOLIRENA was given the Ministry of Education as a fiefdom and more than a dozen members of the Rosas family received administrative posts in that ministry. However one of these, Ariel Rosas, who headed the Canal Once public TV network, has fled abroad rather than answer questions about more than $2 million and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment donated by the Japanese that went missing from the institution. MOLIRENA was once a conservative business-oriented party whose most prominent public figure was former Vice-President Guillermo Ford. But after a series of splits and purges the party’s a shadow of its former self, and now a movement led by legislator Wigberto Quintero seeks to wrest it away from the Rosas family. Rosas and his supporters say they’ll challenge the results of the January 8 meeting before the Electoral Tribunal, but it’s likely that the issue will become moot when one side or the other musters the most votes when the party holds a full convention on January 30.

Accompanied by three of the anti-Castro terrorists she pardoned, on January 6 Mireya Moscoso was awarded the symbolic keys to the City of Miami by its mayor. The men were convicted of endangering public security and received prison sentences of seven or eight years, after more serious charges were thrown out in the wake of certain pieces of evidence disappearing. The men were caught with a large cache of plastic explosives, which they intended to set off in the University of Panama’s main auditorium --- just across the street from the Seguro Social hospital complex --- during Fidel Castro’s November 2000 appearance there. Moscoso used the occasion to complain that she is being politically persecuted here and to dismiss press criticism of her as leftist propaganda.

Former Attorney General José Antonio Sossa handed out checks of between $100,000 and $140,000 to 15 prosecutors on December 30, just before leaving office. It was allegedly to “equalize” senior prosecutors’ pay with those of vice-ministers and appeals court judges, retroactively for several years. The total amount paid was more than $1.8 million. The outgoing Administrative Prosecutor Alma Montenegro de Fletcher ruled that the payments were justifiable and the Torrijos administration has not challenged the move, but anti-corruption activists have generally denounced the payments.

The Public Ministry has issued a warrant for the arrest of former Panama Defense Forces Colonel Ricardo Garibaldo, who commanded the Pumas Infantry Company in Tocumen in the early 1970s when activist Heliodoro Portugal disappeared. A few years ago Portugal’s skeleton was found buried on the grounds of the former Pumas barracks, along with the remains of several other individuals. After a long legal battle against former Attorney General José Antonio Sossa, Portugal’s daughter Patria won a Supreme Court case in which it was held that the statute of limitations does not apply to such disappearances and murders. At one point in the legal battle a house arrest order was issued against Garibaldo, but since then he seems to have moved and left no forwarding address.

Late December say a series of escapes from the La Joya penitentiary complex in Tinajitas, in which a dozen convicts, some doing time for violent crimes like murder, armed robbery or rape, managed to get away. Only a few of the fugitives had been caught by the time that these briefs were uploaded.

Although we have been getting some unusual January rains, it’s dry season and the traditional time when people would clear their land by setting grass fires. That has been illegal since the passage of a 1995 law, and Panama City’s municipal government and firefighting corps are ready to deal with those who don’t respect the burning ban. The mayor warns that fines will be imposed and that a special watch is being kept in Tocumen, Alcalde Diaz, Pacora and Chilibre, the parts of the city where grass fires have been most common.

For about three weeks at the time these briefs were written some 1,500 public health care system patients who are infected by the HIV virus that causes AIDS were going without the anti-retroviral drugs they need to keep their infections in check. The reason is that the Social Security Fund (CSS) supplies ran out. To buy the three-drug mix that’s used costs about $800 per month on the private market, a price which few of the patients can afford. For several years there have been on and off shortages of the medicines, partly as a reflection of the CSS medical supply purchasing system’s inadequacies but also because of the priorities set by public officials.

El Panama America reports Ministry of Health statistics that some 20 to 25 percent of Panamanians suffer at least occasionally from some sort of mental illness, ranging from occasional mild attacks of anxiety or depression to far more dangerous or debilitating disorders. The ministry added that only about one in 700 affected people are diagnosed as such by psychiatrists, and that noise and other urban stress factors, various social conflicts and climatic factors all play roles in our national mental health problems. It often adds up on an individual level to physical illnesses caused by mental problems, and on a social level to lower workplace productivity and increased violence.

The Ministry of Health has sent teams in to take blood samples and conduct mosquito inspections in the eastern part of Panama province and the northern part of the Darien, particularly the Chepo area and the semi-autonomous Kuna comarca of Wargandi. The nation recorded more than 4,700 malaria cases last year, including three deaths. It’s a phenomenon that Health Minister Camilo Alleyne attributes to the previous administration’s cutbacks in insecticide spraying. (One of the ministry’s teams arrived at Wargandi on a Kuna holiday and was denied entrance, which in turn gave rise to a an editorial in El Panama America that denigrated Panama’s indigenous cultures and argued that the comarcas encompass too much land. But the main issue from the indigenous point of view is that, especially in light of the high unemployment in the comarcas, they want control of health programs in their communities and most especially the jobs associated with them.) It appears that the end results of the ministry’s special effort will be data that gives public health system a better understanding of the problem’s dimensions and a more vigorous mosquito control effort in certain areas.

Jonathan Lester Caballero, a 44-year-old erstwhile journalist who had been working for the National Assembly, was arrested over the New Year’s holidays at a Santiago pushbutton, where he was allegedly about to administer an abortifacient substance to a 16-year-old girl. Abortion is illegal in Panama.

Yes, it appears that we have at least one serial killer on the loose, gang violence is pretty bad in certain neighborhoods and the ways that drug traffickers and other racketeers settle disputes are not pretty. However, to put it all into perspective Panama has a lower murder rate than the United States does, and most of our violence takes place at home. As in more than 6,000 domestic violence report in Panama province during 2004, and of course that does not include the majority of incidents, which are not reported to authorities. According to a report by the province’s family court prosecutors, that represents an increase in the problem. Mostly it’s a matter of men mistreating the women and children in their households, but the prosecutors say that some 17 percent of the cases are about violence against men. The problem appears to be worst in San Miguelito, where poverty leads to overcrowded living conditions, which in turn tend to aggravate most social problems.

Eleven employees of the National Lottery are suspected of stealing more than $1 million, through their access to the code to the institution’s check issuing system. Prosecutors say that the erstwhile public servants paid themselves for fictitious bills.

Arnulfista legislator Miguel Fanovich, who failed to get a proposal for government licensing of journalists out of committee during the recent regular National Assembly session, says he will try again. This time, in addition to the requirement that one must have a journalism diploma from or accepted by a university with no student newspaper --- the University of Panama --- Fanovich is would include a pay scale provision that would essentially ban small low-budget media like The Panama News and reserve journalism to the mostly partisan-aligned corporate media.

It turns out that Garrit Geneteau, who heads the Sindicato de Periodistas, was on the take from former President Ernesto Pérez Balladares. The “Sindicato” is a purported journalists’ union that has never negotiated a collective bargaining contract on behalf of journalists and directs most of its efforts toward the exclusion of foreigners from the Panamanian media and lobbying the government to license journalists and restrict the practice of journalism to University of Panama graduates. Geneteau received several payments amounting to $2,500 from the former president’s secret fund. (Now what’s that you were telling us about ethics, Garrit?) According to a report in La Prensa, the list of journalists on the take from Toro include Danilo Toro, Michel de la Ossa, Homero Londoño, Alonso Pinzón, José Gil, Euclides Corro, Luis Pimental, Daniel Blanco, David Serrano Morales, Rolando Guardia, Luis A. Testa, Melquiades Valencia, Roberto Morales, Mario Velásquez Chizmar, Rubén Luis García, Miguel Angel Ramos, James Aparicio, Julio Ortega, Carlos García and Mario Rognoni.

Also in this section:
Looking back at 2004
Gómez replaces Sossa, promises cleanup
Special legislative session on taxes, Seguro
Noriega wins in court, but torture victim vows to continue the battle
Panama News Briefs