news

Also in this section:
Carnival 2006
Torrijos opens a new legislative session
Noriega defaults in torture case
The other Moscoso administration museum theft
Oscar Arias wins in Costa Rica
Panama News Briefs

Panama News Briefs

Magistrate on lam after fake degree allegation

Dulio Arrocha is a magistrate on the superior court that hears appeals from Los Santos and Herrera provinces. He has been practicing law since 1977 and serving as a judge since 1990. The problem is, his law school degree is apparently fake. Arrocha began the practice of law and asserted as his qualification for the bench using a diploma from the National University in Bogota, Colombia. That institution, however, says he never studied there. Acting on a tip, Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez paid the Supreme Court a visit on March 2, discussing the matter with the high court's presiding magistrate, Graciela Dixon, while subordinates searched through court files to find Arrocha's documents. Prosecutors called Arrocha to a March 6 indagatoria (formal questioning for use in a trial dossier), but he did not attend and has dropped out of sight. Meanwhile the high court is investigating Gómez, with some of its member alleging that it's unconstitutional for prosecutors to search the Supreme Court. This is only the latest of a number of fake diploma scandals to come to public attention within the last year.

Torrijos tells legislature to hold off on immigration reform

A proposed set of changes to Panama's immigration laws, primarily to crack down on illegals and to create a central registry for foreign residents, has been put on hold at President Torrijos's request. The president said that he wants some changes to the draft upon which legislators have been working. Panama's immigration system is notoriously corrupt and dysfunctional, and estimates of how many people are living here illegally range as high as 800,000, or more than one-quarter of our total population. The National Assembly appears to like the idea of corruption whenever it comes across it, and also disposed to demagogic gestures against foreigners. The president seems to be more concerned with the realities of an administrative mess. The concerns of foreigners residing in Panama, their legal resident or citizen relatives and their advocates are mostly not considered by the politicians, with the exception of the Colombians who have fled here to escape their country's violence and whose treatment by Panamanian authorities has been the subject of international criticism. One of the reasons why Torrijos wants to delay consideration is the imminent start of talks with our Central American neighbors about a coordinated immigration policy.

Impunity for dictatorship's crimes

On what legal basis? It really doesn't matter. The Supreme Court has held in two cases that nobody will face justice for murders and disappearances committed in the course of Panama's 21-year dictatorship. In the case of leftist activist Narciso "Chicho" Cubas, the court held that those asking for the case to be reopened had no standing to do so. In the case of dissident soldier Reynaldo Sánchez Tenas, whose bones were unearthed at Coiba in 2001, the court used an arcane argument about how since the officer accused of ordering the execution is not now a public servant, somehow or the other a novel non-statutory "statute of limitations" is created for the crime of murder. These arguments have no basis in law, but do follow the political desires of President Torrijos, the son of former military strongman Omar Torrijos.

Reports of China negotiations denied

Although Taiwanese media reported that representatives of the Peoples Republic of China and Panama met recently in Madrid to talk about establishing diplomatic ties --- and that Vice President and Foreign Minister Samuel Lewis Navarro headed the Panamanian delegation --- those stories, which were picked up in the Panamanian press, have been denied by Lewis Navarro. "Panama maintains its diplomatic relations with Taiwan and its commercial relations with China," Lewis Navarro told El Panama America, adding that he was surprised by the stories because he was making public appearances in Panama with President Torrijos when he was reported to have been in Spain.

Thays Noriega to get a diplomatic job

The younger daughter of former dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega has done well on the employment test for the diplomatic service. In fact she got the top score, which makes it likely that she will be hired for an entry level job at the Ministry of Foreign Relations, either here or in one of Panama's diplomatic missions abroad. Some opposition politicians have complained, but Thays Noriega has never been convicted of any serious offense like her father has. Her sister Sandra Noriega already has a foreign service job, as an aide at the Panamanian Embassy in the Dominican Republic.

Movement for a labor party gains momentum

For various reason the largest of the leftist factions, the November 29th National Liberation Movement, and the most militant of the labor unions, the SUNTRACS construction workers' syndicate, are not on board. However, Priscila Vásquez, the leader of some 23,000 unionized Seguro Social workers, says she's moving ahead with her plans to form a working class political party and get it on the ballot for the 2009 elections. Joining in the effort is the United Popular Movement (MPU), whose student affiliate BPU is one of the main campus radical groups. In order to get ballot status some 58,000 voters would have to sign up as party members. A leftist, labor-based party would to the extent it enjoyed electoral success mainly attract votes away from the PRD and to a lesser extent from the Arnulfistas, the only political parties with significant bases of support among this country's working class. Unless it degenerates into just another party as people like SUNTRACS leader Genaro López has expressed fears that it might, a new labor party would be unusual among Panamanian minor parties, which tend to have no ideological bases or mass following but are used as "balance of power" levers to get government jobs and contracts for their leaders.

Vanguardia Moral in crisis

Will the new party that Guillermo Endara is heading, Vanguardia Moral de la Patria, ever make it to the ballot? Endara's personal following is the movement's main strength, but many of the activists who have been attracted to it are making no secret that they are put off by the former president's leadership style and by the role that the former first lady, Ana Mae Díaz de Endara, is playing in the organization. On March 12 there will be a meeting of party activists in Aguadulce at which some of these issues will be raised. Whether the proto-party emerges split or united may well determine whether it will reach its goal of attaining ballot status.

Panameñista membership decline over?

The way that Panamanian politics work, a party that loses power loses members after the elections. It was worse for the Arnulfista Party because Mireya Moscoso maintained an iron grip and purged a number of leading members, leading others to leave the party in disgust with that and the former president's flagrant corruption. But after the election younger party leaders forced Mireya to step down and changed the organization's name to that which her late husband Arnulfo Arias used for the movement, the Panameñista Party. Now the Panameñistas are going to have some new internal party elections and they have opened their books for new members to sign up. According to party president Marco Ameglio, the group's membership is now more than 200,000 again. The only larger political party in Panama is the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), which has more than twice the membership of the Panameñistas.

Carlos Pérez Herrera to preside over City Council

The representante for San Francisco, Carlos Pérez Herrera, will be first among equals at meetings of the Panama City Council for the next year. A PRD member like the outgoing Ramón Ashby Chial, Pérez Herrera assumed the office on March 3. He promised do his job with transparency and set a good example of how to represent the community.

Fewer marriages

The Comptroller General reports that in 2005 there were some 16 percent fewer marriages in Panama than in the previous year. According to a report in La Prensa, divorces were also down, by about 19 percent, maintaining a divorce rate of about one in every five nuptials. Panamanian law does not discriminate between children born in and out of wedlock and for the most part our culture takes a lax view about marriage, which in part means that a lot of families are raised by couples that by all indications other than a piece of paper are functionally married. However, we don't have the Common Law here, nor do we have any legal equivalent of a Common Law marriage.

Death rate down

The Comptroller General reported to La Prensa that 13,017 people died in Panama last year, 503 less than in 2004. The leading causes of death were cancers, strokes and heart attacks, in that order. Traumas, in which accidents, suicides and the results of violence were lumped together, occupied fourth place, followed by diabetes. One unusual thing about Panama's death rate from cancer is the high incidence of stomach cancers, the second most common cause of cancer death among men and the third among women. Some doctors believe this is because of recurrent gastric infections from unsanitary food, while others believe it's the result of Panamanians' fondness for smoked meats, poultry and seafood.

RP water good but declining

According to the results of a regional study published in El Panama America, Panama's water quality index is better than that in most countries, but it's declining. Measured by the percentage of the population with regular access to sufficient clean drinking water, Panama ranks 7th in Latin America and 28th in the world. But increasing pollution and deforestation in the Panama Canal Watershed, from which most Panamanians take their drinking water, is and has been a cause for concern.

Pedophiles busted

An Internet café in David has been closed down and six persons have been arrested after an international child pornography investigation that began in Spain led to that locale. Although the Torrijos administration permits high-profile pedophiles of foreign origin to live and conduct child prostitution activities here without being molested, the police here do occasionally step in to take action on the sexual exploitation of minors when foreign governments demand that it do so.

We're a stolen cell phone fencing center

Police say they have encountered a Colombian-run international fencing operation for stolen cell phones here. First there was the seizure at an airport in Colombia of 3,000 used cell phones bound for Panama. The Colombian police arrested two women and a man, further investigations and seizures, and the ultimate discovery that a ring would export up to 10,000 stolen phones per week from Peru, Ecuador and Colombia to Panama, where the equipment to install new numbers and a relationship with a chain of small vendors allowed the hot cell phones to be sold. Sometimes, according to a report in El Panama America, the phones were stripped for their screens and chips, which were sold.

Bird flu vaccine?

Dr. Guillermo V. Corrales's clinic in Brisas del Golf was advertising a $20 special on a vaccine against avian influenza. One small problem: no such vaccine yet exists. La Prensa called the doctor on it and he admitted that his vaccine is for the common flu, but claimed that this reduces the severity of bird flu. Leaders of the medical profession and the director general of the Ministry of Health refuted the claims, and Dr. Corrales then claimed that the ads were a clerical error.

Also in this section:
Carnival 2006
Torrijos opens a new legislative session
Noriega defaults in torture case
The other Moscoso administration museum theft
Oscar Arias wins in Costa Rica
Panama News Briefs