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Lapdogs pass on disinformation about SUNTRACS, Venezuela

On February 15 Second Vice President and Minister of the Presidency Rubén Arosemena (who is, after President Torrijos, second in command of the SPI presidential guard and national intelligence unit) and Colonel Daniel Delgado Diamante of Noriega's general  staff (who's  now Minister of Government and  Justice and thus, after President Torrijos number two in the chain of command over the National Police), accompanied by National Police Chief Rolando Mirones, National Security Council chief Eric Espinoza and his assistant Guillermo Ruiz, and Ministry of the Presidency press flack Bárbara Bloise, called in a reliable batch of corporate mainstream news figures down to the Palacio de las Garzas to hear some accusations against the SUNTRACS construction workers' union. (The Panama News never gets invited to such things, because they know they'd get hard questions from this medium.) In attendance were Telemetro's Atenógenes Rodríguez, TVN's Lucy Molinar, SERTV's Marielena Barrios, RCM's Fernando Fernández, Radio W's Edwin Cabrera, La Prensa's Gionela Jordán, El Panama America's Guido Rodríguez and La Estrella's Gerardo Berroa Loo.

The government team told those they assembled that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez was behind that week's public disturbances.

Say what? The riots were not touched off when the National Police attacked injured union members going into a hospital for medical attention, shooting one of their number in the back?

Nope. VP Arosemena, Colonel Delgado et al assured the press that Venezuela, by way of one Fernando Bossi, an Argentine-Venezuelan dual citizen who's the secretary of a regional organization called the Bolivarian Peoples' Congress, is the source of support on which the SUNTRACS construction workers' union relies.

You mean, not the dues of the SUNTRACS members? It's Hugo Chávez's oil money behind those strikes and street blockades and demands for construction site safety? Surely they would have some documents to show money trail.

Nope. As Arosemena's fellow Partido Popular member, attorney, newspaper columnist and former Panama City mayor Willy Cochez spun it, it was "logistical and transportation" support.

So they'd have the documents outlining how Venezuela provided a fleet of vehicles for SUNTRACS, right?

Nope. But the government people did produce a greeting said to have been offered by SUNTRACS to Colombia's ELN guerrillas.

Most of the obedient hacks marched dutifully off to their newsrooms to spread the word about Venezuela's destabilization plot against Panama. This country's fount of GOP-aligned and generally pirated English-language disinformation, Don Winner, followed suit and put the allegations up on his website.

But some of the reporters who were called in, maybe at the behest of their editors or news directors, were a bit more cautious.

After all, do not Panama and Venezuela have fairly close bilateral diplomatic ties? Hasn't Martín Torrijos himself been seen acting chummy with Hugo Chávez?

On February 19, Lewis Navarro called in the foreign correspondents and announced that there is no information that Venezuela had anything to do with the previous week's street protests. "I want to be categoric," he said. "There is no information that indicates or even suggests that there is an intervention by the Venezuelan government in the internal affairs of Panama."

Some of Arosemena's lapdogs kept it up, insisting that Lewis Navarro was really splitting hairs, that Fernando Bossi really is behind SUNTRACS. Some, noting the contradictions after having first reported the initial allegations as if they were unquestionably true, complained that one or the other of the vice presidents had lied to them.

Delgado, Mirones and the others who were there to back Arosemena's allegations? They clammed up. All of a sudden nobody from the government team wanted to admit having been there.

SUNTRACS, for its part, was not amused. It issued a statement that accused the Torrijos administration of waging a "dirty campaign" against Venezuela and of being so desperate that it has to "take recourse to disgraceful lies and deceptions." Comparing the whole operation to those of Noriega's G-2, the union alleged that "like in old times, without proof or foundation they pressure the news media to echo these lies."

So what does it mean? It's a relatively minor gaffe on Delgado's and Mirones's part, at least in comparison to the previous few day's performance in which they had ordered police attacks on hospitals, in the course of one of which an unarmed man seeking medical attention was shot in the back and killed; and then ordered a series of raids on the slain labor activist's mother's house, the last of which brought the cops under sniper fire that wounded four of their number and obliged them to retreat from the La Feria neighborhood of Colon.

But President Torrijos married the daughter of the ad cartel's founder, spends more than $70 grand a day on ads to pump up his image and has used his influence to take critical voices off of television and out of some of the major newspapers. Now his vice presidents were playing foolish games that tend to ruin whatever is left of the reputations of the administration's chorus of media acolytes.

Lewis Navarro was once promoted as a 2009 PRD presidential candidate, but he excited no support whatsoever within the party. Arosemena is head of a Partido Popular that's likely to be thrown out of its coalition with the PRD ahead of the next election, and face some unappealing choices if it wants to survive with ballot status.

Take this embarrassment as one more sign that the president is losing control over his administration and his party. Yes, he will have the power to hire and fire people until September 1 of next year. Yes, with support from delegates whose primary loyalty is to others within the party, he will likely fend off Toro Pérez Balladares's hostile bid to win the party presidency. But these contradictory statements are more or less the sounds that lame ducks make.