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Panama News Briefs

Capital’s Carnival celebrations to be on Avenida Balboa

Because there is more room for crowds along the waterfront than on Via España, the government commission charged with organizing Carnival in Panama City has decided that the festivities will take place on Avenida Balboa rather than on Via España where they had been held for many years. There are some issues still to be worked out with Avenida Balboa, particularly as its use can complicate things for ambulances getting in and out of Santo Tomas Hospital and Hospital del Niño.

Her Majesty Sorángel I

This year’s Panama City Carnival organizers also broke with another tradition by choosing a Carnival queen who is not from the nation’s white minority, Sorángel Matos. Matos, dubbed the “Black Angel” in the Italian press, has been quite successful as a model in Europe but until now largely ignored by the Panamanian advertising industry, which prefers blondes. Over the decades Panama City has had Carnival queens of all races, but usually they have been light-skinned. Panama City’s Carnival, is a big event, but traditionally the biggest celebration of the holiday is in Las Tablas, and with the recent rare January rains there will be plenty of water in the river for the Penonome Water Carnival. All of those other Carnivals have their queens, in many cases rival Calle Arriba and Calle Abajo monarchs.

Delgado beats the rap

The Supreme Court, in a decision made in December but only announced in mid-January, has extended and applied the “prior proof” rule by which it provides immunity to corrupt public officials. After the Moscoso administration took office, former Economy and Finance Minister Norberto Delgado turned up holding titles to vast tracts of land in Darien province. These hadn’t been disclosed when he took office, as required by law. Thus an investigation was begun about the crime of inexplicable enrichment while holding public office. Delgado cried foul, alleging that he had owned the land all along. Accepting, for the sake of argument, that claim at face value, the Comptroller General then started an investigation of Delgado for tax evasion, as no taxes had been paid with respect to those properties or for the income somehow obtained with which they were purportedly bought. But by a 7-2 decision --- including two magistrates who have recently been replaced --- the court held that former government ministers can’t be investigated for crimes unless prior to the investigation there is a submission of full proof that a crime has been committed and the politician is guilty. Magistrate Esmeralda de Troitiño and suplente Hipólito Gil (the alternate for Adán Arjona) dissented.

Small resigns

It appears that the courts won’t yet have to decide who is and who is not a career public servant. Janina Small, who had worked in the court system for many years but in spite of laws that entitled her to civil service status was never granted it, had been appointed by President Torrijos as an alternate magistrate on the Supreme Court. The appointment was challenged on the grounds that she had not worked the legally required number of years as a career judicial employee to qualify for a seat on the high court. A week after being sworn in, Small decided to resign rather than litigate over her qualifications.

Fugitive lobbyist was coming here

South Korean businessman and lobbyist Tongsun Park, on INTERPOL’s wanted list, got onto an airplane in Canada on January 7 and was bound for Panama. However, he was grabbed by the Mexican Federales in a stopover in Mexico City and put on a plane bound for Houston, where the FBI took him into custody. Park is charged in a New York federal district court with several counts of alleged corruption in the former United Nations Food for Oil program in Iraq, including the offering of a bribe to former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali. He had served in Washington as a lobbyist for Saddam Hussein’s regime, and earlier representing one Manuel Antonio Noriega in the late 80s. Park’s main claim to notoriety, however, was his role in a mid-1970s scandal in which members of Congress were paid by a group of Korean and Korean-American businessmen who wanted the US government to be more supporting of the Korean strongman at the time, Chung Hee Park. One member of the US House of Representatives was convicted of a crime and several others were rebuked in resolutions of their colleagues. Tongsun Park avoided prosecution in that affair by turning state’s evidence. Park was coming to Panama on some business related to the canal expansion project --- so say his aides --- but nobody in the government wants to admit knowing the man. Park was, however, part of a group of businessmen with whom Panama’s Vice President Samuel Lewis Navarro and Panama Canal Administrator Alberto Alemán Zubieta met in Korea to discuss the canal expansion project.

Legislators to be investigated

There will be a prosecutor’s investigation of five members of the 2004-2005 Government and Justice Committee of the National Assembly, for allegedly taking bribes to get the Bocas del Toro Archipelago declared a special tourism development zone. The proposal was submitted by deputy Benicio Robinson (PRD-Bocas del Toro) and anti-corruption activist Enrique Montenegro says that he has evidence that some $3 million in bribes was paid to gain support for the measure. However, the proposal was never voted upon by the committee. The legislators are ordinarily immune from investigation or prosecution, but the Supreme Court’s presiding magistrate, Graciela Dixon, lifted the deputies’ immunity and ordered the Public Ministry to investigate the matter.

12 die when band’s bus runs off road

La Chorrera is mourning the deaths of 12 people, including cumbia accordionist Ñato Califa (whose given name was , most of the members of his band and three children, in a January 13 bus accident. The vehicle ran off the road en route to a performance in Capira district and plunged down a hill into a creek bed. Only two of the 14 people aboard survived.

Spanish volunteers missing

José Vicente Colastra and Sergio Colastra, a father and son from Spain who were in the Darien working for Tierra Viva, a non-governmental organization that promotes sustainable rural development, have apparently been abducted by masked armed men who took them away from the village of El Guayabo-Perea in Jaque district. More than a dozen indigenous residents reported the apparent crime to the National Police on January 21, and after that they were detained for questioning. The men had been working on a tourist cabin to accommodate whale watchers. Leftist guerrillas, rightist paramilitaries and criminal gangs have from time to time crossed over from Colombia and abducted people on Panamanian soil, but some reported abductions have turned out to be voluntary contacts with armed Colombian groups. The border between Panama and Colombia is in many cases an abstraction for Embera, Wounaan and Kuna families with members on both sides of the remote governments’ dividing line, and police here have often alleged that indigenous people in the Panamanian Darien maintain improper relations with Colombian insurgents.

Bocas investment scam bust

Two US citizens, Robert Lloyd Hammond and Tamara Price, were arrested by the Judicial Technical Police (PTJ) on January 19 for allegedly defrauding another American of more than $1 million that was supposed to be invested in a Bocas tourism development but instead was apparently spent on a luxurious lifestyle. After years in which the Public Ministry under José Antonio Sossa would not prosecute anyone for using Panama as a base to commit frauds against foreigners, it appears that the scammers who swarmed into Bocas are no longer necessarily a protected species.

Alleged Cali capo surrenders to Americans

William Rodríguez Abadia, the son of Cali Cartel co-founder Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela and an alleged capo in the defunct Colombian criminal organization himself, turned himself in to US authorities in Panama on January 16, three days after coming here from Colombia by sea. Along with his father and his uncle and one other defendant, Rodríguez Abadia faces a number of drug and conspiracy charges and a civil forfeiture suit for more than $2 billion for money that the Cali Cartel made from drug trafficking, mostly in the 1990s. The Cali Cartel, which was closely linked with the Colombian Army and politicians of their country’s Liberal Party, dominated the cocaine business for a time after the an alliance of the United States government, the Colombian government and a group called Los Pepes --- People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar, a death squad formed by the Castaño brothers that’s a predecessor of today’s AUC paramilitary --- killed the leaders of the Medellin Cartel and in effect eased the transfer of their illegal business to the rival Cali group. The Cali Cartel’s ties with former Colombian President Ernesto Samper strained relations between the United States and Colombia for a time, but during the Uribe administration the Cali group has been dismantled and much of its criminal business has been transferred to the AUC, whose death squads have played a key if officially denied role in the US-backed Plan Colombia. AUC leaders have from time to time boasted that they finance their operations mostly through drug trafficking. After the Cali Cartel’s demise, in 2003, the charges that Rodríguez Abadia et al face were filed in a Miami federal district court.

Jailhouse brutality probe

Prison conditions in Panama are notoriously harsh, due in large part to overcrowding caused by drug cases and a large number of crimes for which people must await trial without bail. However, another aspect that has long been a problem is simple brutality, both on the part of inmates who seek to dominate others and on the part of jailers. The latter issue has been in the news a lot lately, particularly because of a series of stories in La Prensa by reporter Jean Marcel Chéry. Juan Antonio Tejada, the outgoing national ombudsman, has been looking into a number of accusations, including dozens of beatings and alleged improper use of pepper gas on prisoners at La Joya and La Joyita. The National Police are conducting an investigation and the attorney general has indicated that it appears that there has been uncalled-for brutality and that those found responsible will be prosecuted. National Police director Rolando Rolando Mirones, for his part, told La Prensa that whether or not any police officer or guard is found guilty of any crime, changes need to be made at the prisons because the system used there is dysfunctional.

SUNTRACS complains of beatings

The Torrijos administration has ever more resorted to violence against its leftist critics, particularly in parts of the Interior. On January 10 after a small protest against a possible free trade deal with the United States, police in David arrested 10 members of the radical SUNTRACS construction workers’ union and at the station a former boxer, Sergeant Luis “Mano de Tanque” Caballero, beat them up. One union leader, Jaime Caballero, says he suffered broken ribs from the beating. The union’s lawyers have filed complaints in the matter.

Questions in kidnapping

Was she kidnapped, was it a hoax and who and what were really involved? Two police officers, an ex-cop and an alleged member of a Chinese criminal gang are being held in the case of a 39-year-old Chinese-Panamanian woman who went missing for 10 days and was the subject of ransom demands made to her husband. A trap was laid and suspects were arrested at an arranged ransom delivery at a local restaurant, and from there police were able to determine the woman’s location, where a police anti-kidnapping unit moved in, made more arrests and set the woman free. Some of the local media that have a long history of hysteria about and racist treatment of people of Asian descent spun tales of Chinese tongs running wild, but although we do have that element of organized crime on the isthmus it’s not entirely clear what the case is really about.

Champ injured in scrape with police

The police aren’t saying what it was all about, and world junior flyweight champion Roberto “La Araña” Vásquez isn’t saying much more than that he’ll have to interrupt training for 10 days because police twisted his arm and injured his wrist. The boxer was held for about four hours in the San Francisco police sub-station and then released without charges. The boxer’s brother told La Prensa that police stopped La Araña’s car and wanted to search it, which prompted an objection and then some rough stuff. Police say they are investigating the incident.

Argument over lower sex crime sentences

President Torrijos has appointed a committee to draft a new Penal Code, and one proposal that it had been considering probably won’t come to pass. It had been suggested that sexual assaults in which there is no penetration or attempted penetration and in which the victim is 14 years old or older would be punished by a maximum one-year prison term, rather than the current five-year max. The idea has been widely criticized and it’s likely that the nation’s flashers and gropers won’t get a break after all. There are about 300 sex offenses prosecuted in Panama every year, mostly for forcible rapes or for adults having sexual relations with minors.

Rosas thrown off the gravy train

It appears that the Nationalist Republican Liberal Movement (MOLIRENA) is no longer a subsidiary of the Rosas family business. At a January 22 special party convention that Rosas and his backers boycotted, dissident factions were able to barely muster a quorum --- 396 of 744 officially certified convention delegates attended --- and then went on to depose Jesús “Maco” Rosas as party president, remove the old party leadership committee, void a string of purges of Rosas opponents and elect Gisela Chung, a former legislator from San Miguelito, as the new MOLIRENA leader. Rosas, who tried to storm into the convention once it became known that his boycott had failed to block a quorum, says he’ll sue to void the convention results, and launched a vitriolic attack against his opponents. MOLIRENA was a junior partner in the Moscoso administration, when it counted among its fiefdoms the Ministry of Education and the Canal Once public television channel.