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Torrijos lashes out against people making video about his dad's crimes
by Eric Jackson

Colonel Daniel Delgado Diamante, who was a member of General Noriega's general staff and as President Torrijos's Minister of Government and Justice is in charge of the National Police, was the one who owed an apology. It was the Supreme Court's presiding magistrate, Harley Mitchell, who apologized for the conduct of Delagado's subordinates instead.

On April 1 a group of Costa Rican students was making a video about the May 14, 1970 disappearance, torture and murder of labor activist Heliodoro Portugal by the dictatorship headed by President Martin Torrijos's father, General Omar Torrijos, taping Portugal's daughter and son, Patria and Franklin Portugal, in front of the Supreme Court building in Ancon. National Police First Sergeant Encarnación Rodríguez, in plainclothes and exiting one of the Supreme Court's official cars, pointed a pistol at the Portugals and the film crew. Reinforcements from the National Police came and took the video crew and the Portugals to the Balboa police station, where they were taken prisoner. After several hours under arrest, a night court judge in San Felipe released the victims of the assault with a deadly weapon.

On what loophole in the law were the Portugals and the video crew released? Quite simply, there is no law against shooting a video in front of the Supreme Court. Actually, there are provisions in the dictatorship's constitution, which is still in effect, providing for freedom of the press.

Under what loophole was the sergeant not charged with assault? In keeping with the dictatorship's traditions, there is often an unofficial but real impunity for criminal acts by people employed by or supported by the government. In the past year Delgado has repeatedly stood up for cops who have shot unarmed labor activists, even when prosecutors have brought charges. Patria Portugal says that she's pressing charges in the matter.

The day after the incident the high court's presiding magistrate, Harley Mitchell, offered his apology and acknowledged that it's not against the law to make a video in front of the courthouse.

The Center for Justice and International Law lodged a protest with Panama's First Vice President and Foreign Minister, Samuel Lewis Navarro, and this was picked up by Spain's EFE news agency. It would have been just a blip in the news, and to many people it was --- except that on that very day the United Nations Human Rights Committee was considering its report on human rights practices in Panama.

In earlier hearings the committee members from the UK, Sir Nigel Rodley, and from Tunisia, Abdelfatah Amor, had questioned President Torrijos's suppression of the Truth Commission that had been investigating the abuses of the dictatorship and the Panamanian courts' attempts to construe a statute of limitation on the dictatorship's tortures and murders that by international law and the letter of Panamanian law are not subject to such impunity.

Three days after the Portugals and the Tico video crew were arrested, the UN committee issued its report, which among other things took Panama to task for the very matters that Rodley and Amor had brought up.

Heliodoro Portugal was a printer and union organizer who was arrested and held at the old Carcel Modelo for several months in the roundup of labor activists that was undertaken in the immediate wake of the October 11, 1968 military coup. On May 14, 1970 he had been meeting with friends at the Coca-Cola Cafe in Santa Ana and as he walked out the door he was grabbed by plainclothes members of the G-2 intelligence unit then headed by Manuel Antonio Noriega and thrown into a taxi. In 1999 his bones were found in a tunnel under a parking lot at the former Puma Infantry Company barracks in Tocumen.

The attorney general and prosecutors at the time that the skeletal remains were found resisted the DNA tests that finally identifed them as belonging to Portugal. The search intitially pointed toward Portugal due to a series of investigative reports by journalist Rafael Pérez Jaramillo. Ultimately, after a televised show of prosecutors mishandling the remains, tests financed by the Catholic Church were grudgingly accepted by authorities.

However, the authorities at the time argued that there could be no criminal investigation because the Portugal family, afraid of retaliation, didn't file a complaint until after the dictatorship was removed in the 1989 US invasion; that at the time of that complaint there could be no murder case because no body had been found and that a statute of limitation applied for murders in which the victim is disappeared; and that once the family's complaint had been dismissed, that barred a reopening of the case once the body was found.

That bizarre series of pseudo-legal theories was rejected by Sossa's successor, the current Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez. However, an attempt to prosecute one Ricardo Garibaldo, who was a captain and commander of the Puma Infantry at the time of Portugal's murder and later retired from the Panama Defense Forces as a colonel, ended when Garibaldo died while awaiting trial under house arrest.

Patria Portugal, meanwhile, sued the Panamanian government civilly and, having been rejected by the courts here, appealed to the Inter-American Human Rights Court. At a hearing on the case earlier this year, the Torrijos administration took the position that the court has no jurisdiction over the case because the murder took place before the court was created and before Panama agreed to the treaty giving it jurisdiction in such cases. In similar situations arising for General Pinochet's Chilean dictatorship, the court has rejected such arguments.

The case before the Inter-American Human Rights Court is still pending, but in any case successive Panamanian administrations have disrespected that tribunal's decisions they didn't like. Martín Torrijos is expected to continue that practice in this case as well, if the court rules in the Portugal family's favor as expected.