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Torrijos defends "security law" changes

by Eric Jackson, mainly from other media

"Now we're going to look like Nazi Germany, or go back to the old DENI," complained opposition politician and supermarket baron Ricardo Martinelli in La Estrella. "There are still people who haven't made the effort to read the proposal," President Torrijos responded in El Panama America.

The immediate object of discussion was a plan to dissolve the Judicial Technical Police (PTJ), which falls under the jurisdiction of the Attorney General's Public Ministry, and transfer most of its elements to the National Police, which is part of the Ministry of Government and Justice. The Public Ministry was set up with a bit more autonomy from political pressures than the Ministry of Government and Justice --- an attorney general (procuradora general) is appointed for a 10-year term and can be removed only for cause, while a minister of government and justice serves at a president's pleasure during the latter's five-year term. That the present Ministry of Government and Justice is presided over by a veteran PRD apparatchik as minister and a former Panama Defense Forces major --- not just anyone, but Manuel Antonio Noriega's top aide --- as vice-minister are symbols of its political subordination to the ruling Democratic Revolutionary Party.

But Torrijos complains that politicization is one of the evils that his proposal is designed to eliminate. "The PTJ is an institution that stopped being professional, that has become politicized and demoralized, where the chief of special investigations was murdered, where they distribute drugs in their facilities, where they hand out false diplomas," he told La Prensa. All of which is more or less true --- but then the drug cartels have also infiltrated the National Police, the Ministry of Government and Justice has also had drug scandals, the rector of the University of Panama who's a member of the PRD and who enjoys the president's full support has a fake doctorate, and the courts and legislature controlled by the president's party hardly present an image of professionalism or political impartiality when confronted with cases of public corruption.

Under the president's reorganization plan, the only part of the PTJ to be left in the Public Ministry will be the crime lab and its field technicians. But to many who remember the 22-year dictatorship and the reasons for the PTJ's creation after the 1989 US invasion, the transfer of the detective squad to a ministry under tighter political control looks like the revival of something like the old National Investigations Office (DENI), the dictatorship's feared secret police.

It doesn't help that the legislature just passed and the president just signed a Penal Code that includes a provision that those aged 70 or over can serve prison sentences under house arrest, which means that when Manuel Antonio Noriega steps out of a US prison in September at age 70 he will be able to come back here and not see the inside of a jail cell. It doesn't help that the head of Noriega's Dignity Battalions goon squad is now minister of public works and Noriega's old aide is now vice-minister of government and justice. It doesn't help that another security law proposal under discussion would allow corregidores --- mayoral appointees with judicial functions who may or may not have legal educations --- to authorize police searches of homes or businesses without a showing of probable cause. It doesn't help that in the wake of a particularly notorious gang-related crime Torrijos sent masked police officers on a series of raids in which hundreds of people were rounded up but evidence to support criminal charges could only be produced against one of them. Nor do new Penal Code sections making it harder to prosecute political corruption and criminalizing the possession by reporters or publication of most documents that can demonstrate political corruption tend to demonstrate the benevolence of the president's intentions.

However, in the wake of the burning of 137 homes in Curundu in a confrontation between street gangs most Panamanians do believe that crime is out of control, there are no spontaneous demonstrations of public support for the troubled PTJ, and even if the president's approval ratings are dropping in the public opinion polls he's not the object of public hatred like Noriega was. Torrijos has the votes in the legislature to do whatever he wants, and the courts will probably not interfere.

In addition to the PTJ abolition proposal and the Law 292 "security" reform that will permit warrantless home invasions, the Torrijos administration has a third law enforcement reform bill in the works, this one to merge the National Maritime Service and the National Air Service into a new coast guard.

Torrijos defends "security law" proposals
Colombian kidnap industry discussed by high-profile victim's sister

High court to hear challenge to ACP's multi-billion dollar "reserve fund"

Terrorist whom Mireya pardoned gets bail in the USA
US media, a few gringos here are fascinated by grisly murder case

A peek down into a multiple urban pathology
Panama News Briefs