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editorial

Martín Torrijos's defining moment is now at hand

There comes a certain defining moment in any presidency, after which the true nature of the administration is plain for all to see.

With Mireya Moscoso, it came relatively early on, when her immigration director, Erick Singares, resolved a pay dispute with his illegal immigrant Nicaraguan maid by summarily deporting her, and yet he still had a job the next day. After that everyone knew that Mireya was a crook and her administration a racketeering organization dedicated to the personal enrichment of its members.

In retrospect we can see that the indelible stain of corruption was stamped on the Pérez Balladares administration at the moment he appointed José Antonio Sossa as his attorney general. The defining moment, however, was when Toro's relative Francisco Iglesias, the Panamanian consul in New York, flouted US, Panamanian and international laws by turning the consulate into an illegal gallery for the display and sale of looted Peruvian antiquities and then fled here as the FBI wanted posters featuring his mug shot were issued. There was never any question about calling Iglesias to account for his crimes against Panama, and thus there could be no honest question about the nature of Toro's government. The visa and PECC scandals that later came to light were but further details of the corruption with impunity that characterizes the public career of Ernesto Pérez Balladares.

Now two great challenges have been raised to the pervasive corruption in Panamanian public life, and the ways that President Torrijos responds to them will tell us everything we need to know about the man and the government he runs.

A presidential commission has made a number of recommendations, beginning with changes to the law against inexplicable enrichment while holding public office, which would for the first time make that statute enforceable. This proposal has been summarily rejected by members of a National Assembly committee.

A coalition of the nation's civic, professional, business and religious leaders has filed criminal charges against eight of the nine members of the Supreme Court, documenting a sordid, notorious and pervasive pattern of public corruption. Unless there is a short circuit along the way, these charges would end up before the legislature in an impeachment trial.

Recall the last attempt to impeach a Supreme Court magistrate. José Manuel Faúndes was heard by the nation, in a taped telephone conversation, negotiating a $20,000 bribe to free a Colombian drug trafficker whose case was pending before a lower court. A majority, but an insufficient one to convict, voted to find Faúndes guilty, so he returned to the court just long enough to permanently trash its reputation.

So now that high court corruption is again front and center in the national dialogue, will Martín Torrijos once again plead separation of powers, and tell us that because the power of the presidency is limited he is unable to act against the sleaze manifest in a legislature controlled by his own party? Will he tell us that he has no choice but to go along with a tacit agreement between the courts and the legislature not to act against each other's corruption? If he does that now, then there will be no other rational conclusion but to dismiss Torrijos as a crook like Mireya and Toro and to do whatever possible to frustrate and defeat his every effort for the remainder of his term. This is the nature of the defining moment now at hand.

It's true, there is a separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches. But Martín Torrijos is also leader of the PRD, which holds an absolute majority in the National Assembly. It is indisputably within his power to tell each member of the PRD caucus that he or she can vote in any fashion, but that failure to take a stand against corruption will result in the president using the executive power he holds to see to it that nothing gets spent on roads, bridges, schools and public facilities in the circuit of a deputy who does not support him, that the people who worked on the deputy's campaign and later got government jobs will lose those public posts, that nobody in the executive branch will even meet with or listen to such a deputy, let alone do any favors.

We are about to see whether Martín Torrijos is in any way, shape or fashion a political leader, or whether he's just an errand boy for a corrupt political class. We will see it by the results the president will have to show, and not necessarily by what he has to say in public.

It's a test that Torrijos can't afford to fail. If he and his party come down on the side of corruption now, then the Panamanian people will be justified in presuming that any canal modernization proposal would be a ruinous and crooked boondoggle; that any substantial trade agreement with the United States would be a vile betrayal of the national interests; that any legislative reform package would be just another unseemly scam.

There can be no excuses now, Martín. What's it going to be?

Bear in mind…

There is no building known that has been built upon bayonets.

José Martí

There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet.

Zora Neale Hurston

A dog owns nothing, yet is seldom dissatisfied.

Irish proverb