Panama News Briefs

President Torrijos, whose public approval rating sank to just 21 percent at the height of the protests against the Social Security Fund reforms, got a 38.8 percent positive rating just a few weeks later. That means that although his post-inauguration honeymoon with the public is definitely over, he has recovered the approval of most of the people who voted for him in May of 2004 and of virtually all of the PRD hard core, which amounts to about one-third of the Panamanian electorate. The poll numbers were the results of surveys by Dichter & Neira, the Latin American affiliate of the Harris polling organization, which were commissioned and published by La Prensa. It appears that from the point of view of most Panamanians, the suspension of the controversial Law 17 was the right thing to do. The pollsters found 55 percent of those surveyed believing that the president's retreat on the unpopular law was not a sign of weakness and 69.1 percent perceived it as the correction of an error. On the down side for Torrijos, nearly two-thirds of those polled thought that corruption had not diminished under the administration of the man who ran for office on a "zero corruption" pledge.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNCESCO) has designated Coiba island and its surrounding reefs and islets as a World Heritage Site. Due to an ocean current running from Coiba to the Galapagos, and because the area has the largest reefs on the Pacific side of the Americas, it is both home to many unique marine species and biologically linked to another more famous World Heritage Site. The problem with Coiba is that the use of illegal fishing methods, overfishing in general and a growing coral poaching problem have been rapidly depleting the marine wildlife. The island itself is mostly forested but has been inhabited since ancient times (in recent decades only by a relatively small penal colony, which is now mostly closed), and is home to several animal species found nowhere else. During the Moscoso administration environmentalists were able to achieve a long-sought goal, the designation of Coiba and environs as a national park. That change, in turn, made the site eligible for UNESCO's designation.

Panama's anti-terrorist precautions are mostly subtle, as they should be in order to be effective. However, in the wake of al-Qaeda's recent London bombings there were more and more heavily armed police guards outside of embassies here, access to some areas close to the canal was more restricted and increased baggage inspections at Tocumen Airport raised the level of inconvenience for travelers. Without getting into the details, President Torrijos acknowledged as much to El Panama America. In 1994 Panama had a commuter plane bombing which remains unsolved, though it is known that the plastic explosives went off in the hands of a mysterious Mr. Jaffar, and we have had various attacks by the FARC guerrillas and AUC paramilitaries near our borders with Colombia over the years, but so far Panama has not been a major target for international terrorists. It probably helps that, unlike some of our neighbors in Central America, Panama has lent neither material nor diplomatic support to the war in Iraq. However, an attack that shut down the canal would both damage the US economy and demonstrate the destructive power of the perpetrators.

In what may have been her final major public speech as US ambassador to Panama, Linda E. Watt addressed the Panamanian Business Executives Association (APEDE) on July 14 and decried a political culture of impunity for corruption. Urging Panamanians to excise the "cancer" of corruption "once and for all," she pointed out the assistance that the American government has given to this country's justice system.

By a 5-4 decision the Supreme Court has filled a gap in the Moscoso-Torrijos constitutional reforms and apparently reversed several earlier decisions about legislative immunity. The magistrates held that the Attorney General can investigate alleged crimes by those who possess immunity as members of the National Assembly or the Central American Parliament (PARLACEN), but that the court must give its prior approval to any prosecution arising from such an investigation. Previously it was held that those with immunity couldn't even be investigated, and that when a crime involved both those with immunity and those without it, legislative immunity shielded non-legislator criminal accomplices from investigation or prosecution as well. The ruling means that the Public Ministry can proceed with several investigations, most prominently the probes of abuses of the secret presidential discretionary funds by former Presidents Ernesto Pérez Balladares and Mireya Moscoso, who received immunity as members of PARLACEN after finishing their presidential terms. But the court has yet to authorize prosecutions in the several cases involving those with legislative immunity that Gómez has submitted to the court.

Former Social Investment Fund director José Porta, who was forced to resign by the Torrijos administration, has been accused in complaint filed with prosecutors of demanding a $60,000 bribe of a surveyor who wanted to be paid for demarcating 16,000 lots in San Miguelito for the Banco Hipotecario Nacional as part of the Moscoso administration's pre-election program to hand out land titles to people who held land in the city by squatter's rights. Contacted by El Siglo about the matter, Porta said he doesn't respond to rumors.

In the ongoing scandal about the empty children's museum in Curundu, the Office of Patrimonial Responsibility (DRP) has ordered the seizure of former First Lady Ruby Moscoso de Young's assets, to the tune of $8.5 million in the Museo del Tucan case. Former President Mireya Moscoso's sister, in addition to serving as first lady she had headed the Fundacion Pro Educacion Integral de la Niñez y la Juventud, through which millions of dollars in aid from Taiwan had been funneled, mostly to evaporate as alleged administrative costs. Moscoso de Young, however, says that she has virtually no money in her bank accounts here to seize, and as these briefs were written the DRP had seized very little in the case.

Human remains found on Cerro Azul in 2001 and identified by the Public Ministry's DNA lab as those of Swiss banker Hans Jorg Bosch, who disappeared in 1998, were retested by Swiss authorities in Zurich when the remains were repatriated. The Swiss lab's conclusion was that the corpse was not Bosch's, and that has set off another controversy within the Institute of Legal Medicine. The first casualty was lab director Ives Monteza. It seems that by any measure the people who did the lab tests in Panama on the cadaver sent to Switzerland were unqualified to do DNA work, and beyond the lab director's removal that has led to various turf battles over what makes a person qualified. The Colegio Nacional de Laboratoristas Clinicas is asserting that only its members are qualified to work in the Public Ministry's DNA lab, and the Ministry of Health has pointed out that when the lab was created none of the techicians who were employed were certified by its Technical Board. Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez, who already has big problems finding qualified forensic specialists due to a purge at the Institute of Legal Medicine, may be obliged to rely on foreign DNA specialists until enough Panamanians can be educated to qualify for the positions at the DNA lab.

The Ministry of Economy and Finance has suspended 18 employees, including supervisors, at the Arraijan-Chorrera Autopista toll gate for an alleged long-running scam in which it is claimed that millions of dollars were lost. But although the ministry, after a sting operation, filed criminal charges against the 18 individuals, the following day an assistant prosecutor released them because no audit had been performed prior to the arrests. The investigation, however, continues. It is alleged that the slovenly drivers who routinely throw their receipts out the window immediately after passing through the toll gates played a key role in the scam. These tickets would be collected and recycled, with the money from the tolls they represent skimmed off of the proceeds paid to the government, increasing toll gate workers' income by some $25 per day. There is no word on any investigation about police complicity, although there are armed cops at the toll gate at all times, who have never been heard of to pull someone over for littering or for reporting what would have been a massive theft from the government happening before their eyes.

Former Foreign Minister José Raœl Mulino has been elected to replace Samuel Lewis Galindo, who resigned, as president of the Solidaridad party. The party came in second place in last year's presidential elections, but its standard bearer Guillermo Endara never joined the party and is now working to put a new party, Vanguardia Moral, on the ballot for the 2009 elections. Mulino said that talks aimed at a merger between Solidaridad and the Partido Liberal Nacional will continue, as will efforts to bring the Panameñistas into a united opposition bloc in the National Assembly.

A lawsuit impugning the January 16 Arnulfista Party convention at which the party changed its name to Panameñista and paved the way for Marco Ameglio to succeed Mireya Moscoso as its leader has been dismissed by the Electoral Tribunal. Some of the things that Ameglio has done since he took over the party leadership have also been challenged before the tribunal, but those cases are still pending.

The Electoral Tribunal has sentenced Benacio Sobenis and Aremio Gonz‡lez, the representante and his suplente respectively for the corregimiento of Boca del Monte in Chiriqui's San Lorenzo, to six months in jail. The two men were convicted of using $9,000 in public funds from the Social Investment Fund (FIS) to buy building materials that were passed out to buy votes.

Nine members of the Partido Popular have received sentences of six months in jail apiece for making a campaign swing through the Ngobe-Bugle Comarca in a government vehicle. The judgment was imposed by the Electoral Tribunal, more than a year after the activists were caught in the act in the campaign for the May 2004 elections.

An inventory at the Jose Domingo Obaldia Museum of History and Art in David has come up 242 pre-Columbian artifacts short. According to a National Institute of Culture (INAC) report obtained by La Prensa, some later pieces are also missing. As soon as the Moscoso administration left office in September of last year, citizens began to come forward with complaints that things were missing from the museum. Mostly the missing items are stone or ceramic works, as INAC's golden artifacts are kept at the gold room at the Reina Torres de Arauz Anthropology Museum in Panama City --- which was also looted in an inside job during the Moscoso administration. Most but not all of the objects stolen in the gold room theft were later recovered.

The little 17th century church in the Veraguas town of San Francisco, which contains priceless wooden furnishings, some made by the first generation of indigenous craftsmen to embrace Christianity, may finally get the restoration job it needs. The National Institute of Culture (INAC) has granted $205,000 for work on the church, which has been closed since 2000. Under the previous administration about half that amount was earmarked for the project, but the only work that was done was the partial removal of the roof, which led to water and sun damage to some of the church's furnishings. The foundation set up by the Moscoso administration to oversee the work has since been supplanted by a new foundation headed by the Catholic bishop of Santiago, Óscar Brown.

The decapitated and mutilated bodies of three Panamanian fishermen were found on July 8 in the mangroves along the Tocumen River, which is a favorite point of entry for Colombian drug runners. The smuggling route by speedboat is from Buenaventura to the poorly watched and hard to patrol mangrove swamp on the city's southwest side. The decapitations are the hallmark execution style of the right wing AUC paramilitaries, which derive most of their income from drug trafficking and have long maintained an organization in Panama. Authorities here are looking for five suspects and are operating under the assumption that the killings were about a cache of drugs that was left in the mangroves by drug traffickers for further shipment but then taken by third parties.

During the wee hours of July 11 one or more intruders broke into the premises on Colon's Calle 4 from which Radio Hit (105.3 FM) and Latin Hit (96.1 FM) are broadcast and vandalized radio equipment, computers and the stations' music library. A computer hard drive was stolen in the break-in. The stations are owned by Eduardo Fernández, a prominent Panameñista who served as deputy director of the Colon Free Zone during the Moscoso administration.

After a month and a half, prison authorities in Santiago have relented and allowed Reverend Víctor Atencio and the other members of his Catholic prison ministry back into the Santiago jail. The missionaries were excluded after they had spoken out in public about prisoners' complaints about abuses by the guards and their superiors.

Tuan Mu Wei Kai and Jing Gui Guo, the former captain and first mate of the Panamanian-flag Chinese freighter Well Pescadores, will be spending the next 20 years or so in a Panamanian prison. The two were convicted of throwing several Dominican stowaways into the Caribbean Sea in the course of a voyage from the Dominican Republic to the United States, resulting in the drowning deaths of two of the illegal passengers. Upon arrival in the United States the captain, first mate and several crew members were detained by American authorities, but when it was determined that the crime took place on the high seas aboard a Panamanian ship, they were sent here to be tried. A third crew member was acquitted by the jury.

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