news

Also in this section:

Tourist visa changes may be short-lived
City has second thoughts on getting rid of the Avenida Central Peatonal

Urban planning in Panama, such as it has been and may become

Emancipated high school girls expelled

The strange tale of Captain Sherman

Flowing in the streets of the capital
Panama News Briefs

Pirate website owner threatens to invade every hospitalized American's medical privacy

The strange case of a conked-out canal pilot

by Eric Jackson

Captain Dave Sherman, a 63-year-old Panama Canal pilot, had been telling friends and colleagues a strange story. He claimed that he had set up one of the private foundations that this country's laws allow and that are often used for certain tax, inheritance or asset protection purposes; that the lawyer who set up this foundation had retained a power of attorney to conduct transactions for it; that he had discovered that there were transactions on the order of $50,000 a pop that were moving money into and out of his foundation without his knowledge, consent or participation; that he feared that his foundation was being used to launder the proceeds of some underworld enterprise; and that he had hired a second attorney to investigate the situation.

Not everybody to whom Sherman told this tale believed him, but some did. Others thought that while some of his conclusions may have been conjecture, that version of identity theft where someone else hijacks the use of a Panamanian private foundation would be a quite viable financial crime.

Then, on the afternoon of June 16, one of the owners of a boat shed in Diablo found Sherman lying face down, unconscious and bloodied from several cuts about his head. An ambulance was called and Sherman was taken to Santo Tomas Hospital.

There more questions, and more questionable practices, began to be raised.

Sherman, a US citizen and widower who didn't have a close day-to-day relationship with his family, was always a punctual worker. The day before he was found unconscious he failed to report for work and it was noticed. When he was admitted to Santo Tomas nobody contacted either the Panama Canal Authority or the US Consulate, as one would expect when a seriously injured US citizen canal pilot comes into the emergency room unable to contact anyone for himself.

And were the circumstances of Sherman's injury suspect from a police point of view? He had suffered one or more serious blows to the head, but that could have been either accidental or the result of a crime. The police had no reason to know of Sherman's complaints about his private foundation. His wallet and other valuables were on his person when he was found in Diablo, so if there was a crime it wasn't a garden variety mugging. Were there some organized crime money laundering angle to his injury, the norm would have been that Sherman would not have been found knocked cold with cuts on his head, but lifeless with bullet holes in his body. In any case, the usual procedure at Santo Tomas has been that there is a police officer on duty and when someone comes in with injuries that suggest a crime that officer files a report and an investigation is begun. This was not done in Sherman's case.

Eventually it was a colleague at the ACP who found out, nearly six days after he was noticed missing, that Sherman was unconscious at Santo Tomas and informed the US Consulate of the situation. A source told The Panama News that the US government expressed its concern about the delayed notification to the consulate to Panamanian authorities.

Meanwhile, the purveyor of a website mostly filled with stolen copyrighted material from mainstream media went to Santo Tomas Hospital, where he claims that he got a report on Sherman's condition from Dr. Jorge M Trujillo at that hospital's intensive care unit, including the results of a CAT scan. That private medical information was then published on the Internet.

The unauthorized release of a patient's personal medical information to third person is a major violation of medical ethics. The publication of such improperly released material is an unethical practice in journalism. These standards, however, are frequently violated both by Panama's public health care system and by its Spanish-language corporate mainstream media.

This reporter raised the privacy issue in discussions in online email groups, and the offending pirate website owner responded with a vitriolic attack that included several misrepresentations of fact about this reporter and his action, the relative sizes of online readerships in Panama's English-language press. In the first version of his screed, that person claimed that he was doing a public service by publishing medical information about Americans hospitalized here and vowed to continue to do so. After some protests from the American community here, however, he deleted that threat from his website.

Through the consulate Sherman's family was brought in to make arrangements for his further medical care, and a source said that when the pilot had recovered sufficiently to talk with law enforcement officials he spoke with both US and Panamanian authorities about the situation with the private foundation. The Panama News does not know, however, whether any criminal investigation, either about the private foundation matter or about the incident that landed Sherman in the hospital, has been opened.

Tourist visa changes may be short-lived
City has second thoughts on getting rid of the Avenida Central Peatonal

Urban planning in Panama, such as it has been and may become

Emancipated high school girls expelled

The strange tale of Captain Sherman

Flowing in the streets of the capital
Panama News Briefs