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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

Panama News Briefs

FSU-Panama to move next year

The Panama Canal campus of Florida State University will have to move by the end of next year, so that the new international maritime university can take over the facility in 2009. Exactly where FSU will move is still up in the air. The plan had been a move to Cardenas, but the Torrijos administration developed other plans for the intended site and the university and government are talking about other possibilities. FSU-Panama is part of the City of Knowledge, but the foundation that runs that project is more or less a dependency of the University of Panama and consequently a PRD political patronage fiefdom, and its asking prices for space at the former Fort Clayton tend to be high. FSU-Panama rector Carlos Langoni, however, expects that an acceptable arrangement will be made shortly.

Martín's standing in polls varies

President Torrijos by any measure has lost popularity points this year, but due to different polling methodologies there are different interpretations of how popular or unpopular he really is. A Dichter & Neira poll taken for and published by La Prensa has the president climbing a couple of points in the past month, up to 57.2 percent giving him a "good" or "very good" grade. A year ago Torrijos had an approval rating of 66.1 percent. Either way, it's an unusually high rating for a president at this point in his or her term. However, a poll of most Latin American countries by Latinobarometro found that only 28.1 percent of Panamanians approved of the Torrijos administration, as compared to 38 percent who disapproved. By that pollster's measure, Panama has one of the least popular governments in the region. The big difference is that Dichter & Neira's method doesn't allow for a neutral opinion while Latinobarometro and others do. A lot of Panamanians dislike and distrust politicians and governmental institutions in general, but since the economy is doing reasonably well are not particularly annoyed with Torrijos. These people will show a neutral opinion of the president when given the option, but when the only choices are positive or negative tend to give positive marks.

Is she a Cristina or a Hillary?

One of the major things that separates Vivian Fernández de Torrijos from Argentine President-elect Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is that our first lady has never held elected public office. However, on November 15 Vivian got to play president for a day, chairing an expanded Cabinet Council meeting that also included Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez and the members of the Supreme Court, to discuss a proposed comprehensive new law on childhood and adolescence. The first lady is an officially recognized job in Panama, which has a budget generally used for partisan publicity and about which there are gray areas like whether it is subject to public scrutiny under the Transparency Law.

González Ruiz edges Chung in MOLIRENA race

At a November 11 leadership convention businessman Sergio González Ruiz narrowly defeated former legislator Gisela Chung to win the presidency of the Nationalist Republican Liberal Movement (MOLIRENA), a conservative business-oriented political party long beset by defections, purges and faction fights. González Ruiz says he wants to run for president of Panama in 2009, but it's more likely that MOLIRENA will be part of an anti-PRD unity coalition with a slate headed by somebody else.

Varela for a constituent assembly

Juan Carlos Varela, the Panameñista Party president who wants to be the unified opposition candidate for president in 2009, said on a November 18 campaign swing through San Miguelito aimed at signing up younger voters as party members that if he becomes president he'll convene a constituent assembly to write a new constitution. The Panamanian government operates according to a modified version of the constitution inherited from the military dictatorship that was removed by US military action in 1989 --- to the extent that the constitution is actually followed.                 

Housing Ministry declares its files "confidential"

Housing Minister Balbina Herrera, who wants to be elected mayor of Panama City in 2009, hotly denies any and all allegations of an attack on transparency. However, on October 19 regulations that she decreed declared the reports in the Housing Ministry's (MIVI's) files to be "confidential" --- that is, exempt from public disclosure under Panama's Transparency Law. The decree adds to a growing fight about urban development and people's right to know about proposed new buildings in their neighborhoods. Earlier the city had taken the position that architects' plans for new buildings are confidential intellectual property and all information with them are likewise --- which would mean that neighbors who might accept a three-story apartment building next door but who would be very upset about a 53-story tower on the same lot wouldn't have the right to know what sort of a building is contemplated. The closing of MIVI reports to public scrutiny would mean, for example, if there's a public hearing on a rezoning and a ministry analyst concluded in a report that a proposed change would lead to traffic gridlock and overflowed sewers that opinion would be kept out of the public discussion. The Panameñista Party's communicating secretary, Luis Eduardo Camacho, has sued in the Supreme Court in an attempt to void the decree.

Gómez moves to drop charges against Cornejo

Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez has petitioned the Third Bench of the Supreme Court to drop charges against anti-corruption prosecutor Maribel Cornejo. The motion is not an attack on the legal theories involved, that a high court magistrate's immunity from investigation and prosecution not only survives his or her tenure on the court but also his or her death, and that this immunity extends to people who were accomplices with the magistrate in any criminal activity and don't enjoy immunity in their own right. Outgoing Supreme Court president Graciela Dixon accused Cornejo of abuse of authority and attacking the personality of the government for allegedly looking into suspicions that aides of deceased high court magistrate César Pereira Burgos had been involved in bribery scheme that got proceedings against former President Ernesto Pérez Balladares in the PECC scandal thrown out. It appears that the bribery suspicion against Pereira Burgos was misplaced, but that the essence of the allegation against the former president --- that he is or was a secret part owner of PECC, a company that during his administration got the lucrative contract to maintain the nation's maritime buoys and lighthouses --- is true. Pereira Burgos and most of his other colleagues voted to dismiss the case against Pérez Balladares on procedural grounds. The bribe suspicion arose from a large loan given to Pereira Burgos by a close friend of both the judge and the ex-president --- but there was no attempt to conceal the loan from anybody. (In most places other than Panama a judge's acceptance of such a loan would be considered unethical, but conduct giving rise to the appearance of impropriety is the judicial norm here.) In any case, Gómez is not saying that the extensions of magistrates immunity underlying Dixon's criminal complaint are improper, but only that Cornejo had no criminal intent when she looked into the matter, a showing of which would be needed to support the charges lodged against her.

Criminal procedure debate put off

Meeting just once a week, a presidential commission of judges, prosecutors, legislators and lawyers that was set up to draft a proposed new Code of Criminal Procedure has determined that things were moving too slowly to have a proposal ready for the legislature this year. Thus the National Assembly is not going to take up the matter in this session. That may extend the life of the Judicial Technical Police (PTJ), as part of the package was to be a reorganization of the Public Ministry that would break up that agency and take most of its functions out of the hands of the Attorney General and put them under the National Police director. The legislature started on the criminal procedure issue in the first session of 2007 and passed a partial reform to gut the PTJ but then got bogged down on the rest, so put off the PTJ reorganization law until the end of this year. Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez wants that PTJ law repealed. One of the big issues of criminal procedure reform is the notion that instead of the combination of investigating and judging functions that magistrates under Civil Code systems of law perform, Panama should adopt features of the Common Law system in which prosecutors present cases, defense lawyers defend against them and judges conduct the trials and render decisions but leave the investigations to the parties. This idea has its supporters and detractors, and would require some major re-education of everyone who works in the criminal law system if it is enacted. Another important aim of procedural reform is to make it easier to dismiss an unworthy criminal charge, whether by plea bargaining (currently not allowed) or by summary dismissal.

Lower court approves disappearance case

In recent years the Supreme Court, led by its president Graciela Dixon, has been prohibiting investigations and trials for murders, torture and disappearances committed under the old dictatorship. However, there are also high court decisions allowing such procedures and Dixon is on her way out at the end of the year. Thus the ultimate prospects remain clouded, but the Second Superior Tribunal has by a 2-1 decision approved the opening of a criminal case against Edilberto del Cid Dueñas, the former commander of the Machos del Monte infantry unit, for the August 7, 1969 abduction and subsequent murder of Belisario Gantes.

Gangland hit ends one part of a controversy

Is Richard Schueler an innocent investor who was betrayed by a cabal of lawyers and accomplices who stole his property, or just a con man? The issue is before the courts and hotly debated in some circles, with evidence proffered by the different sides to the public or available with a little bit of research not clear enough to convince The Panama News one way or the other. As to one of those whom Schueler has accused, however, the courts are not going to find him innocent or guilty. Late on November 10 in the Sea Cliff area of Santa Clara 35-year-old Ruperto Antonio Henry Marshall --- "Tony Henry" --- was shot in the back of the neck execution-style and left dead by the side of the road. Schueler claims that lawyers convinced him that his property was under threat and that to avoid its loss he should give Tony Henry a general power of attorney, which was then allegedly used to transfer his property to the lawyers and their confederates. The people whom Schueler accuses have a very different version.

Illegal logs busted, officials fired

On November 9 ANAM agents confiscated some 130 cubic meters of illegally harvested timber from Darien province coming into Panama City aboard the ship "Buen Pastor." This is the largest ever illegal timber seizure for Panama. The case took another turn a few days later when ANAM fired two officials, one in the capital and one in the Darien, for allegedly being part of the illegal logging ring.

FECE's officials allegedly play dirty

FECE is the Ministry of Education's Equity and Quality of Education Fund, and the accountant in its San Miguelito office is one Joaquina Gallardo, who happens to be the niece of Vice Minister of Education Sonia Smith. According to documents obtained by El Panama America, Gallardo and a few other people in that office improperly wrote themselves checks to withdraw about $100,000 from the fund, which is supposed to be used to renovate San Miguelito's dilapidated elementary schools, in their favor. The teachers' unions are demanding prosecution to the full extent of the law and pointing to the affair as an example of the Torrijos administration's low regard for public education.

Oops! Wrong guy...

Miguel Ángel Pastor Morales was leaving a fair at ATLAPA early on November 17 when a gang of hoodlums set upon him and forced their way into his car. It turned out to be a case of mistaken identity, so the kidnappers parked in the Plaza Edison, threw him in the trunk and went away. Luckily for Pastor, he still had his cell phone and was able to summon help before he suffocated.

No criminal charges in architect's shooting death

Prosecutors have decided that nobody will have to answer for the shooting death of architect Cristina María "Gina" García de Paredes Eleta. While taking care of some business at the IDAAN water and sewer utility office in Corozal, a gang attempted a robbery. The neighbors there happen to be the headquarters Institutional Protection Service (SPI), Panama's presidential guards and spy agency. SPI agents poured out of their HQ, surrounded the building and began to shoot. The architect was taken hostage and was shot to death. The SPI first alleged that one of the robbers had killed her, but none of their weapons could have fired the bullet. After some delay 31 SPI weapons were collected and ballistics tests allegedly showed a 98 percent probability that it was a specific one of these that fired the bullet that killed the hostage. But prosecutors say that's not beyond a reasonable doubt and are declining to look into the key issues of command and control, even though it was a specific violation of SPI policies to open fire in such a way as to endanger a hostage. Panama doesn't have a felony murder rule like most US states, which holds that someone committing a felony such as an armed robbery is held responsible if a person is killed by someone else in the course of that crime, so the robbers will not be charged in the death.

Heavy rains threaten historic landmark

La Prensa reports that the 387-year-old Puente del Rey (King's Bridge) in Panama Viejo is threatened by this year's unusually heavy rains and the prospect that we may be into a new climate cycle that gives us more of the same in years to come. The rains are sending torrents down the Rio Abajo, which may erode the bridge's foundations. Experts from the Ministry of Public Works and the National Institute of Culture are looking at various options to protect the historic structure.

Bomberos inspecting sprinkler systems

Panama City's fire department (Cuerpo de Bomberos) is sending out inspectors to all buildings that are protected against fire by sprinkler systems. It has been awhile since they have done those inspections on anything but new buildings, and the campaign is to ensure that established systems are functioning.

2008 Panama Carnival on Transistmica again

Inventing 2007 success that a lot of people would dispute, Panama City Carnival Committee president Mingthoy Giro said that next year's festivities will also take place on the Transistmica. In the last Carnival long lines and police searches failed to prevent a shooting incident, the area had to be contracted at the last moment to avoid drunken revelry in front of houses of worship, a lot of business owners complained about having to close for several days and most of the activity was squeezed in front of one stage, with sardine-can crowds there and nothing going on most the time in the rest of the Carnival area. The 2008 Carnival is February 1-5.

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