Panama News briefs through April 25

Panama News Briefs

Artes y Oficios principal shot by cops

Artes y Oficios, the vocational high school across the street from the University of Panama where many of Panama's skilled construction workers learn their trades, began the school year with its workshops in disrepair and lacking certain equipment and materials. The Ministry of Education announced that the problem would be fixed --- by October. The school year ends in December. The boys at Artes y Oficios, many of them the kids of members of the militant SUNTRACS construction workers and many destined to join the same union, reacted as is customary --- they masked their faces and took to the streets to do battle with riot police, also allegedly caused some damage to the school and the bus stop in front of the school. In three days of rioting one driver complained of being assaulted and robbed, and a police lieutenand complained that the little monsters injured his toe. The police, meanwhile, responded rather indiscriminately with tear gas and bird shot. They gassed not only Artes y Oficios, but also the University of Panama and the Arnulfo Arias Hospital Complex. When the gas went into the university, some of the campus radicals poured out into the street to join in the battle. At The Panama News office in Perejil, which is close to Santa Fe Hospital and about a mile away from Artes y Oficios, we also got an eye-stinging dose of gas. Among those injured by the bird shot fired by police was Artes y Oficios principal Luis Powell, who was hit in the side of the face while trying to intervene to calm the situation. After the three days of disturbances the school was closed and parents were summoned and told that they had to pay $11,000 for various damage. The parents took a vote and declared that they won't pay a cent.

Cops accused in businessman's abduction

Three employees of the National Police have been arrested for alleged roles in April 3 abduction of 66-year-old Cuban-American businessman Cecilio Padrón in Panama City. Padrón, who has real estate investments here, was taken when returning to his home in Costa del Este and is still missing. According to reports published in various newspapers his family says that it has received communications from his abductors but no specific ransom demand. According to La Prensa, one of the cops has confessed and named a Colombian as the mastermind behind the crime. So how were the cops caught? The National Police say by one of those little video cameras that have been springing up around the city of late, which recorded an image of their paddywagon escorting the vehicle in which Padrón was kidnapped.

Dictatorship's goon dies under house arrest

Nivaldo Madriñán Aponte, who headed the National Department of Investigations (DENI) when General Noriega was dictator and before that served under Noriega in the G-2 espionage and torture unit, died of complications from kidney failure on April 17. He was 62 years old. Madriñán was technically a prisoner, having been convicted of kidnapping in the 1971 disappearance of Father Héctor Gallego and having been implicated in a number of other deaths, robberies and acts of brutality. However, due to his kidney disease he was released to house arrest after having served 12 years in prison. Madriñán died without ever having spoken to clarify the facts of Gallego's fate or the whereabouts of his remains. The most commonly believed version of what happened to the priest was that he was abducted and killed because he founded a Santa Fe, Veraguas farmers' cooperative that competed with a business owned by then-dictator Omar Torrijos, the father of our current president, and that the priest was thrown from a helicopter high over the Pacific Ocean, at a point where the current would have taken the body out to sea. The failure to find a body has, due to old Vatican rules, meant that Gallego can't be declared a saint as many Catholics think he should be. The cooperative that Gallego founded, however, has thrived and is the largest business enterprise in Santa Fe.

Police major charged in beating death under house arrest

Prosecutors say that National Police Major Emilio León supervised the beating death of La Joyita inmate Daniel Vela Rodríguez and the clumsy subsequent attempt to cover it up by claiming that the injuries were from a fall out of a tree. The medical examiner showed that the police explanation --- supported by de León's superiors --- was patently false and a number of eyewitnesses to the beating said the same, so the major and two other officers were charged with murder by prosecutors. Generally one is incarcerated to await trial on a murder charge, especially when one is alleged to be the ringleader. But Major León is living at home while a prosecutor studies his lawyer's petition to allow him to await trial under house arrest. Health reasons are proffered in the petition, but there is a prison ward at Santo Tomas Hospital where those with health problems who are awaiting trial for murder are generally treated.

Civic group protests house arrest for Noriega-era bank chief

Rafael Arosemena was head of the Banco Nacional de Panama under the Noriega dictatorship and at the time of the 1989 US invasion he fled to Mexico. Tried and convicted in absentia for large-scale embezzlement from the bank, after Martín Torrijos became president Arosemena flew back to Panama in his private jet and was promptly arrested. However, after a few months in El Renacer Penitentiary near Gamboa, the aging ex-banker was allowed to serve his time under house arrest due to illness. Late last year the Institute of Legal Medicine opined that Arosemena should return to prison but the Torrijos administration has not accepted that recommendation. Now the Alianza Ciudadana Pro Justicia, a coalition of professional, human rights and civic groups, is pressing the government to put Arosemena back in jail, pointing out that prisoners who aren't millionaires like him routinely suffer through terminal illnesses under incarceration and demanding a single standard.

Hunger strike in David over inmate's death

On April 14 inmates in David's jail staged a hunger strike to protest the death of prisoner Segundo Batista Hernández. Batista, awaiting trial on murder and robbery charges, died in his cell the week before after a tear gassing by police. The other prisoners claimed that the police caused the death and were trying to block a genuine investigation into the matter.

Roundup in Cocle

It was one of those "social prophylaxis operations," wherein the police roust suspicious looking people and those committing petty crimes, across Cocle province on the weekend of April 19 and 20. The haul was 34 people, including some minors caught out after curfew, some foreigners with their papers not in order and some junkie or mentally ill - looking types.

Cops beat heads in Santiago

Students from the Normal School in Veraguas were tear gassed and beaten on April 17, when they tried to block the Pan-American Highway to protest a Torrijos administration attempt to legislate their school's legal status. There were 20 arrests and 40 minor injuries, mostly reactions to heavy tear gas exposure.

Martín's DR license to steal was tax-free

The high pay for virtually no work contract that a company owned by President Torrijos and former Minister of the Presidency Ubaldino Real had with the Dominican Republic between 2001 and 2004 had an extra advantage. Newspapers in Panama and the DR, relying on Dominican tax records, note that the company, Land & Construction, a subsidiary of Torrijos's and Real's Constructores y Consultores SA, paid no taxes on the $300,000 per year it got from the Dominican public works ministry.

Another school embezzlement case

Auditors for the Ministry of Education have discovered about $200,000 missing from the Escuela Aserrio in Bugaba, Chiriqui. El Panama America reports that the former principal is the main suspect.

President's uncle beats the rap

First he was allowed to jump ahead of someone else who had applied to Reforma Agraria to get the property. Then, despite the fact that it was a government-owned mangrove forest that's not supposed to be privatized, he got it at a tiny fraction of its market value. Then, in violation of environmental laws, he bulldozed 38 hectares of mangroves. No problem. La Chorrera judge Ricardo Mazza created a special standard and came up with an amazing finding of fact: bulldozing a mangrove forest doesn't do "irreversible damage to the eco-system," so Rodolfo "Charro" Espino was found not guilty. Well, of course. To President Torrijos, you see, the defendant is "Uncle Charro." Environmentalist leader and University of Panama biologist Ariel Rodríguez blasted the reasoning behind the decision as an scientific and environmental absurdity. Panama's coastal fisheries depend on the mangroves for their nutrients and as hatcheries upon which the marine food chain depends, and the wetland forests also filter a lot of pollution that would otherwise get into the sea.

Former legislator doesn't beat the rap

Carlos Santana --- the former Arnulfista legislator from Veraguas, not the Mexican rock musician who can make his guitar cry --- has been sent to jail for six months for using public funds for his 2004 campaign. The Electoral Tribunal has, on the other hand, allowed the use of public funds for political campaigning by the current PRD regime.

Murder conviction in American retiree's death

Marlon Enrique Hunter won't be at large for awhile. He was convicted in the May 2004 robbery and slaying of American retiree Jill Canganelli, who was forced to sign checks to various individuals allied to Hunter, forced to drive to a forested area near Gamboa, then shot in the head. Four co-defendants were acquitted of murder but are still in prison on charges of receiving stolen property in the case.

Criminal Procedure Code passes on first reading

Dictatorship-era Supreme Court magistrate Jerry Wilson, now the pro-corruption president of the National Assembly's Government and Justice Committee, says that "95 percent" of what people who had participated in the process of consultation to write a new Code of Criminal Procedure is included in the version that was passed on first reading by the committee on April 22. Which 95 percent, hardly anybody knows because the document has not been published. Anti-corruption and civic groups are demanding time to read the document before it gets jammed the rest of the way through the legislative process. Wilson has been an adamant backer of procedural rules that make it virtually impossible to investigate, prosecute or punish acts of political corruption. The committee has attached the label "urgent" to the proposed law, but not, according to Wilson, to jam it through the legislature without opportunity for public disclosure and debate. It would need that status to go into effect at about the same time that the new Penal Code does next month. However, that's going to be a problem to the extent that it will be expected that lawyers and judges will adjust to new procedures with less than a month of preparation. Anticipating that problem, Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez has called for a transitional period to implement the new rules.

SUNTRACS leader on trial

Saúl Méndez, the number two leader of the militant SUNTRACS construction workers' union, will go on trial on April 29 for allegedly hiring a thug to start a shooting incident at a labor protest last year. On Frederic Mayre, a petty hoodlum with a long record of arrests and convictions, said that Méndez paid him $500 and gave him a pistol to start a shooting incident at an August 16, 2007 protest march in response to the killing by an Odebrecht company goon and a police officer respectively of two SUNTRACS activists earlier that week. The trial was set for April 23 but postponed for a week.

Pentagono members sentenced for gangsterism

Under a 2004 law belonging to a gang dedicated to criminal purposes is a crime in itself and that law was enforced on April 16. Judge Zaida Cárdenas tried 10 members of the Santa Ana - El Chorrillo drug (etc.) gang El Pentagono, found six of them guilty and handed out sentences of one year in prison.

US help requested in Danger Man slaying case

One of the theories about the February 21 murder of regueton singer Alonso "Danger Man" Blackwood Drakes is that he was gunned down because he was a witness in a US drug trial. To pursue this angle of the investigation, the Panamanian government has asked for US government assistance. It may be a problem. Although US authorities pay a lot of money to informers and witnesses in drug cases, such people are notoriously expendable to American justice.

Representantes invite Hugo Chávez

Members of Panama City's city council have invited Venezuela President Hugo Chávez to come here for the September meeting of the Latin American Congress of Mayors and City Council Members. Across Latin America, most governments are highly centralized and the main theme of the congress will be to push for a greater degree of local autonomy throughout the region. Within Venezuelan politics Chávez has promoted neighborhood councils with powers that would infringe those of local governments, but that idea has been rejected by his country's voters.

These briefs were compiled on April 25

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