For years, word on the streets has been that it usually costs $20,000 to bribe the Supreme Court to fix a serious criminal case. That’s the figure that was cited in wiretap tapes played before the legislature and the Panamanian people during the impeachment trial of the late high court magistrate José Manuel Faúndes, who notwithstanding the damning evidence that he was bought to let a Colombian drug trafficker walk was acquitted when a less than sufficient majority voted for his acquittal. That’s the figure that has been cited to this reporter by various prisoners, criminal defendants and lawyers over the years.
Since the Faúndes acquittal, the court has become ever more brazen in its pro-corruption decisions. It upheld Mireya Moscoso’s regulations that gutted the Transparency Law, turning the issue into one of Martín Torrijos’s campaign themes. It threw out the CEMIS legislative bribery scandal, not only upholding legislative immunity, but also extending it to legislators who had attempted to voluntarily set aside their own immunity and to non-legislators suspected of paying bribes to deputies. It held that the immunity of members of the Central American Parliament applies to acts committed before a person joined that body and bars criminal investigations of such acts after the person is no longer a member of PARLACEN. And on and on and on.
The problem with that game --- other than the popular indignation that the collapse of the rule of law entails --- is that for a criminal organization the Supreme Court lacks the unity and discipline to prosper over the long term. As Mireya Moscoso was on her way out, the magistrates were embroiled in a bitter dispute over who would get to drive which of the institution’s luxury cars. And now, as Martín Torrijos is in the middle of an ambitious and politically risky legislative effort to change the nation’s tax laws, reform the Social Security Fund, negotiate a free trade deal with the United States and present a Panama Canal expansion plan to the electorate, the magistrates have had another, even more spectacular, falling out.
The latest crisis began when magistrates Arturo Hoyos, Aníbal Salas and Winston Spadafora accused their colleague Adán Arnulfo Arjona of a conflict of interest --- the latter had four employees of the Public Ministry, where they worked for former Administrative Prosecutor Alma Montenegro de Fletcher, at the same time on his Supreme Court staff. That formed the basis of a complaint filed with Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez by anti-corruption activist Enrique Montenegro.
Arjona shot back, bringing up a case last year in which he cast the lone dissenting vote in a nine-member en banc decision. (Usually Supreme Court cases are decided by one of the court’s specialized three-judge panels.) In that case money laundering charges were dropped against Lorena Henao Montoya, the sister and alleged accomplice of a Colombian drug kingpin who, along with her brother, was found living under an assumed name in a country home in Torti and several luxury apartments in Paitilla. The brother was extradited to the United States to face drug trafficking charges and the sister, after the court threw out the charges against her here, was deported to Colombia, where she is now in jail awaiting trial on narcotics charges and is potentially a key witness in what could be a major Panamanian bribery case.
Arjona also pointed to several other decisions in which property seized from drug traffickers was returned, other drug defendants were freed, the investigation into a huge shipment of assault rifles from Nicaragua through Panama to the Colombian AUC death squads was quashed and requests for information about scams that Mireya Moscoso and her inner circle were running were denied. Both Arjona and his colleagues accused one another of damaging Panama’s institutions of justice. On the basis of Arjona’s allegations, attorney Florencio Barba Hart filed a complaint with the legislature.
Gómez submitted Montenegro’s complaint to the National Assembly, whose Credentials Committee will take up both that and Hart’s petition and decide whether there ought to be impeachment trials of the magistrates involved. Moreover, despite earlier high court decisions conferring immunity on the criminal co-conspirators of public officials who are protected by immunity, Gómez opened an investigation into Montenegro de Fletcher and those others allegedly involved who are not immune from investigation and prosecution in their own right.
There is and long has been an anti-corruption movement in Panama, which is essentially divided between the leftists who can put more bodies on the street for a protest and a series of middle- and upper-class non-governmental organizations that have far more resources, better access to the mainstream media and a legion of lawyers willing to press matters before the courts.
The left, which has long called for the resignation of the Supreme Court en masse, is at the moment preoccupied with as yet unproposed changes to the social security system and the possibility of a free trade deal with the United States that would be anathema to them. Thus, as has been the case for the past several years, SUNTRACS et al left the initiative on the corruption issue to the more establishment anti-corruption forces and the gadfly lawyers. As would be expected, the likes of former President Guillermo Endara, law professor Miguel Antonio Bernal, retiree Enrique Montenegro and Angélica Maytín of the Foundation for the Development of Citizens’ Liberty all lent their voices to a movement for thorough change in the high court.
So, too, did the Colegio de Abogados, Panama’s bar association.
But the difference this time is that Panama’s most influential business group, the Panamanian Association of Business Executives (APEDE), has taken the lead and organized a “Moral Crusade for the Cleanup of the Administration of Justice,” an umbrella group that unites more than two dozen civic organizations and which is calling for the resignations of all nine high court magistrates. The Moral Crusade is also calling on President Torrijos to set aside partisan temptations and replace the magistrates with honest, independent and highly qualified professionals.
So far only one Supreme Court magistrate, Graciela Dixon, has responded to the call. She says she’s not resigning.
President Torrijos, for his part, took the occasion of the inauguration ceremony for the US Army National Guard’s engineering and tropical health care maneuvers in Macaracas to advocate “orderly” changes in the justice system. What sort of changes those might be, the president did not specify.
However, last year’s constitutional amendments give the president and the legislature, which the president’s party firmly controls, the power to pack the high court by increasing the number of its magistrates. Given that the current National Assembly’s Credentials Committee has taken every opportunity to uphold politicians’ immunity and avoid action against corruption and that Torrijos has not seen fit to pressure them to do otherwise, the odds are that change will come neither by impeachments nor by a mass resignation, but by court-packing legislation or through intimidation by way of the threat of such a measure.
It does seem, however, that there’s a change on the way for Panama’s court system.
Also in this section:
Supreme Court infighting prompts crisis, demands for change
Mireya takes PARLACEN immunity
Panama News Briefs
