Panama News Briefs

Rogelio Harris, the head of the Judicial Technical Police’s narcotics unit, is under arrest for drug trafficking. According to La Prensa, Harris’s name turned up in address books and phone records seized in an earlier drug bust, setting into motion an investigation that led to a drug seizure and the linking of Harris with the contraband.

The magistrates of the Supreme Court of Justice have chosen Graciela Dixon as the tribunal’s presiding judge for the next year. It was a five to four vote in a contest against Aníbal Salas, with the votes breaking down mostly but not entirely along the lines of those appointed by PRD presidents (except for Arturo Hoyos) voting for Dixon and those appointed by Arnulfistas (except for Adán Arnulfo Arjona) supporting Salas. Dixon first came to the court as a leftist political independent appointed by Ernesto Pérez Balladares, but her legal thinking has tended to be fairly conventional and she has been a defender of an extensive concept of parliamentary immunity and the various unpopular perquisites that judges and other public officials enjoy.

US President George W. Bush will be in Panama on November 6 and 7, after he attends a November 3-5 hemispheric summit in Mar de Plata, Argentina. The last time that a US president visited here was in 1992, when George H. W. Bush thought to make a triumphal election year visit to the scene of his smashing military victory. But protesters, including then-legislator Balbina Herrera, greeted him in Plaza Porras and the police fired tear gas, which the wind carried back to the speakers’ podium. Bush the elder was whisked away, but not before politically damaging video footage of him wiping the gas out of his tearful eyes went out to TV sets around the world. This time Balbina says times have changed and she’ll be civil to Bush the younger. However, Panama’s leftists vow to stage protests on the occasion of next month’s visit.

Colombia’s civil warfare has, with brief pauses, been ongoing since the days of Simón Bolívar. The recent “peace process” in that country has been essentially a process of granting amnesty to the right-wing United Self-Defense of Colombia (AUC) paramilitaries aligned with the government. However, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has now opened the possibility of talks with the two left-wing rebel groups that have been fighting the government, freeing a jailed leader of the smaller guerrilla army, the National Liberation Army (ELN), as a goodwill gesture. Talks with the larger Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) seem less likely at this time. But President Torrijos has offered the use of Panamanian territory for peace talks between the Bogota government and the guerrillas if that will help matters. Panama has occasionally been attacked in spillovers of our neighbors’ conflict --- most often in recent years by the AUC paramilitary --- but our traditional policy is neutrality in Colombia’s internal conflicts. (In fact one of the basic reasons for Panama’s separation from Colombia in 1903 was to remove this country from the cycle of political violence.) Venezuela has also offered to host peace talks, but so far the government and rebels have not offered to sit down and negotiate in any locale.

You shouldn’t have such a sense of impunity when speeding past the linces. Those guys on the motorcycles with machine guns whose main job is rapid response to violent crimes just might be among those who have been trained to deal with traffic offenses. For many years only Transito police could enforce traffic laws, and in turn the traffic cops were not authorized to chase down robbers who drove by at a lawful speed and otherwise observing the traffic regulations. But now under the new National Police director Rolando Mirones the officers who walk the beats and respond to crimes are being trained to deal with traffic issues as well and are being given ticket books. So now it’s not just the true desperados who need fear the linces, but also people who drive like maniacs.

Government and Justice Minister Héctor Alemán has announced the government’s attention to merge two of its law enforcement agencies, the National Maritime Service (SMN) and the National Air Service (SAN), which are more or less the autonomous sea and air branches of the National Police. The program is being strongly criticized, however, in particular by former President Guillermo Endara, under whose post-invasion administration these forces were organized. According to Endara what the Torrijos administration proposes to do is unconstitutional. Alemán is defending the merger as a way to strengthen the law enforcement nature of these forces, which he argues would become analogous to a navy and an air force if allowed to develop apart from one another and the police.

The deaths of three members of the Servicio Maritimo Nacional (SMN --- Panama’s coast guard on August 14 during the international Panamax 2005 naval maneuvers has resulted in disciplinary actions for negligence against three SMN officers. Two were demoted and one was suspended for 30 days without pay for the accident, which took place in the course of a practice assault on Isla Huacha, a small island in Gatun Lake. The assailants were supposed to disembark in shallow water, wade ashore and retake the island from mock terrorists who were holding it. However, where Omar Durán, Luis Pérez Becerra and Jackson Angulo got the order to jump off the boat in full combat gear the water was 20 feet deep instead of the expected three feet and the men sank to the bottom and drowned.

Dalvis Xiomara Sánchez, the presidential secretary in the Moscoso administration who notoriously complained of more than $38,000 in cash being stolen from the freezer in her kitchen, is the beneficiary of a controversial court decision blocking a criminal investigation for inexplicable enrichment while working for the government. However, the Comptroller General’s Office of Patrimonial Responsibility (DRP) is investigating her for a possible civil forfeiture. The “durodollars lady” says that the money was her life’s savings from working at the old Howard Air Force Base, which she kept in the freezer because she doesn’t believe in banks. Her ex-husband, however, told El Panama America that there were no such savings --- but he facetiously allowed the possibility that maybe she had an oil well in the patio. Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez says that depending on what the DRP probe finds she may move to reopen the criminal investigation.

Legislator Franz Wever (PRD-Panama City) has this understanding attitude about firearms crimes. After all, as a taxi syndicate leader he was known for pulling guns in union meetings where he encountered opposition from dissidents. So maybe it should be no surprise that his government-paid driver, Edilberto Batista, was arrested along with three other men for trafficking AK-47 assault rifles, Wever announced that he would pay for the man’s legal defense. Wever was declared the winner of a close legislative race last year in which the number of votes cast did not match the number of votes reported in the vote count, and in which it was alleged that Wever bought votes at the polls. The Electoral Prosecutor asked the assembly to lift Wever’s immunity so that he could be prosecuted for vote buying, but his colleagues refused that request. The discrepancy in vote totals and possible effect of vote buying never got before the Electoral Tribunal because under the law to challenge an election result the aggrieved party must show complete proof not only of irregularities but that these definitely affected the result of the election --- there are no recounts or investigations that can lead to changed election results in this country. Batista is the fourth legislative employee jailed this year. Three others were busted while selling heroin out of one of the legislature’s vehicles.

Amael Acosta, a Chiriqui civil engineer who had been a fugitive for seven months since the death of a 19-year-old prostitute in the course of a sex and drugs orgy on the 17th floor of the Plaza Paitilla Inn, turned himself in to authorities on October 5 and is being held in preventative detention as the criminal investigation proceeds. The woman fell, jumped or was thrown from a balcony and was later run over by a car in an attempt to feign a traffic accident. The decedent’s body was quickly cremated and the initial police and forensic pathology investigations were interfered with to the extent that it may never be possible to establish with any degree of certainty precisely how the death occurred. The deputy director of the PTJ at the time and the medical questioner involved have been fired and are facing criminal investigations for a suspected cover-up. It seems likely that Acosta will at the minimum be charged for orchestrating an attempted cover-up and may face charges of homicide or providing cocaine to the dead woman.

Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, who fled to Japan to escape investigations and prosecution for various alleged crimes while leader of Peru, is, along with his top advisor and spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos, the target of Peruvian and Panamanian probes about the movement of money derived alleged corruption through banks in this country. Fujimori has now formally waived his banking privacy under Panamanian law, which means that information about any accounts that are in his name here can be released to Peru’s government. But the head of the Peruvian Attorney General’s financial crimes unit, Walter Hoflich, says it’s a meaningless gesture because any accounts he would have used here would be in other people’s names.

Seven inmates were injured, two suffering serious stab wounds in the chest, in a disturbance on the afternoon of October 10. The Chorrera jail is one of the country’s worst, in a nation where the norm for places of incarceration is internationally notorious overcrowding.

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