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The violent death of the attractive young mother of a four-year-old boy after a sex orgy involving young men from prominent families at the Plaza Paitilla Inn would ordinarily be the carrion upon which this country's sensationalist tabloids feed. The alleged participation of the deputy director of the Judicial Technical Police (PTJ) in a cover-up of the incident, however, has put the incident at the top of the front pages of the country's more respectable mainstream dailies.

Suspended from his post and fighting in court to keep his job is PTJ deputy director Erick Bravo, whom Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez accuses of doctoring investigative reports in order to suppress the names of some of the men who were at the party on the 17th floor of the Plaza Paitilla Inn. Behind bars pending an investigation that's ever more pointing toward the theory that the death was a homicide is Yanibe Sarmiento, the alleged procurer of the sexual services of the several women at the party. On the run from police is Chiriqui civil engineer Amael Acosta Díaz, whom witnesses placed along with Sarmiento as having been at the scene when the deceased woman was last seen alive.

Found dead alongside the hotel on the morning of March 5 was 19-year-old Vanessa Márquez.

Because medical examiners arrived late with an order to conserve her remains the body was cremated before a thorough autopsy could be performed, so all of the medical evidence that the detectives have to go on to determine the cause of her death are photos of the cadaver, the results of the toxicologist's blood sample tests and the findings of a number of other examinations. The cause of death was identified as a head injury, with the working hypotheses being that she fell, jumped or was thrown from the hotel's 17th floor balcony, she was beaten to death or she was hit by a car.

The body had tire tracks to indicate a driver-pedestrian accident, and grass was found in the decedent's clothing, but it appears that those were the hallmarks of a post-mortem staging designed to obscure the true cause of death.

Investigators are tending toward the homicide theory because the post-mortem photos showed bruises to the hands and neck consistent with those caused in an altercation. Toxicology results indicated traces of cocaine and marijuana in the body and a small amount of marijuana was found with the corpse, but it doesn't seem likely that this was a drug overdose case. The examination that was done before the body was cremated also indicated sexual activity.

In the course of the evening, it has been widely reported by way of leaks from official investigations to various of the mainstream media, Ms. Márquez became distraught.

Several of those present at the party told police that Acosta Díaz attempted to orchestrate the stories that they told to police, and that, along with his being identified as one of the two persons last seen with Márquez before she died, is the reason why fingers of suspicion have been pointed at him.

That part of the cover-up, if it was that, turns out to be a relatively minor detail. The real bombshell came when the attorney general announced that she had filed a petition with the Supreme Court to remove PTJ deputy director Erick Bravo from his post, because he had manipulated the investigation in order to exclude any mention of the presence of two young men from prominent families, who happen to be married, from the record of the investigation.

(These men have been named in several other media, along with some but not all of the other men who were at the party. Two lawyers whose names were mentioned then took out full-page ads in the dailies to protest their innocence and complain of the unfairness of news reports mentioning them. Because at this point none of these men, other than Acosta Díaz, are the subject of formal charges or arrest warrants, The Panama News sees no compelling reason to identify them. On the other hand, we see the possibility that entirely innocent third parties could be harmed as a reason not to name other men or women who were at the party.)

The deceased woman's mother is furious, not only about her daughter's death but also because the young woman's name has been the subject of headlines in lurid published accounts of a sex and drugs orgy, while it appears that the men for whose entertainment that event was staged have enjoyed the protection of corrupt cops and news editors with hypocritical double standards. She has vowed to publicize the names of every man who participated in the festivities at the hotel that night.

Meanwhile, and of far more consequence from the public policy perspective, Bravo's removal has prompted a number of other PTJ detectives and inspectors to come forward to Enrique Montenegro's National Anti-Corruption Front with a litany of complaints about corruption and abuses in their institution. That story, which became the lead article in the March 16 edition of El Panama America, included allegations by a group of unnamed, some said to be police veterans with more than 20 years of service, that the PTJ has been "prostituted and politicized" by successive administrations; that bribery and favoritism run rampant; that innocent people have been incarcerated as the result of PTJ corruption; and that people without any police training have been hired by the institution.

The PTJ is a strange legal hybrid, created in 1990 after the US invasion, which is part of the Public Ministry but whose directors are hired and fired by the Supreme Court rather than the Attorney General. In his decade as attorney general, Gómez's predecessor José Antonio Sossa repeatedly demanded full control over the institution and managed to get the high court to accept his power to fire top PTJ officials after they accused him of corruption. One of the highlights --- if you care to look at it that way --- of the Sossa regime was a televised guns-drawn confrontation between Sossa's bodyguards and those of the PTJ director of the time, Alejandro Moncada, when Sossa went down to the institution's headquarters in Ancon to secure the release of a drug suspect who happened to be the son of one of his friends. In keeping with its pro-corruption reputation, the Supreme Court agreed that Sossa had the right to fire Moncada for insubordination.

Thus what would ordinarily have been just another lurid tabloid tale of sex and death has turned into part of an unfolding drama about corruption in the nation's legal system.

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