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The self-styled "Rector Magnífico" has made the most unusual gesture of naming a university street after himself. Photo by Eric Jackson

García de Paredes, increasingly on the defensive, lashes out at Bernal

by Eric Jackson

University of Panama rector Gustavo García de Paredes, facing ever more questions as claims asserted in his publicity counter-offensive with respect to a false diploma scandal, has had the General University Council that he controls declare law professor Miguel Antonio Bernal “persona non grata” on campus.

This past May, after a leak from someone inside the university administration, Dr. Bernal, a tenured professor with the law faculty for some 30 years, filed a criminal complaint with the Public Ministry (which is headed by an old student of his, Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez about the issuance of an accounting degree to one Humberto Alcázar, a student and supporter of the rector on the university’s Academic Council who was about a year short of the required classes to qualify for a diploma. In the days following the complaint’s filing, the rector took several defensive measures:

·        Using the disturbances over the Seguro Social reforms as an excuse, he closed the university such that when prosecutors arrived at the secretary general’s office in search of documents related to the case, it was locked. It later turned out that a number of relevant papers had disappeared from the university files

·        He sent the university’s lawyers to the Supreme Court to challenge the Public Ministry’s power to investigate the false diploma scandal, citing university autonomy. High court magistrate Esmeralda de Troitiño accepted the case for consideration before a panel, but rejected the university’s motion to quash the prosecutors’ investigation.

·        He appointed a committee, headed by law school dean Rolando Murgas Torraza, to conduct an in-house investigation of the matter.

·        He blasted Bernal and other critics, alleging that they were waging an underhanded campaign to discredit the university.

·        Mainly via subordinates, he set in motion a public relations damage control campaign centered around two key claims that the Alcázar case was an isolated incident and that in any case the diploma that was created to the student was never issued.

The Murgas commission’s report was issued in early June, but not made public for some three months. In the meantime, Bernal submitted further proofs of possible improper diplomas to prosecutors.

The Murgas report “exonerated” García de Paredes (who was one of the people who signed the diploma in question) but found that the university’s secretary general, Ónfala de De Bello, who is also a professor with the business administration and accounting faculty, had intentionally falsified the diploma in question and had lied to the commission about her role in the affair. The report, apparently anticipating some of the other proofs and claims Bernal had submitted to the Public Ministry, noted that files of four other students with diplomas that had been questioned were withheld by the university administration, which claimed that granting access to the files would be a violation of privacy. The Murgas commission also found that there had been removal and destruction of documents. A copy of the report was forwarded to the Public Ministry.

Based on the report, de De Bello resigned as secretary general but was allowed by the rector to remain a member of the faculty. Alcázar was suspended from school for two years. In addition, García de Paredes called for two more investigations: one to find out who leaked word of the scandal to journalists and anti-corruption activists and one to investigate the validity of Bernal’s own university degrees.

The rector’s lenience with the guilty and vindictiveness toward whistle blowers looked bad enough, but probably more damaging was the unraveling of part of cover stories spun in the early days of the controversy. It turns out that not only was the unearned diploma in fact issued to Alcázar, but he had used it to enroll as a graduate student at another university. The Murgas commission flatly rejected the administration’s claim that for many years there had been a practice of creating diplomas before they had been earned, and that there were hundreds of unissued or unclaimed certificates in university files by virtue of long-standing clerical procedures.

The assertion that more than 900 diplomas dated back for many years were innocently kept on hand was spun in many directions. It was interpreted by some, including the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs, that there were this many fraudulent diplomas. Others were more cautious, but noticed that a cache of hundreds of diploma forms dating back for decades would be very convenient for one running a fraudulent diplomas for sale business.

In mid-September the Murgas report made its way onto the Internet, spread in part by Bernal himself. In a public relations counter-offensive, the rector caused the administration’s in-house tabloid El Universitario to publish a flattering panegyric of himself. In recounting García de Paredes’s lifetime of accomplishments, it was stated in that article that the rector had earned his licenciatura (equivalent of a US bachelor’s degree) in 1962 and his doctorate in 1963.

Whereupon Federico Ardila, a former university professor, noted that the doctoral degree that the rector claims requires two years of classes, followed by the writing and defense of a dissertation, and demanded that García de Paredes explain how he could have earned a doctorate in only one year. Added university professor Luis E. Murillo in a column on the liberation theology CARITAS-Panama website, “apparently the boasted-of ‘doctorate’ of Gustavo García de Paredes, like the ‘doctorate’ of [former President] Pérez Balladares, is a fake degree.”

On September 27, the day after Ardila’s observations and questions were published in El Panama America, the rector gave his answer: not a word about his own suspect degree, but instead a declaration by the General University Council that Bernal is a “persona non grata” at the university.

The council voted 72-1, with five abstentions, against Bernal. The one opposing vote was by former Supreme Court magistrate and law professor Edgardo Molino Mola and Murgas being one of the five abstentions. The resolution, based upon allegedly “disrespectful” statements made about the rector and the state of the university, had no binding effect, though it might now be used as “proof” in a move to fire Bernal.

However, the attack set off a storm of contrary opinions, including a couple of opinion columns defending Bernal in La Prensa, which in its news coverage has been consistently supportive of García de Paredes and hostile to Bernal. (The rector is a prominent member of the PRD, and these days La Prensa is controlled by an alliance of PRD and Partido Popular supporters.)

The scandal took on international dimensions, with the Council on Hemispheric Affairs again commenting on the diploma scandal and the measures against Bernal, and citing them as an example of the PRD government’s unwillingness to face up to corruption. In response to this, Panama’s ambassador to the United States and former La Prensa publisher Federico Humbert wrote to the council that “I find it inappropriate to elevate the diploma issue to the level of a national problem that ‘further mires the Torrijos government in corruption charges.’ COHA’s research associate considered this statement to be of such importance to use it as the title for the report while not mentioning a single word in the whole document returning to those other ‘corruption charges.’ Leaving aside this out-of-context issue, one has to ask what relationship exists between the investigation of allegedly false diplomas in the University of Panama and the Torrijos Administration. None, I have to say.”

(What Humbert didn't acknowledge in his argument is that just as this false diploma scandal broke last May and June, the PRD-controlled National Assembly passed and President Torrijos signed legislation increasing the University of Panama rector's powers, including by giving him the right to fire professors who criticize him, notwithstanding any considerations of tenure.)

Bernal, for his part, filed a complaint with the nation’s ombudsman, alleging an assault on academic freedom. Another citizen, one Luis Fidel Narváez R., filed a complaint with the Public Ministry, alleging that the 72 General University Council members who voted to censure Bernal had in so doing committed the crime of exceeding their legal authority.

Despite many shows of support from various segments of society for Bernal, most of the University of Panama faculty has remained silent about the controversy and the campus radicals have taken up neither the causes of university corruption nor the persecution of Bernal. It does seem that the rector has a strong grip on the university and few are as willing as Bernal to challenge him.

But meanwhile, the prosecutors’ investigations continue and people whom the Murgas report exonerated have been called to the Public Ministry for questioning.