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Bush administration plugs free trade pact despite Pedro Miguel González, but Congress kills the pact for this year

Despite what Hillary said, the dispute isn't just about a 1992 shooting now

article and photo by Eric Jackson

New York's Democratic  junior senator, Hillary Clinton, may or may not be a shoo-in for her party's 2008 presidential nomination. Hers are a name and face known to Panamanians but on Capitol Hill other people control the House and Senate committees before which the US-Panama Trade Promotion Agreement must pass muster if it is to be ratified into law.

On the Senate side, Montana's Max Baucus is the key committee leader, while in the House it's New York Representative Charles Rangel. Baucus has had little to say about the merits of the economic integration package with Panama but Rangel supports it. However, the former said several weeks ago that he's not going to let his committee debate the treaty so long as Panama's National Assembly is presided over by one Pedro Miguel González, for whom there is an outstanding US terrorism warrant in connection with the 1992 drive-by shooting death of US Army Sergeant Zak Hernandez. The latter, counting the votes, has declared that whatever he might think or President Bush might think, since the September 1 choice of leaders by Panama's legislators there is not enough support in either the House or the Senate to approve the free trade pact.

Well after that impasse became known, Hillary Clinton announced that she's against the treaty so long as González heads the National Assembly and added that "when" (if) she is president she will review the matter. Some Panamanian political analysts, presuming that Clinton has a lock on her party's nomination and that her party is almost as surely set to take the White House from the GOP in the 2008 elections, thus conclude that that's the end of that.

But things are a bit more complicated.

Although the Bush administration says that Congress should compartmentalize the González issue and pass the proposed treaty, its representatives in the US Embassy here are not letting the matter slide, and Ambassador Eaton's declarations about both the assembly president and the tenuous nature of the rule of law here are infuriating the Torrijos administration.

González says he won't step down and meanwhile the PRD has closed ranks around him --- sort of. Under the normal course of things, his term as the head of the legislative branch will end on September 1 of next year, with more than four months left in the current US administration's term, and González assures Panamanians that after this flap blows over the Americans will ratify the treaty.

How solid the assembly president's intra-party backing really is might be seen in a party election in the coming year. González is making noises about challenging Panama City Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro for party secretary and to some of the rank-and-file that could make support for the former a substantially less compelling partisan cause.

Meanwhile, González has hired Gregory Craig, the Washington lawyer who successfully defended Bill Clinton in his impeachment trial before the US Senate. In the race for the Democratic presidential nomination Craig is supporting Illinois Senator Barack Obama rather than Hillary. Although in campaign speeches Obama has criticized Clinton for supporting the NAFTA deal on which other trade pacts with Latin American countries are based, he has not raised the Panama issue as a specific difference with his opponent.

A free trade pact with Peru has passed Congress, but on the strength of Republican backing. Most Democrats opposed it, and that party rank-and-file is even more solidly against such deals. If the González affair is but a delay, treaty opponents are using it to continue their campaign in the meantime and as an illustration of some of the arguments that they had already been making.

More and more, what's happening in the United States is that González is being taken not as the issue, but as just one example of what's wrong with Panama.

Time magazine, for example, recently ran a story about a branch of the oligarchic Arias family and its lawyer Héctor Infante's strong-arm tactics in an attempt to grab a $50 million bequest from Panama's needy children. The sub-text to the story is that in Panama the entire legal system is for sale for even the most odious of purposes.

It's just a variation on the theme, another case of how everything's rigged, not all that different from the way, as embassy folks here and the Bush administration allege,  it was arranged for a 1997 sham trial before a jury of biased government employees to let Pedro Miguel González get away with murder.

The US branches of international environmentalist groups are pointing to the Torrijos administration's constant flouting of this country's laws, and the assurances about this subject given by the oily Samuel Lewis Navarro. The González affair has ruined the Panamanian administration's credibility in many Capitol Hill eyes, and now assurances previously given and accepted about other matters are subject to review and revision.

To what extent? We probably won't know that until well into 2009, and almost surely not until late next year. Don't look for the US Congress to take up the matter of free trade with Panama before the November 2008 elections. Depending on the mandate that the American people deliver on that occasion, the issue may come up in the lame duck days of the outgoing Congress and Bush presidency, but if it's a Democratic sweep the matter may well be put off until the new batch of Washington politicians is inaugurated.

Also in this section:

Environmentalists join forces against Petaquilla
Graciela Dixon picks up support, opposition

US-RP tensions going beyond Pedro Miguel González

Roadside campaigning in Chame - San Carlos
Panama News Briefs