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On February 25, about a week after Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez issued a report that signalled her intention to press ahead with criminal investigations of several matters that implicated ex-President Mireya Moscoso, the former president took the oath of office as a deputy of the Central American Parliament, or PARLACEN. By treaty and Panamanian court decisions, membership in that body confers immunity against investigation, prosecution or punishment for crimes.

Previously Moscoso had promised not to take the seat reserved for ex-presidents in PARLACEN, calling the body a “den of thieves.”

The inauguration was criticized by a number of PARLACEN members, some of whom booed and heckled while Moscoso was taking the oath. However, according to RCM cable TV news only Solidaridad members Mayín Correa and Elsy McKay dissented from the Panamanian delegation’s support for the former president’s decision to join the body. PRD PARLACEN deputy Carlos Duque denied that there is an agreement between the PRD and the Mireyistas by which neither political faction while in power will investigate the other when it is out of power. In El Panama America Duque defended his party’s support for Moscoso’s membership in PARLACEN as a matter of respect for the institution.

PARLACEN was created as part of a set of accords designed to end Central America’s bloody civil wars of the 1980s. At that time there was a palpable fear that former leaders of such countries as El Salvador and Guatemala could have been tried for the tens of thousands of death squad murders which they oversaw. Any thorough investigation aimed at such a prosecution, or of the Nicaraguan Contra War or of the dozens of disappearances in Honduras, would also have inevitably led to the US government, which at various junctures of the different conflicts played key roles in instigating, supplying, advising or covering up the violence.

Panama joined PARLACEN in large part because the talks that led to its creation took place on Contadora Island, with the Panamanian government playing the part of host and former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias in the Nobel Peace Prize-winning leadership role. Historically, culturally and economically, however, Panama has been much more of a South American than a Central American country.

With the Central American wars long ended and only Honduras now afflicted with significant death squad activities, PARLACEN shifted its role from a facilitator of peace among factions with blood on their hands to a political patronage plum, and it has frequently been used as a cover for ordinary criminal activity. Over the years a number of deputies have been caught in the commission of various crimes, and on two occasion the PARLACEN headquarters in Guatemala itself has been found to be the seat of drug trafficking rings.

Because of this sordid record, long before Costa Rica’s crackdown on political corruption led to the jailing of two former presidents, the Ticos pulled out of PARLACEN. Within the body itself there have been anti-corruption moves, including a proposal to eliminate deputies’ immunity. But to get rid of PARLACEN immunity each member country must approve and that measure failed because Panama was the lone holdout against it.

Under last year’s constitutional reforms, members of the Panamanian National Assembly could theoretically have their immunity stripped by the Supreme Court. However, the constitution is silent about PARLACEN, and legal experts are divided about whether the high court could similarly lift the veil of protection from members of that body. In any case, the present Supreme Court has been consistently pro-corruption and without a sea change in the political currents is unlikely to deny immunity to deputies of either the Panamanian or Central American legislatures.

Moscoso has had nothing to say about what she would like to accomplish as a member of PARLACEN, but that hardly makes her unique in the Panamanian delegation. The body doesn’t really do very much. To the extent that it has attempted to promote a Central American free trade area, Panama has declined to participate because this country produces all of the agricultural products that our Central American neighbors would like to sell us. The PARLACEN initiative to link the region’s national power grids --- actually an idea that comes from international energy companies --- has affected Panama to the extent that our electric lines are now connected to Costa Rica’s, but from the consumers’ point of view there has been little or no apparent effect.

Former President Guillermo Endara, the only Panamanian ex-president who declined to take a seat in PARLACEN, told El Panama America that “she [Moscoso] saddens me” and alleged in La Prensa that “what she’s looking for is immunity.”

That immunity would be very handy in light of investigations about the more than $1,000 per day in public funds that Mireya Moscoso used to buy clothing and jewelry for herself; the revelation that one of her secretaries kept tens of thousands of dollars in cash in her freezer; the diversion of Taiwanese aid for Panama’s public health care system and a children’s museum through a “private” foundation controlled by members of her inner circle; and the strange process by which she became owner of what had been the state-owned beach house at Punta Mala.

There is no word yet whether Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez will petition the Supreme Court to lift Moscoso’s immunity.

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Mireya takes PARLACEN immunity
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