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Torrijos keeps internal party foes at bay but depends on folks he doesn't control
by Eric Jackson

Who's left and who's right, who's a "Martinista" and who's not, how the Democratic Revolutionary Party's (PRD's) factions align today and how they will stack up tomorrow --- all of these questions are being spun in various ways by different observers. The truth of the matter is that President Torrijos more or less had a slate of people personally loyal to him in the January 20 voting for party convention delegates and by and large these candidates went down to defeat.

The winners were by and large members of local slates, in the capital loyal primarily to the representantes, in many other places loyal to legislators. Various national party figures might count them among the ranks of their supporters at a given moment but notions of control would be illusions.

After a questionable counting process that lasted the better part of two weeks, arms were twisted, incentives were offered and people at least not overtly hostile to President Torrijos prevailed at the regional "congresillos." But there the contests were often not clear-cut.

After the January 20 voting, Housing Minister Balbina Herrera said that her followers had won 95 percent of the delegate races. Panama City Juan Carlos Navarro scoffed at that, estimating that the 45 percent of delegates he said were in his camp were the party's largest block. Former President Ernesto "Toro" Pérez Balladares made similar but more muted claims of victory.

Some recent party history is needed to help decipher all this.

Understand that Navarro and Pérez Balladares are declared candidates for the PRD's 2009 presidential nomination and that polls consistently show that within the party and among the public at large Balbina, who has said she is running for mayor of Panama City rather than president, is the most popular possibility to succeed Torrijos. Bear in mind that the first lady in particular and the president in general were a year ago boosting the 2009 presidential aspirations of the mayor's cousin, Vice President and Foreign Minister Samuel Lewis Navarro. Take into account that this time last year Mayor Navarro was intending to run for the party presidency against Pérez Balladares as a preliminary to a presidential primary contest, but then Torrijos intervened to get the mayor to step down in favor of Herrera as the unity candidate for the party presidency against the ex-president.

Samuel "Perro" Lewis Navarro, despite public barbs and some even nastier whispers against his cousin, failed to gain any traction at all with the public at large, although eventually polls showed that he was able to shatter the glass ceiling of one percent support among party members and get into single digits. It was a nonstarter onto which the president clung for many months, but now it is generally accepted that Lord Ashcroft's Panamanian business partner is not going to be the PRD nominee, much less the president of Panama. Ashcroft, the owner of Belize and former treasurer of the British Conservative Party, who recently lost his Australian influence with the ouster of John Howard, will have to buy a different dog if he is to extend his imperial holdings in Panama.

Toro retained a far more substantial base of support than Lewis Navarro was ever able to muster, and by this time last year he had been lobbing political spitballs at Torrijos for some time. His criticism of the current president has generally revolved around the point that Torrijos is a dull-witted, inept mistake that the party made by confusing his abilities with those of his late father, the dictator General Omar Torrijos. Those sentiments resonated within large sectors of the party. Unfortunately for Pérez Balladares, many PRD members who are unhappy with the current administration remember the August 1998 referendum on presidential re-election and how it squandered public support for the party, and Toro's petulant behavior afterwards which many argue was the main factor behind the PRD's defeat in 1999. Moreover, even if the guy with masters' degrees from Notre Dame and Wharton wants to be an academic snob about the Aggie frat boy and McDonald's shift manager, Torrijos still holds many strings of power and, clumsy as he may sometimes be, is effective enough at manipulating them to avoid humiliation by a has been.

The argument between Torrijos and Pérez Balladares is entirely about egos and ambitions. They both represent policies of privatization, union busting and subservience to international financial institutions. If Pérez Balladares attempts to play an anti-American card in his rivalry with Torrijos, that's mainly because Toro lost his US visa for his participation in the racket of illegal immigration of Chinese citizens into the United States and thus has little to lose by portraying the current president as an obsequious lackey of the Americans.

But other ideological divisions within the PRD aren't nearly so easy to dismiss even if they are hard to precisely chart.

Toro, Torrijos and Lewis Navarro are all identified with policies of selling off the country's assets to foreign interests, destroying or weakening the labor movement and cutting back on environmental and other regulations that might interfere with corporate profits.

There is an alleged "leftist tendency" going back to the young party militants of the 70s and 80s, the most prominent of which is said to be Balbina Herrera. Included on that list are legislator and former Torrijos campaign manager Héctor Alemán and National Assembly president Pedro Miguel González, and sometimes Public Works Minister Benjamín Colamarco (formerly head of General Noriega's Dignity Battalions goon squad) and Education Minister Belgis Castro (formerly a psychologist for Noriega's G-2 torture/intelligence unit).

Viewed in terms of the interests they represent and look to for financing, there are strong ties with the construction and real estate industries here, especially in the cases of Herrera, Alemán and Colamarco. Alemán is a junior partner with the thuggish Colombian developer Gustavo De La Cruz of the Isla Viveros upscale residential community and resort project, whose partners also include convicted French swindler Andre Beladina. De La Cruz notoriously declared in La Prensa that if the SUNTRACS construction workers' union was not removed from Isla Viveros people would be killed. The Ministry of Labor then obliged De La Cruz by a most unusual decertification of SUNTRACS and the National Police lent their support by shooting and killing unarmed SUNTRACS member Luiyi Argüelles.

The "left" allegation here seems to be mainly a matter of conservatives out of the Christian Democratic tradition confusing propensities toward violence and ties with capitalists who are less respectable than the blue chip corporate varieties with the working class allegiances and notions of social solidarity by which most leftists define themselves.

And Mayor Navarro --- what's he? Because he's from a rich family --- the Tropigas people --- and has properly bourgeois educational credentials (Dartmouth and Harvard), he gets pigeonholed as a rightist by some observers. However, he came to the PRD from the environmentalist movement and over the course of the Torrijos administration has staked out some positions opposing both the president and Balbina Herrera on a series of issues that include opposition to commercial developments on Ancon Hill, the Petaquilla strip mine, a Clayton housing project on the site of the old Camino de Cruces, the capture of dolphins for entertainment or export and so on.

And if Torrijos was getting along well with Herrera and Pedro Miguel González a year ago, they embarrass him today. The massive Educational Quality and Equity Fund (FECE) embezzlement scandal centers almost entirely around people who were part of the inner circle of Balbina's San Miguelito entourage. González's election to head the legislature has poisoned Panama's relations with the United States and frozen the chances for US ratification of the bilateral free trade agreement with Panama.

So coming out of the January 20 delegate election and into the congresillos and the March 9 congress, there were myriad local organizations of shiftable loyalty, a president without much of a delegate base of his very own but with political patronage and other levers at his disposal, Toro's faction, Mayor Navarro's faction and a slate led by Balbina Herrera and Héctor Alemán. Torrijos allied himself with the mayor, handing Balbina a stinging rebuke in the San Miguelito regional elections by routing her slate in the place which had in the past elected her as its mayor and later as its legislator. Only in a few places like Chepo, where a slate fielded by the Duque clan and opposed to a hydroelectric dam that the president supports won, and Santa Fe de Veraguas, where Pedro Miguel González's slate rolled over its opponents, did people not backed by the president win the congresillos.

That sent the party to its March 9 showdown at Rodney Carew National Stadium with the president allied with and dependent upon the mayor to push back a big challenge by Balbina (whom Torrijos had earlier supported against Navarro for the party presidency) and to a lesser extent by Toro.

How did it turn out?

La Prensa, whose editorial line is pretty much oriented toward the PRD, played it as a matter of Torrijos maintaining an iron grip on the party's rudder. That daily called Toro's slate "reformist" and noted that it was shut out. It counts the results of the races for the nine members of the national executive committee as having been won 6-3 by the Torrijos slate. That includes Torrijos himself as secretary general, Mayor Navarro as first undersecretary, fourth undersecretary Belgis Castro, businessman Rodrigo Díaz as fifth undersecretary, legislator Elías Castillo as first vice president and Benjamín Colamarco as second vice president. Balbina herself was elected party president and the winners from her slate also included Héctor Alemán as second undersecretary and Pedro Miguel González as third undersecretary.

La Estrella, whose editorial line is set by Partido Popular members, played it as a leftist victory, with five alleged leftists --- Herrera, Castro, Colamarco, Alemán and González --- holding the majority.

If the presidential primary race is between Toro and the mayor, don't look for Pérez Balladares to get much backing from members of the National Executive Committee. But if the presidential primary is between Balbina Herrera and Juan Carlos Navarro, don't look at the mayor's alliance with the president for the party elections and Balbina's slate's defeat at the hands of this alliance as any guarantee that the mayor will have most of the party leadership in his corner.

The headline of a story published on the eve of the January 20 voting in the British magazine The Economist may have summed up what happened in the weeks that followed very well: "President Torrijos's grip is beginning to falter." But just beginning. He has to rely on allies whom he doesn't control, but he's still at least formally in charge of the PRD.

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