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Gay Pride and the Policia Nacional --- everything's under control. Photo by Eric Jackson

Everything's under control

Yep. Bien controlada. On Saturday, June 28, gay activists planned to gather at 3 in the afternoon for Gay Pride festivities, but at 2 o'clock there was a tropical cloudburst, which flooded a number of areas of Panama City, sent raw sewage flowing down the street where the people had planned to march and left the park where the protesters had planned to gather something of a mudhole. A couple of dozen people showed up to wave the banner and pass out leaflets for the cause, but the march was called off without the police having to fire a single shot or beat a single head.

(The washout meant that the season's principal demonstration of gay pride was mainly cultural rather than overtly political, in the form of an excellent play at the Teatro La Quadra, the Spanish-language adaptation of Bent.)

Everything's under control.

The Ministry of Public Works (MOP), which is headed by one Benjamín Colamarco, who advanced to the cabinet by way of being the head of General Noriega's Dignity Battalions goon squad, answers to a higher calling. They don't have to keep the storm drains working. Nor, unless and until someone can get a court to order them to do so pursuant to the Transparency Law, do they have to reveal the details of the projects on which they're spending the taxpayers' money. 

Take the Cinta Costera, that boondoggle of the amazing expanding budget, as an example. MOP has mostly stonewalled, but given one story, then another, about certain pertinent details. According to what one MOP official told La Prensa, the Club de Yates y Pesca and the Hotel Miramar, which get huge private concessions on the new public works project, are concessions so won't be taxed. But after that was reported, President Torrijos angrily denounced the report based on his government's information as baseless. MOP first told La Prensa that a little more than 70 percent of the cost would be paid by owners of properties between Avenida Balboa and Avenida Justo Arosemena, by way of a special assessment. Then they said that virtually all of the cost would be paid by a special assessment on properties between Avenida Balboa and Via España / Avenida Central, and in Paitilla and Punta Pacifica. But wait a minute, not ALL properties! Heavens, no. The newer buildings have 20-year tax exemptions. It's just the owners of all the remaining historic buildings in the area, people who live in buildings more than 20 years old, banks, hotels and businesses that have grown comfortable in their old locations and so on that will have to pay the cost. Don't like it? Tough luck! The real estate developers who own President Torrijos and Balbina Herrera and the rest have the government on their side and they're going to force you to sell your property to them and move somewhere else.

Everything's under control.

I woke up and looked at the daily newspapers and read that Panama City Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro and the pro-corruption neo-Torquemada Attorney General José Antonio Sossa had won their case in the Supreme Court. They got Mireya Moscoso's pardons of more than 70 journalists, myself included, declared null and void. From his federal prison cell in the United States, I am sure that my accuser, former Atlanta and Bocas del Toro swindler Tom McMurrain, is eternally grateful to Mayor Navarro and former AG Sossa for the assistance they have given him. But maybe not --- McMurrain's a greedy little punk who lacks any sense of gratitude or any other aspect of decency. Of course, isn't that precisely WHY he got along so well with the Panamanian political class? After all, he had former Bocas del Toro Mayor Eladio Robinson (now in prison over a different matter) and former Vice President Arturo Vallarino (now a member of the Central American Parliament and as such immune from investigation or prosecution for his crimes) hyping his fraudulent teak and noni plantation scam. 

Yes, I know the legal explanations and I'm reasonably sure that at least the former had other matters in mind, but in effect Tom McMurrain has had Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro and former Attorney General José Antonio Sossa working to revive his criminal defamation case against me. And now Navarro and Sossa and all the racketeers for whom they took a stand have won their case. I now have TWO criminal defamation cases pending against me, both by guys with fraud convictions in the United States but who have the support of the Panamanian government.

Everything's under control.

But you know what? Maybe Juan Carlos Navarro is now regretting that he got what he wanted. See among those whose pardons he had thrown out is one Ubaldo Davis, the main brain behind the popular TVN Saturday night comedy, La Cascara. Popular? Certainly with many younger Panamanians, including a bunch who are old enough to vote --- in fact including a demographic group that voted en masse for Martín Torrijos in 2004, and has provided many of the new members that the PRD has signed up over the past few years. It's a group that Juan Carlos Navarro is counting upon in his presidential primary race against Balbina Herrera. No doubt, the mayor's legal victory over Ubaldo Davis --- whose notorious criminal conviction was based on the allegedly legal determination that all satire is a crime in Panama --- is going to alienate a number of younger voters from his presidential campaign.

Everything's under control.

Navarro himself is facing criminal prosecution because back in May his presidential campaign published a public opinion poll that showed him trailing Balbina Herrera by just five points. The pollster was registered with the Electoral Tribunal, but apparently when the PRD-controlled tribunal made up their pollster licensing rules they invented some new hoops for pollsters to jump through and it is alleged that the company that Navarro hired didn't do this. So now the mayor has been stripped of his immunity and is facing criminal charges that are ridiculous, and it's a sign of just how desperate Balbina Herrera's Norieguista wing of the PRD has become.

Everything's under control.

In a poll for which nobody is being prosecuted, La Prensa delivers some flawed bad news for the ruling party. La Prensa switched polling firms from the very reputable Dichter & Neira to the fairly unheralded Unimer, and purports to compare the latter company's polling results with the former company's, as if there is an unbroken string of polls. But of course, a lot of the techniques used by pollsters to assure truly random samples are proprietary knowledge and there are going to be differences in the two companies' results even if the questions they have asked and the rough demographics of the people whom the asked are the same. Set those doubts aside as minor, however, because what La Prensa's pollster shows is more than a 60 percent disapproval rating for President Torrijos and a massive turn away from the PRD a little more than 10 months away from the coming general elections. Those months are an eternity in politics, but the public disaffection is unmistakable. But don't worry.

Everything's under control.

El Panama America, which also switched pollsters, complains about the manipulative techniques that La Prensa polls use. They mention all possible candidates of all parties and see who gets the most support, and by this technique have Balbina Herrera losing by a slender margin to Ricardo Martinelli. But of course, Herrera plus Navarro plus then some equals the PRD --- something a little more than one-third of the electorate, the traditional Torrijista base. Alberto Navarro plus Juan Carlos Varela plus Marco Ameglio plus a few more equals about what Martinelli is showing, and not coincidentally about the traditional Arnulfista base. If the opposition parties unite around one slate, they will absolutely clobber the PRD. A divided opposition might well return the PRD to office for another five years. In any case, after July 6 we will know the winner of the Panameñista Party's primary and the comparison of that candidate's support with Martinelli's will be a more intelligent measure of who's the most popular of the anti-PRD candidates.

Everything's under control.

Will the left derail the best-laid plans? FRENADESO is pushing a 2009 election boycott, which I personally doubt will accomplish anything positive, and meanwhile they're calling for a national strike over a laundry list of grievances, the date of which walkout they'll probably set at a July 12 meeting. Because of some serious economic problems led by inflation, it's not hard to see that we are getting into a period of increased labor militancy. However, despite the president's strident claims, it does not appear that organized labor or the left has the strength to destabilize the government. Embarrass the party now in power, yes. Make the coming months difficult for the current administration, yes. Reinforce a public attitude willing to accept the most insipid and uninspiring alternatives to what we have now, yes. But overthrow the government, no.

Everything's under control.

It would, of course, be better if ordinary people without vast fortunes or illustrious surnames or goon squads at their command took control. In between now and the time that can happen, we're going to have to do away with the constitution that Panama inherited from the dictatorship and write a new set of rules for the nation's governance.

So for now, everything's under control --- by the wrong people, who are not making good use of the control they have, unless you want to count enriching themselves and their friends as a good use. Wouldn't you very much prefer to be able to say that everything's under control, not in the sense of ubiquitous manipulation but in the sense of a calm and orderly society that works well for you?

Ever onward, my friends. Panama can be that way, but it won't be until a lot of people make the effort to change things around here.

Me? I'm putting a lot of my defensive effort into defeating scurrilous criminal defamation charges made against me, and going on the offensive with more positive efforts to elect a more enlightened US government in November and a few good people like independent mayoral candidate Miguel Antonio Bernal in next year's Panamanian elections.

The first thing over which I will attempt to gain control is the initiative in Mark Boswell alias Rex Freeman's case against me. It's actually looking pretty good. There has been a change of prosecutors and the new one seems ready to ask the judge to provisionally dismiss the case. However, it's a privately brought prosecution so Mark Boswell alias Rex Freeman will have a lawyer there to argue that it should not be dismissed and the judge will do what she wants to do. 

We still need to go through the motions and the expense of putting on our defense --- and really, if you know what patriot militia punks like Boswell alias Freeman have historically done, that's the whole point. I aim not only to thwart his legal attack on me, but make both him and the public officials who are helping him with his crime wave pay dearly for what they have done. As far as I am concerned, "Rex Freeman" is every PRD candidate's running mate next year because that party allowed him into this country with his felony conviction record, that party helps him elude Costa Rican justice, that party allows him to violate Panamanian banking and securities laws with impunity and that party has put him in a position to attack the press. It's time to fight back against the Torrijos/Freeman hoodlum regime.

I am asking for whatever help you may lend, and in particular I'm hoping for people to turn out at the courthouse across the parking lot from the Balboa Niko's for my hearing on August 20. We will be, after all, dealing with Don Winner's finance columnist, a man with a felony conviction for fraud in Colorado and a warrant for his arrest in Costa Rica, the guy who announced to the stunned world that it wasn't Tim McVeigh who blew up the Oklahoma City federal building, but Bill Clinton --- so the tinfoil hats will be optional but encouraged at that event.

Enjoy.

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