news

According to a Dichter & Neira poll commissioned for and published by La Prensa, 58.3 percent of Panamanians oppose the tax changes and public employment cap recently enacted by the government, while only 29.6 percent support them. It seems that the younger, richer and more urban a person is, the more likely she or he will look askance at the reforms.

Panama’s Supreme Court has now held that conflict of interest is not only legal, but mandatory. When President Torrijos invoked a law requiring most public employees to retire at age 75 to force the presiding magistrate at the time, César Pereira Burgos, off of the high court, the latter appealed and brought the matter back before his erstwhile colleagues. The president nominated juvenile judge Esmeralda de Troitiño to replace Pereira Burgos, and she took what would ordinarily be considered the ethical course and recused herself from participating in the decision that would either continue or end her own membership on the court. For other reasons, magistrate Arturo Hoyos also recused himself. But now the rest of the Supreme Court magistrates have rejected the recusals, in effect ordering Troitiño and Hoyos to participate in the decision. So much for the prevailing international principle that a judge must be impartial. In the Panamanian judiciary conflict of interest is now required by law.

While the controversy rages about whether the CEMIS case investigation can or should be reopened, law professor Miguel Antonio Bernal has filed another criminal complaint about the case with his former student, Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez. During the Moscoso administration the Supreme Court suppressed the investigation into allegations of legislative bribery against both legislators and non-legislators on the basis of legislative immunity. However, Bernal’s complaint is not against any of the figures in the prior matter, but against Gómez’s predecessor José Antonio Sossa for allegedly neglecting his duties and taking a dive on the case. The most prominent among the groups asking for the whole CEMIS case to be reopened is the nation’s bar association, the Colegio de Abogados. Along with Bernal’s complaint against Sossa, the former head of Panama’s INTERPOL office, Jorge Motley, says he’ll file a criminal complaint against Sossa for quashing money laundering investigations. The editor of The Panama News has also asked the Public Ministry for an investigation of Sossa and prosecutor Julio Laffaurie for their possible roles in the use of a criminal defamation prosecution by American swindler Tom McMurrain in an extortion attempt aimed at forcing the sale of this publication to McMurrain.

The Interoceanic Regional Authority may have declared a private developer’s installation of a toll gate on the Amador Causeway illegal, but as far as the Attorney General is concerned that’s no excuse for its destruction by students and employees of the University of Panama. Vowing that there won’t be impunity for vandalism, Procuradora Ana Matilde Gómez says she’s opening a criminal investigation in the matter.

According to National Police figures comparing the months of September 2004 through this past January with the same months a year before, Panama has seen a drop in murders, armed robberies, frauds, forgeries and criminal destruction of property. However, car thefts, rapes and assaults with blunt instruments have increased. The differences in some categories may be due to changes in record keeping methodology that were instituted when the government changed hands this past September.

José Luis “Pistolero” Garcés, one of the more offensively productive players on the low-scoring Panamanian national team, hasn’t been able to play in any away games lately. That’s because he was convicted of assault and sentenced to 20 months in prison, and while he remains out of jail while appealing he’s not allowed to leave the country. The court found him guilty of dispersing a crowd of young men who were drinking beer and blasting their Puerto Caimito neighbors with rap music by opening fire with a machine gun, seriously wounding one 22-year-old man who has not been able to return to his usual occupation as a fisherman. Some soccer fans --- and maybe a few people who really hate loud rap music --- have called for a pardon or commutation of his sentence, so as to improve Panama’s chances of making it to the World Cup for the first time, and El Panama America reports that President Torrijos will indeed call off the jail term. But there are others who object to special treatment for a violent offender who happens to be a gifted athlete, and among those is another athlete, boxer Vicente Mosquera. The latter told La Prensa that several years ago Garcés shot and wounded him in the leg, in an act of gang-related violence. Garcés has not responded to Mosquera’s allegation.

If you try to rob Hamburguesas Rancheras when proprietor Ricardo Mangravita is nearby, you may find that the guy has a temper. At least four suspects, three adults and a minor, found that to be the case on the morning of February 21. The men robbed the company offices on Via Brasil of some $20,000, but the owner was summoned by radio and gave chase. After a wild race through city streets that ended in the two cars crashing on Calle 50, there ensued a shootout in which Mangravita ducked the alleged robbers’ bullets and shot one of his opponents in the chest. After that the other three suspect attempted to flee on foot but the police had arrived by then and they were captured. Mangravita got his money back, but has faced a certain amount of criticism for the danger that his defense of his business posed for uninvolved persons.

The Palacio de las Garzas has a lot of physical problems that the government doesn’t have the money to fix right away, but President Torrijos says he will take prompt action to deal with one of the problems. But actually, it’s not with his official residence itself but the adjacent headquarters of the Institutional Protection Service (SPI), which is among other things the presidential guard. It seems that the air conditioning system that the SPI uses is so loud that it both annoys and poses the possibility of permanent hearing loss to students at the nearby Escuela Simon Bolivar as well as to residents who are even closer than that. The problem began in the Moscoso administration when loud new compressors were installed and recommendations by the Ministry of Health to do something about the resulting noise --- which was measured at 84.9 decibels --- were ignored.

The present American Embassy on Avenida Balboa is way too close to the street to protect from a determined suicide bomber driving a truck full of explosives, but that will change in due course. On February 18 groundbreaking ceremonies took place at the former Fort Clayton, where a new embassy will be built in a much more tenable position, well away from roads and parking lots. The project is part of a program to replace vulnerable US diplomatic installations that was begun after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

US National Guard engineering, support and medical units are now in the Azuero Peninsula and will be there until May --- with people rotating in and out --- for maneuvers in which they will practice construction, well drilling and tropical medicine skills around Macaracas. The SUNTRACS construction workers’ union, both out of leftist principles and due to bread-and-butter economic objections to foreigners doing construction work here, objects to the maneuvers. Generally, however, most Panamanians welcome these military training missions. There will be no combat component to the exercises.

Sandra Noriega, the daughter of former dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega, has landed a job at the Panamanian consulate in Santo Domingo. The appointment has been criticized by some, but President Torrijos says that she’s a Panamanian citizen with the proper qualifications to do the job and that regardless of her parentage she has a right to work for a living. But the critics point out that Ms. Noriega was convicted after the 1989 US invasion of making use of funds that came into the family as a result of her father’s illegal activities.

One of the two candidates to unseat MOLIRENA party boss Jesús “Maco” Rosas, Olimpo Sáenz, has petitioned the Electoral Tribunal to postpone the party’s February 27 convention, citing allegedly unfair rules. The party had already been postponed at Rosas’s behest after it seemed that his other challenger, legislator Wigberto Quintero, had the votes to oust Rosas. If Rosas can divide his foes and siphon off a little of their support, then he’s likely to retain power in a close vote. If not, the Rosas clan will lose control of their principal family business, one that got them more than a dozen high-paying government administrative jobs plus ancillary revenues during the Moscoso administration.

Carnival is a holiday for most Panamanians, but not for cops, emergency room personnel, food inspectors and sanitation crews. In Panama City, the latter picked up some 120 tons of trash left by revelers, according to the municipal waste department.

Having won a hard-fought battle to scuttle Mireya Moscoso’s plan to build a road past her and her relatives’ land and through the Volcan Baru National Park to connect Cerro Punta and Boquete, the National Association for the Conservation of Nature (ANCON) is now seeking to make that victory permanent by pushing for the construction of a road between the towns on the two sides of the dormant volcano along an alternative southern route, mostly through cow pastures. The cost of building a road along the southern route would be higher than Mireya’s pet project if only construction costs are considered, but ANCON argues that the road would serve a need, attract the boom in local development away from the sensitive cloud forests, and shut the door to a future attempt to put a road through the park.



Also in this section:
Gómez reports on corruption cases
Legal and political issues abound in Cerro Petaquilla mining concession
Panama News Briefs

Back to top

Financial services at Finansbanken --- http://www.finansbanken.dk/english/index.html
Build a home in Las Cumbres with Villa Concordia --- http://villaconcordia-pma.com/
Make the Executive Hotel your headquarters in Panama City --- http://www.executivehotel-panama.com