updates

He's wanted by the USA for terrorism

Pedro Miguel González picked

to head the National Assembly

Deputy Pedro Miguel González (PRD-Veraguas) has been chosen by his colleagues in the National Assembly to head the legislature for its 2007-2008 session. In secret balloting at the assembly's September 1 organizational meeting, he got 50 of the 76 votes cast by the 78 legislators. That means that he received at least a half-dozen votes from opposition deputies.

González is wanted by US authorities on a terrorism warrant stemming from a 1992 drive-by shooting in Chilibre that killed US Army Sergeant O. Zak Hernandez. The slaying took place on the eve of former US President George H. W. Bush's planned triumphal visit to Panama in an election year some two and one-half years after the invasion he ordered. The shooting and protests that sent Bush fleeing with tear gas in his eyes marred the planned campaign photo-op and was one of the turning points in a campaign that led to his defeat later that year by Bill Clinton.

González was a fugitive for several years, but ultimately turned himself in and was tried for murder before a jury of Panamanian government employees in 1997. He was acquitted, but the US government has never accepted the verdict and maintains a warrant for his arrest under a law that provides for the death penalty for any act of terrorism anywhere in the world in which a US citizen is killed.

At the trial there were alibi witnesses placing González on the University of Panama campus when the incident happened and other witnesses placing him at or near the murder scene. However, none of the witnesses for either side were so unbiased and in such a good position to positively identify Gonzáles as to be completely convincing. The key piece of physical evidence was a Kalashnikov rifle found at González's sister's house: the FBI crime lab said it was the murder weapon, the PTJ crime lab said it wasn't the murder weapon and experts from Scotland Yard said it couldn't be proven one way or the other.

Prior to the vote top government officials were warned by the US Embassy that the selection of González to head the legislature would likely affect US-Panamanian relations, including by hurting the chances of ratification of a bilateral free trade agreement by the US Congress. González and his supporters were able to turn that around and present his election as an assertion of Panamanian nationalism.

Torrijos shuffles his cabinet

On August 27 President Torrijos asked for and received the resignations of all 14 of his cabinet ministers, announcing that there would be a series of changes in his cabinet.

After some speculation, some of it wrong, in the PRD-aligned media, Torrijos announced 27 changes in his administrative lineup, including five of cabinet ministers. Essentially he removed a number of his most disliked or controversial or about to be controversial ministers, increased the militarization of the Ministry of Government and Justice by former Panama Defense Forces (PDF) officers and made more changes in the second and third levels of the ministries and autonomous agencies than he did at the top.

In Government and Justice Olga Gólcher, recently infamous for her defense of the shooting of unarmed members of the SUNTRACS construction workers union and predictions of labor violence, is out. Her replacement is Daniel Delgado Diamante, a former lieutentant colonel in the Panama Defense Forces that were disbanded after the 1989 US invasion. At the time of the invasion Delgado was commander of the PDF garrison in San Miguelito, which put up resistance to the invading Americans. He then spent a number of months in jail without any charges with much more substance than that he was a top PDF commander, then went to law school when released. In the Pérez Balladares administration he was governor of Colon province and leader of the local Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) organization there. Before being called to head the Ministry of Government and Justice, he was head of Customs. Continuing in the ministry's number two spot is former PDF Major Severino Mejía, who was General Noriega's adjutant before the invasion. Torrijos relieved Mejías of his temporary assignment as head of the Land Transport and Transportation Authority (ATTT) and appointed another former PDF officer to replace Delgado at Customs. Heraclio Batista, was number two man at the ATTT, moved up to replace Mejía, who had been acting director of the authority.

The cabinet's single most unpopular minister, Dr. Camilo Alleyne, is out as head of the Ministry of Health, replaced by Dr. Rosario Turner, who had been chief of health care services at the Social Security Fund. Alleyne, who in his parting words to the press blasted his critics as "clowns," is widely criticized for his acts and omissions in the poisoned medicines scandal that has taken at least 102 and probably well over 600 lives.

Labor Minister Reynaldo Rivera is also history. Along with Gólcher he took a high profile in defending the murder of union activists, the promotion of illegal company unions and the government's support for the Grupo Viveros that's headed by a Colombian with a habit of making death threats in La Prensa, a French ex-attorney with a criminal record of embezzling from the Belgian bank for which he worked and President Torrijos's 2004 campaign manager Héctor Alemán. He has been replaced by Edwin Salamín, the Vice Minister of Labor who was one of the PRD representatives in the "dialogue" that privatized the Seguro Social retirement pension system.

Minister of the Presidency Ubaldino Real is one of the casualties. It had seemed that he had survived the scandal about the presidential guards, who are under his supervision, beating protesting patients who were poisoned by government-distributed cough syrup that had been tainted with toxic diethylene glycol. However, just as Torrijos was making his cabinet changes a little blurb in the gossip section of La Estrella acknowledged what had long been rumored, that Real was a naturalized US citizen. Although the issue has never come before the courts for interpretation, it appears that one who has renounced his or her Panamanian citizenship to take another is constitutionally ineligible to be a government minister. Real has been replaced by Second Vice President Rubén Arosemena, who steps down as head of the Panama Maritime Authority but stays on as the president of that entity's board of directors. Arosemena's promotion may be seen as a move to strengthen the PRD's alliance with its junior coalition partner the Partido Popular, which Arosemena heads.

Minister of Education Miguel Angel Cañizales has been replaced by Belgis Castro Herrera. Cañizales, who got his start in PRD politics as a psychologist for Manuel Antonio Noriega's G-2 intelligence and torture unit of the PDF, has not been on speaking terms with the nation's schoolteachers since the PRD created a paper organization with no membership, the Teachers Unity Coordinator (CUM) with which to conduct "contract negotiations" rather than talk to the teachers' unions, most of which were allied in the Teachers Action Front (FAM).

Noriega’s extradition to France approved, controversy continues here

On August 28 US Federal Magistrate William Turnoff approved the Bush administration’s motion to have General Manuel Antonio Noriega extradited to France. Paving the way for this ruling, which can’t be appealed, were the French government’s decisions to grant Noriega a new trial on money laundering charges and to afford him prisoner of war status. Noriega had been tried in absentia and given a 10-year sentence for Paris real estate purchases made with the proceeds of criminal activity, but such a trial by its very nature violates the US-protected right to confront one’s accuser and one of the few ways to attack an extradition request is to show that rights considered fundamental in the USA would be denied in the other jurisdiction. Under the Third Geneva Convention Noriega is a prisoner of war and does not lose that status just because he’s being tried or punished for an ordinary crime, so France’s assurance took away that objection to extradition.

Earlier, on August 24, US Federal District Judge William M. Hoeveler held General Manuel Antonio Noriega’s prisoner of war status does not shield him from extradition to a third country to face criminal charges. The decision allowed an effort to extradite Noriega to France to face money laundering charges to proceed. Unlike the magistrate’s decision on the extradition motion, the habeas corpus decision can be appealed and Noriega’s lawyers say it will be.

Hoeveler made his ruling on a narrow ground that he has no jurisdiction to grant a habeas corpus motion in Noriega’s circumstances. In dictum --- a speculative legal argument not necessary to the decision of the case --- he used scholarly commentaries on the Fourth Geneva Convention and applied them by analogy to the Third Geneva Convention, the latter which rules the treatment of prisoners of war, to conclude that “competing claims for Defendant’s extradition are matters for the Secretary of State to resolve.”

In Hoeveler’s decision he said it was not clear what the Panamanian government wanted, and that has brought about opposition demands to see all papers filed by the Panamanian government with US authorities on this matter. Vice President and Foreign Minister Samuel Lewis Navarro, a possible 2009 presidential candidate, repeatedly said that he was trying to get Noriega sent back to Panama to face justice here. However, Hoeveler’s opinion suggests that Lewis Navarro didn’t actually pursue the case. The Torrijos administration is refusing to release any of the papers, but Lewis Navarro is now promising that he will seek Noriega's extradition from France at the conclusion of the former strongman's legal troubles there.