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Also in this section:
Torrijos inaugurates new legislative session
Lively "no" forum at ULACIT
On the referendum campaign trail
Church fires Héctor Endara as CARITAS director
Panama News Briefs

Panama News Briefs

Violence against strikers

Beginning on September 4, the Torrijos administration took a harder line with striking teachers. On that day the president sent riot cops to surround the Veraguas Educators Association (AVEVE) offices in Santiago and cut off their phones. They arrested a reporter and photographer who tried to cover the story. Then they moved in on strikers marching on Santiago's Avenida Central using tear gas and clubs to break up the march and arresting 15 protesters and a local businessman who happened to be standing nearby. Three strikers were injured, including a pregnant woman who was rushed to an emergency room. In Chitre the police moved in to beat and tear gas teachers as they were gathering to begin a protest march. Colon teachers had their protest march disrupted by a PRD member who ran over a striker with his bus. The Teachers Action Front (FAM) claimed that this was the third such hit and run attack on strikers over the past several days. On the morning and afternoon of the following day teachers marched in several places around the San Miguelito and Panama City metro area to protest the government violence.

Low-key war games

On September 1 the 11-nation Panamax 2006 naval maneuvers ended, and we saw a few of the 3,000 or so participants on shore leave in Panama City afterwards. Theoretically the war games, which took place on both the Atlantic and Pacific sides, were about defending Panama against a terrorist attack on the Panama Canal. Actually, the canal's anti-terrorist defenses are more subtle and require more rapid responses than an international flotilla of warships can provide. The maneuvers are designed to build ties between the US and Latin American navies and to accustom naval forces throughout the Americas to the use of US-made equipment, thus increasing the market for American-made goods. This year's war games were carried out with less publicity than last year's because the country is embroiled in a tight canal expansion referendum race in which a few of the critics allege that the canal expansion is motivated in part by US military needs, and because last year's maneuvers resulted in the deaths of three Panamanians and ensuing scandal in the National Maritime Service (SMN). While in Panama some of the US military personnel also carried out medical missions and other charitable work in impoverished Panamanian communities.

Dentist, nurse die on Torrijos vote buying trip

The president flew in, passed out envelopes with $35 in them and asked for "yes" votes in the October 22 referendum and got in his chopper and flew away. The other public officials who were required to attend the August 25 ceremony along the Rio Caña in the Ngobe - Bugle Comarca had to return to their offices by other means, including by boat to Chiriqui Grande in Bocas del Toro province. About an hour after the boat in which some of the officials were traveling set out, a violent storm arose and a huge wave smashed the vessel onto a coral reef. Dr. Vicente Alvarado, a dentist who was in charge of government medical supplies for the Ngobe - Bugle Comarca and Priscila Torres, the chief nurse for the comarca, were drowned in the accident. Six others survived. Nobody who had set out in the boat had been given any storm warning and prosecutors are investigating whether there was any negligence involved in the mishap. At the funeral for Dr. Alvarado, President Torrijos complained about the probe, telling a reporter for El Panama America that prosecutors "should investigate other cases."

Not too transparent Transparency Council

Just how much has the National Transparency Council received from foreign donors? A report by the Torrijos administration's anti-corruption czarina, Alma Montenegro de Fletcher, said about $700,000 in a report, which, however, only accounted for less than half of that amount and omitted some known donations. The report also noted 59 matters brought to the czarina's attention, only two of which she referred to competent authorities for further investigation. So what's the deal? The czarina wasn't answering questions. Minister of the Presidency Ubaldino Real explained that the financial numbers given in the report were projections of what is expected, not an account about what actually happened. Real is now promising a "redefinition of functions," now that the president's "zero corruption" campaign promise is widely recognized as having been broken to smithereens.

Mosquera involved in shooting incident

As these briefs were written former WBA super-featherweight champion Vicente "El Loco" Mosquera was sought by police and prosecutors for further questioning in the August 4 shooting death of 29-year-old Antonio Trejos. The fisherman was killed and another man wounded in the hand during a brawl at a beach party in Puerto Caimito in which the prizefighter was a participant. Mosquera fled the scene along with others after the shooting, but was later questioned by police and released. After one of the victim's sisters testified that she saw the boxer with a pistol authorities began to look for Mosquera for further questioning.

Daily threatened over drug case reports

El Panama America complains that Rogelio Arosemena, the attorney for one Mario Leone, whom allegations in a US federal indictment ties to the money laundering activities of an alleged drug ring headed by Colombian Pablo Rayo Montaño, has threatened that if the newspaper mentions his client's name he will find criminal charges of injuria --- the crime under Panama's benighted press laws in which those who publish true stories that injure the reputations of the rich or powerful may be imprisoned. Leone is one of a number of people under investigation here in connection with the case, but he hasn't been convicted of anything. It is alleged that front people and companies controlled by Rayo Montaño owned dozens of businesses, watercraft, vehicles, houses, apartments and lots, including at least three islands and 10 kilometers of beachfront along Colon's Costa Arriba.

Controversial crime figures

National Police chief Rolando Mirones has issued a report claiming that in the first half of 2006 crime of all types went down by 20 percent as compared to the previous year. However, the claim has met with widespread skepticism. Panamanian official crime statistics are historically unreliable and politically manipulated, and the experience of recent months has been the appearance of gangs committing violent crimes in such traditionally low-crime areas as Altos de Golf, El Cangrejo and the banking district, with no let-up in the gang warfare that plagues the many of the country's most poverty-stricken urban areas.

Triple execution on the autopista

On August 30 police responding to an anonymous tip found the bodies of three men who had been bound, gagged and shot to death execution-style in a blue Nissan parked alongside the Arraijan - La Chorrera Autopista.

Tourist wounded in Via Veneto robbery attempt

A 41-year-old American tourist was shot and wounded at 6:45 p.m. on August 29 when he resisted being robbed by a teenage gang on Via Veneto. The area is the main tourist drag in Panama City, with restaurants, hotels, Internet cafes, casinos, brothels and lots of street vendors, pimps, hookers and panhandlers working the streets. The police caught one suspect, a minor, with a pistol which apparently was not the one used to shoot the man. They are seeking three others, all said to be of the Los Bebes de Patio Pinel gang. Although the scene on Via Veneto has been becoming ever crazier, this sort of violence, especially at this time of the day, had been pretty much unheard-of.

UNICEF against more severe juvenile penalties

In response to a crime wave noticed by most Panamanians other than the National Police chief, many politicians are proposing to increase the penalties for minors who commit crimes. The recent death of a toddler in a shootout between teenage gangs in Curundu and subsequent quick release of two of the alleged shootout participants has lent fuel to the firestorm of outrage. But the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) is calling for cooler heads to prevail. The organization's regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean, Nils Kastelberg, said that more severe penalties are not the answer, but that more certainty of punishment for offenders is part of a proper solution. He also called for stiffer penalties on adults who used minors in their organized criminal activities.

Court restores prosecutor to her post

The feud between Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez and the pro-corruption majority on the Supreme Court appears to be alive and well, although other spins can and have been put on the situation. The latest is an order by high court magistrate José Troyano putting prosecutor Geomara de Jones back on the job. Gómez had suspended Jones for allegedly trying to interfere in the criminal case against prominent attorney Carlos Jones, the prosecutor's husband, is involved. He's charged with homicide in the traffic deaths of a couple whose car was struck when a vehicle Mr. Jones was driving crossed into the oncoming traffic lane while traveling at a high velocity. That investigation has been hampered by, among other things, the disappearance of the remains of the car that Jones had been driving and police and prosecutors' inability to locate the woman who was a passenger in Jones's car at the time.

Court files being restored

On August 29 the Supreme Court ordered the reconstruction of the files of several criminal and civil courts that were destroyed in an arson fire at the Tribunal Maritimo Building. The fire was set at the guarded court building on April 1. No suspects have been arrested.

Albrook Massacre figure says he'll sue

Evidelio Quiel, a fugitive who was tried and sentenced in absentia for commanding General Noriega's firing squad that executed those who attempted an October 1989 coup and arrested this past July in Costa Rica, is free because Vice President and Foreign Minister Samuel Lewis Navarro did not file an official request for extradition within the required 30 days. It was not almost certainly not an oversight. The Costa Ricans apparently wanted a promise from Panama that Quiel, who was sentenced to 20 years while a fugitive, would get a new trial. The Panamanian government never responded to that request and the Foreign Ministry is blaming prosecutors and the latter blaming the former. Actually, Martín Torrijos has followed a consistent policy of impunity for those who committed human rights violations under the dictatorship headed by his father and succeeding military officers, to the point of threatening the members of the former administration's Truth Commission for wasting taxpayer's money. The president, who has several of General Noriega's top henchmen in his cabinet, certainly wouldn't want a court case about the Albrook Massacre in the news while he's hustling votes in a hotly contested referendum. So the deadline was allowed to pass, Quiel walked, and now he says that he's going to sue the Panamanian government. Why? He says that he had a Costa Rican government contract lined up for his business, which was lost when he was thrown in jail.

Unlicensed nursing home raided

On August 31 the corregidor, health officials and social workers raided a house in the Cerro Silvestre area of Arraijan where nine elderly people and a minor with mental problems were being housed in an unlicensed nursing home. The authorities had been tipped off by a woman who had been hired to work there but after two days on the job found conditions so appallingly dirty and abusive that she went to the corregidor. Among the conditions encountered was a person apparently suffering from Alzheimer's disease who was strapped to a chair. The people found at the house, some of them suffering from malnutrition, were moved to Health Ministry facilities for treatment, evaluation and new placements. The families of those kept at the home were charged $250 per month.

Nuke ship passed through here

With no advance publicity --- a measure designed to reduce the threat of terrorist attacks and environmentalist protests --- the radioactive materials cargo ship Pacific Sandpiper passed through the Panama Canal on the evening of August 31, bound from Japan with a load of plutonium fuel to a port in France. Most Latin American and Caribbean governments have denounced these shipments as an unacceptable environmental risk and have tried to ban them from their national waters. The Panama Canal Authority, however, makes the argument --- specious in the opinion of most experts in international law --- that the 1977 Panama Canal Neutrality Treaty obliges this country to allow highly radioactive cargo to pass through the canal. The canal regularly serves ships carrying radioactive wastes from Europe to Japan, where it is processed by extracting and purifying the plutonium and then returned to Europe in the form of fuel pellets. The special nuclear cargo ships have redundant safety systems, but in the event of an accident that caused a plutonium spill into Gatun Lake the water supplies on which most Panamanians depend would be dangerously tainted.

Colombians building highway to our border

Panama, balking at the idea of cutting a road through the Darien Gap that's our natural jungle barrier against various agricultural diseases, has turned down Colombia's plea to finish the last link in the Pan-American Highway. Now, however, the government in Bogota says it will build a 50-kilometer road through one of its national parks right up to the Panamanian border, some 58 kilometers from where our part of the highway ends at the Chucunaque River in Yaviza. The leftist FARC rebels hold sway in that part of Colombia, so the road project would also have an ulterior military purpose with which the Panamanian government would not care to be identified.

Rival Olympic Committees

In the wake of a court decision voiding the election of Melitón Sánchez as head of the Panamanian Olympic Committee (COP), those who won the court case held a new election and elected a board of directors headed by Miguel Vanegas. This received the government's recognition and with the intervention of a local corregidor the new group took possession of the COP offices in Dos Mares. But then, with a Cuban Olympic official who purportedly represented the International Olympic Committee present, sports federation leaders loyal to the old leadership held their own vote and elected Sánchez to his old post. Now we have two rival organizations calling themselves the real Olympic committee, and there remains the possibility of Panama getting excluded from various international competitions as a result.

RP environmentalists mark Irwin's passing

Australian zoologist and television personality Steve Irwin's death from a venomous ray's sting has prompted condolences from around the world, including for environmentalists in Panama. "He died doing what he loved," Biodiversidad Panama leader Ariel Rodríguez said, "making direct contact with nature." Irwin not only had his television shows on the Animal Planet cable network, but also created Wildlife Warriors Worldwide, a foundation that worked on campaigns to protect endangered species and supported a veterinary hospital in Australia for wounded wild animals.