Panama News Briefs

The first wave was the suspension of drug prosecutor Rosendo Miranda, for the sale of 40 head of cattle belonging to a jailed Colombian drug suspect. Miranda denied all wrongdoing and submitted his resignation, taking out full-page ads in the daily newspapers to protest his innocence and blast Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez for persecuting him. But now the procuradora's investigation of the anti-drug prosecutors has uncovered what has been public knowledge for years, that assets commonly disappear in drug investigations. As in a preliminary audit that found that over the past decade some $50 million in assets were seized, but only $7 million of these were delivered to the CONAPRED anti-drug commission as required by law. El Panama America reports that the other anti-drug prosecutor, Patricio Candanedo, is also under investigation. It appears that further audits and investigations of a number of specific cases will keep this old situation in the news for some time to come and it's not clear at this time whose heads may roll.

In the Panamanian legal system, neither the constitution nor rules of criminal procedure contemplate the right of a defendant to confront his or her accuser as is the tradition in the United States. But there still is a right to a trial, a guarantee that is delayed for years for many defendants for many reasons. One of the most commonly cited excuses for slow justice here is the lack of resources to transport inmates from the prisons to the courts and guard them on such excursions. Now some of that may be alleviated as a program to conduct trials via closed circuit video links between the courts and the prisons is getting underway. The first jailhouse electronic courtroom is at La Joya Penitentiary near Tinajitas.

It's not that he's soft on cattle rustlers, the president wants you to know. However, President Torrijos did veto a law to stiffen penalties for agricultural theft. The problem, he said, was with piecemeal changes to the Penal Code, which he says needs an overall revision. A presidential commission with a mandated to draft a proposed new code of criminal laws that both addresses the inconsistencies in the current one and sets up a more rational set of penalties will be appointed shortly.

Police cordoned off the University of Panama shortly before US President George W. Bush came to town, and the day after he left when it reopened the campus radicals took to the streets with rocks and molotov cocktails to protest the arrests of two students who had tried to break through the earlier cordon. The university was promptly closed again. Meanwhile the two principal seats of high school student unrest, the Instituto Nacional and Artes y Oficios, remain closed by order of the Ministry of Education.

In most places in Panama, leftist groups and labor unions that don't get along well with the government marched in the patriotic parades like many other citizen groups do. In David, however, 36 labor activists with SUNTRACS and allied unions were arrested at Cervantes Park as they gathered for the November 3 parade. Citing no law --- because no such law exists --- local authorities said that the labor contingent was arrested because they planned a protest. But SUNTRACS said that they merely intended to march in the parade as they usually do.

The attempt by a contingent of union members from SUNTRACS and allied unions to march in the Independence Day parade in Changuinola as they usually do resulted in 30 arrests for “trespassing” on the parade route, as local officials there invented a new rule that only supporters of the Torrijos Administration are patriotic enough to march in the parades.

Panama City will spend $12 million to buy and renovate the 10-story El Hatillo building between Avenida Cuba and Avenida Justo Arosemena south of Parque Porras in order to use it as the city's principal office building. That will get more than 1,000 city workers out of the parking structure on Avenida B, where they have been working and putting up with inadequate facilities for a number of years. Previous attempts to move the city hall have bogged down in partisan bickering, concerns about high costs and allegations about improprieties in the contracting process.

Thirty-three AK-47 rifles, a .38 caliber revolver and eight crates of ammunition were seized at the Divisa traffic police checkpoint on November 1, and a 23-year-old Venezuelan man was arrested in the incident. The weapons apparently came from one of the Central American countries and were headed to criminal gangs or guerrilla or paramilitary forces in South America. Police noticed that the car in which the arms were being driven was overloaded, leading to the search and the arrest.

The case of Father Roberto González, a priest and former teacher at the Jesus Nazareno Agricultural Institute in Atalaya who was sentenced to 20 months in prison for sexual harassment of several of his students earlier this year, continues to make waves. Veraguas circuit prosecutor Ángel Gómez has appealed the sentence as too lenient, and has also petitioned an appeals court to allow him to begin a criminal investigation of Monsignor Óscar Mario Brown, the Catholic bishop of Veraguas, and Father José Schmiehuizen, the principal of the school, for covering up González´s crimes. The trial court in the case denied permission to investigate the principal or the bishop, and both Brown and Schmiehuizen deny any wrongdoing. González, for his part, denies the allegations and is appealing his conviction.

The last of the defendants in the scandal about the financing of the Prados del Este housing project to have been held in preventive detention has been granted bail. Former National Bank of Panama director Bolívar Pariente had fled abroad when charges were laid against him for his role in the bank's financing of a project built illegally in a flood plain, in part by relatives of his. The inevitable floods came, and the ones in September of 2004 were so severe that several residents were drowned. The Housing Ministry has since ordered the subdivision razed. After several weeks on the lam Pariente was jailed, but after months in El Renacer Penitentiary near Gamboa a court finally granted him bail on October 28, with a provision that he may not leave the country.

La Prensa reporter and writer Herasto Reyes, a native of Los Santo province and winner of the Miró Prize for Literature, died on October 27 after a long illness. He was 53 years old. Herasto, a lifelong leftist by conviction, was one of the bright stars of that flagship of rabiblanco print media, La Prensa. His 1983 book “Cuentos de la vida” won the Miró Prize. He also published two other books of stories, historical works on San Miguelito and the development of Panama's municipalities and a play that was staged in 1987. His passing was noted with great sadness by his fellow journalists and writers.

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