The political parties in the National Assembly have agreed to suspend the members’ privilege to import duty-free automobiles after a rash of cases in which it appears that they transferred their tax breaks to Panama City luxury car dealers. The practice has prompted rebukes from the Catholic church, President Torrijos, and a wide spectrum of civic, business and professional groups. Two political parties, the Partido Liberal Nacional and Solidaridad, are investigating members of their legislative caucuses for participating in the scam and may expel those people from their ranks. Assembly president Jerry Wilson, though claiming that the circumstances of what’s going on are “not very clear,” says the next legislative session will take up a proposal to eliminate the much-criticized tax breaks.

Cirilio González, a superior prosecutor who reviewed files from lower-ranking colleagues to recommend whether and how cases should be pursued or dropped, has been fired and arrested after soliciting and taking a $500 payoff to let a prisoner out of jail pending trial. The case is one of a string of prosecutions and disciplinary actions taken by Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez against the widespread corruption in the Public Ministry over which she assumed control at the beginning of this year. Scandals like these may be one reason why in all newspaper photos and television reports that feature Gómez her face bears this dour expression.

The security director for the nation’s prison system, Ricardo Apú, is now himself a prisoner after being caught taking a $2,000 bribe from the family of a man incarcerated at La Joyita Penitentiary near Tinajitas to the much less hellish El Renacer near Gamboa. The transaction took place at the National Bus Terminal in Albrook and was recorded by undercover agents with the cooperation of the family that was shaken down for the payment.

Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez has fired Chiriqui superior prosecutor Edwin Alvarez for sexually harassing a woman who works at the Public Ministry and several female students to whom he teaches university law classes.

It’s round two between Winston Spadafora and Jean Marcel Chéry. Recall that the latter and a colleague were accused of criminal defamation by the former in 2001, when they reported on the construction of a road in La Arenosa that served the farms of Spandafora, then Minister of Government and Justice, and then Comptroller General Alvin Weeden. The courts found that that the story was true and thus acquitted the two journalists of calumnia (publishing something false) but convicted them of injuria (publishing something true but unflattering) and gave them one-year prison sentences. Ultimately Mireya Moscoso pardoned them along with about 70 other journalists, including the editor of The Panama News, on one of her last days in office. This time Chéry wrote a story about how Spadafora, now a Supreme Court magistrate, cancelled Spadafora’s friend Jean Figali’s debt to ARI for back rent on the Figali Convention Center. Not the facts reported were wrong, but Spadafora thinks that it ought to be the crime of injuria to write a true story about actions in public office that make a magistrate appear to be partial and corrupt and says he’ll press charges in the matter. Periodistas Frente a la Corrupcion, a Latin American journalists’ group based in El Salvador, is leading an international defense of Chéry and complaints against Spadafora have been lodged with the Organization of American States.

Mercedes Grimaldo de Araúz, who gained a reputation as the honest and energetic understudy to the sordidly pro-corruption former Attorney General José Antonio Sossa, has been elected to head the nation’s bar association, the Colegio de Abogados. The head of the Ethics and Dignity slate, the former deputy attorney general won the race to succeed Carlos Vásquez Reyes by better than a two to one margin.

An internal investigation by a group of University of Panama faculty members has found more than 900 diplomas with various irregularities on at the school registrar’s office, in addition to the infamous one improperly granted to Humberto Alcázar. The diploma that Alcázar was issued without having taken the classes required to qualify for it was, according to the 18-page faculty report, the product of deliberate administrative misconduct. The university’s secretary general Onfala López de De Bello has been sent on vacation for the duration of the controversy. But rector Gustavo García de Paredes claims that it’s all a matter of minor clerical errors that have been corrected being used in a campaign to discredit the university. (Errors such as the signatures of several university officials, including the rector’s, on Alcázar’s diploma.) As these briefs were being prepared, El Panama America reported that after a contentious meeting of the Disciplinary Committee of the University Council, it was recommended that López de De Bello be demoted from secretary general but kept on as a professor and that Alcázar be suspended from the university for two years. Under a recently passed law, the final decision on these matters will be up to García de Paredes despite his own misconduct in the case in question. Meanwhile, however, prosecutors are continuing a criminal investigation of the matter and lawyers for the university have been in court trying to get that outside probe quashed.

The ruins of Panama Viejo, a Spanish colonial city that was founded by Pedrarias the Cruel on the site of an indigenous settlement that was at least 1,000 years old but abandoned after Henry Morgan’s 1670 assault and much later engulfed by modern Panama City’s urban sprawl, are put at risk by the vibrations and pollution from the traffic along Via Cincuentenario, which runs through the old city. The ruins are one of this country’s tourist attractions and a symbol of the Panamanian nation, but Via Cincuentenario is an important city thoroughfare. The government has thus decided that it will build a bypass around the ruins, and in the meantime install a few traffic lights and pedestrian crossings to allow visitors to get from one side of the road to another without risking their lives.

President Torrijos has vetoed legislation that would have merged the state-owned Radio Nacional and Canal Once, and mandated their use to broadcast National Assembly sessions. Canal Once, once the University of Panama’s educational station, has over the years degenerated into a propaganda organ of the faction in power at any given time, and was severely looted of equipment and funds during the Moscoso administration. Radio Nacional has a somewhat better reputation, but is also something of a political patronage electronic dumping ground. The president, who is already criticized for alleged moves to control the nation’s news media, found the proposal to more forthrightly politicize public broadcasting unpalatable.

Prosecutors here, acting at the Peruvian government’s request, have frozen 38 bank accounts through which the proceeds of political corruption amassed by Peru’s former spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos were laundered in Panama. It seems that delays by Panamanian authorities in taking actions requested by Peru allowed the money to be shifted out of several of the accounts. There are possibilities of more searchers farther down the money trail and money laundering prosecutions here.

On August 8 police and prosecutors seized more than a ton and one-half of marijuana, smaller quantities of heroin and cocaine, a rifle and ammunition for it, two trucks and four men (two Panamanians and two Colombians) in the Pacora area. Police are looking for a fifth man who fled when the trucks were stopped and prosecutors allege that this was a shipment of drugs by Colombia’s leftist FARC rebels that came in by sea to the mangrove swamps on Panama City’s east side and was intended to be forwarded to markets in North America or Europe.

The buzzword of the moment is “anti-terrorist,” but the military maneuvers in which the navies or coast guards of the United States, Panama, Canada, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Mexico and Peru are currently conducting in Panama’s Pacific waters are similar to war games held in other years for such proffered purposes as canal defense or the War on Drugs. Basically it’s a chance for naval officers to mingle with their counterparts in other countries, the hemisphere’s arms suppliers to indirectly show off their products to potential buyers and for allies to standardize procedures in case some crisis actually does require coordinated inter-American naval action. The Panama News has learned that during these maneuvers American sailors will pitch in to do repairs and improvements at a local public elementary school. Panama has no navy as such, but the National Maritime Service (SMN), a branch of the National Police, serves as our coast guard.

Santo Tomas Hospital has run out of anti-retroviral drugs that can delay the onset of AIDS in a patient infected with the HIV virus or extend the life of a person suffering with AIDS. According to a report in La Prensa some 350 patients haven’t received their medication for up to three months. It seems that the problem is not so much the hospital’s chronic budget shortfall as it is bureaucratic delays in ordering the necessary drugs.

National Assembly president Jerry Wilson, a former magistrate on the Supreme Court, believes that one of the things that ought to be done to reform our discredited justice system is to lengthen the terms of high court magistrates, which are now set at 10 years. When he said that some of the mainstream media reported that he wanted to extend the terms of the current magistrates, a misinterpretation that prompted widespread criticism, given that in the eyes of most Panamanians the current Supreme Court is a collection of crooks. Longer terms for magistrates is one traditional way to insulate the courts from political pressures. But even when Wilson’s suggestion is taken as it was made, public lack of confidence in the courts in general leads many Panamanians to reject it out of hand.

Comptroller Dani Kuzniecky, investigating his own office and actions, has concluded that Lauren Haydee Santa María Quijada, the wife of PRD legislator Leandro Avila, was not a no-show employee after all. After returning to work from an extended leave last January, it was found, she had been assigned (without any written record thereof) as the Comptroller’s liaison with the National Assembly and thus legitimately earned her paychecks even though she didn’t work at the Comptroller General’s office on Avenida Balboa. When Santa María Quijada’s government job status was questioned, she resigned. She had worked in the Comptroller General’s office for many years, well before her husband was elected to the legislature last year.

The Olympic Committee of Panama (COP) has cut most of the team it had intended to send to the Bolivarian Games in Colombia after the government denied it a subsidy. The long-standing problem is the COP sends too many “dignitaries” and not enough athletes to international events, and the non-athletes tend to run up exaggerated expenses. The response has been the government’s refusal to pay for this, and the result is that instead of 94 individuals representing 14 sports, a 28-member delegation that includes 18 athletes from four sports will go to the games, with the possibility that several other sports might find independent funding and send more athletes. We’re sending a 12-member basketball team, two swimmers, a three-member judo team and a fencer, plus ten coaches, officials and dignitaries. Cut out are the baseball and softball teams, boxers, bowlers, runners, wrestlers, billiards players and most of the fencers. It is likely that the triathletes and the tae kwon do team will find independent funding and send athletes to the games sometime after the opening ceremony, and that some of the sports that have been cut might come up with last-minute support to do likewise. The crisis came when Comptroller General Dani Kuzniecky audited the state subsidies for the COP delegation to the 2000 and 2004 Olympiads and found improprieties such as liquor purchases with public funds that he said legally prevent him from allowing the COP or its long-time president Melitón Sánchez from handling public funds, and because of that refused to sign off on the Bolivarian Games subsidy.

After several weeks under house arrest while he was being treated for medical problems, former Banco Nacional de Panama chief Bolívar Pariente has been sent back to jail, this time in El Renacer near Gamboa, to await trial on a series of charges related to the bank’s financing of the Prados del Este housing development that was built in a flood plain and controlled by his relatives. Several people died in the inevitable flood and the development is slated to be razed.

What’s a corrupt public official to do when the law clearly states that he can’t get a public concession from the department for which he works? According to a report in El Panama America, one way around this pesky little regulation is for the official to set up a front company in the name of his uncle’s maid. Such was allegedly the case when in 2000 the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MICI) granted a sand mining concession to a company named Euro Travel SA, whose directors include domestic worker Candelaria Espinoza Sánchez. She worked for the uncle of David Quintero, the latter a member of the Escalona-García clan that infested the Moscoso administration and at the time a sub-director at MICI. Ms. Espinosa also was a director of a company named Reno Transport SA, which obtained a stone quarrying concession in the former Canal Zone from the Moscoso administration. The Torrijos administration has moved to cancel these mining concessions, alleging that Espinosa was merely a front person for Quintero, who is a beneficial owner of Euro Travel and Reno Transport, which were therefore ineligible for MICI concessions under such conflict of interest laws as Panama has. Quintero, of course, denies any wrongdoing.

National Police Lieutenant César Emilio Reyes, 35, is in custody after shooting a 25-year-old Colombian woman who worked in a local nightclub in the head with his police-issue nine-millimeter pistol. The crime took place in a room at a Calidonia hotel not far from The Panama News office, and a few hours after the shooting Reyes turned himself in.

Prosecutors have petitioned Panama province’s Second Justice Tribunal to allow them to proceed in absentia against Carlos Meneses Lambis, a fugitive from justice, in the cases of three women who were slain in 2003 and 2004. Meneses Lambis is also suspected in a series of forcible rapes.

The Torrijos administration is apparently taking the position that the government has the right to take the children of illegal immigrants, or of Panamanians who can’t prove their citizenship, away from their parents. According to a report in El Panama America, María Isabel Pineda, a young woman who lives in Ipeti and who is not registered as a Panamanian citizen in the Registro Civil, gave birth to a son at San Miguel Arcangel Hospital in San Miguelito, and because the child had a birth defect he was transferred to the Hospital del Niño for an operation. After the child recovered from the surgery the hospital refused to release him to his mother because of her lack of a cedula, and instead turned the baby over to the juvenile court, which in turn place him in the Hogar Malambo orphanage. The government’s separation of a child from his parents because the latter are or may be illegal aliens is a violation of several international treaties to which Panama is a signatory, most notably the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. But the Hospital del Niño says it won’t turn a baby over to a parent or alleged parent who can’t show ID, and thus it’s a mess for the courts to sort out. Meanwhile, since the mother can’t produce a cedula a birth certificate has not been issued for the child, and that’s a violation of the Panamanian constitution insofar as every person born here is supposed to be recognized as a Panamanian citizen, but the son is being deprived of that right due to his mother’s apparently illegal status.

Usually a fish kill along one of Panama’s rivers indicates some sort of contamination, either an inadvertent or reckless agricultural or industrial spill or the deliberate use of poison to catch fish or shrimp. But the recent massive deaths of shrimp and fish along the lower parts of the Bayano and Mamoni rivers in Chepo district don’t seem to fit those profiles. For one thing, the things that died were all Pacific salt water species farther up the estuary than they are usually found, while the rivers’ fresh water fish and shrimp were not affected. The National Environmental Authority (ANAM) is investigating the incidents to try to find out the cause, but as this issue of The Panama News was uploaded there were no clear answers.

It’s rainy season and, although the storms generally get more intense in the last few months of the year, we’re getting the occasional gully washer. On July 20 the storms across much of the country were severe, resulting in the drownings of a 22-year-old man who when the Clarita River overflowed its banks in Yape, Darien and a 37-year-old man who was swept away in a city drainage ditch in Santiago, Veraguas.

It appears that negotiations have been successful and that in October special conventions of the Solidaridad and Liberal Nacional parties will vote to merge their political parties into one. Although Solidaridad can claim to be the nation’s second-largest party on the basis of its showing in the 2004 presidential voting, its standard bearers in that election were not and are not party members and judged by the number of registered members or its eight-member legislative caucus it’s one of the country’s minor political forces. The Partido Liberal Nacional is even smaller, with a three-member caucus in the National Assembly that’s likely to go down to two as internal proceedings are underway to expel Kuna Yala deputy Rogelio Alba from the party for corruption.

Three actors for a pornographic film that was being shot in the Arraijan corregimiento of Veracruz, who were jailed earlier this year for allegedly corrupting minors by working in such a manner that kids could see them, have been released from jail. The director and producer remains behind bars. The accused say that minors were not allowed to see what was going on and that public authorities had been informed of the film production and had issued all of the necessary permits, but the mayor of Arraijan called in the police for political reasons.

It’s generally not a good idea to bring members of rival gangs into the same court at the same time. On July 19 this was done at the courthouse into which part of the old Gorgas Hospital has been converted to house the Supreme Court and several lower tribunals. The event was a trial of 13 inmates accused of taking part in a mass jailbreak, and as the accused included members of gangs that hate one another a prison riot broke out in the court. During the fracas a table was thrown and several people were injured.

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