editorial

One of the really creepy things about both the sticky fingered political class we have here and the greater part of the Creole aristocracy that holds itself above the rest of Panamanian society is worse than mere servile imitation of someone else's culture: it's this weird tendency to copy the wost things about the USA.

Now our Electoral Tribunal is imitating one of the ugliest features of US Republican politics, which in turn borrowed techniques pioneered by southern Democrats of an earlier epoch: techniques designed to suppress the votes of groups whom they don't expect to be supporting the party in power.

The American ambassador says that everyone expects a fair election in May of next year, but consider the administration that she represents. What she really means is that the Bush administration doesn't care if the PRD breaks every rule in the book to steal the election, just like the Reagan administration supported the PRD's theft of the 1984 election.

The latest twist was a casual announcement by the Electoral Tribunal that dual citizens who had acquired a second citizenship rather than being born into it will not be allowed to vote, and if they try they'll be thrown into one of this country's notoriously hellish prisons.

Never mind that the constitution that we have inherited from the dictatorship that created the PRD provides that Panamanians who take on a different country's citizenship resume all the rights and duties of other Panamanians upon their return to this country. What does the law have to do with anything? This is a PRD Electoral Tribunal that wears its partisan favoritism on its sleeve.

But why would the PRD do such a thing?

It's because a large part of the population that has taken on another country's citizenship and then come back to Panama is composed of men and women who got American citizenship by serving in the US Armed Forces, then came back here to retire. It so happens that this group of people is largely black, composed of people of West Indian ancestry who because they or their parents worked for the old American canal administration or on the former US military bases were allowed to emigrate to the USA or enlist in the US forces.

In case you didn't notice, Norieguistas in general and former Dignity Battalions leaders in particular are not popular among any class of US military veterans, including those who hold Panamanian citizenship. So now that the lady to whose home Noriega first fled during the 1989 US invasion --- Balbina the batallionera --- is the PRD presidential candidate, the Electoral Tribunal has moved to create a new and inferior class of Panamanian citizenship.

They're doing this even as one sector of PRD supporters is making the "vote for the sister" pitch to Afro-Panamanian voters. It's a breathtaking exercise in cynicism, a performance that matches the standards of General Noriega and his elections czarina, Yolanda Pulice.

This latest move puts the number of Panamanians whom the Electoral Tribunal has under one pretext or another stripped off of the voter rolls for next year's elections at well over 100,000, in a country of a little more than a million and one-half voters. It's a long step toward a stolen election.

There's this Colombian developer who, in his country's standard paramilitary death squad tradition, announced in La Prensa that if the SUNTRACS construction workers' union that represented his workers was not removed, people would be killed. This, after his company had violated all sorts of environmental laws and illegally destroyed several pre-Columbian archaeological sites.

So what did the Torrijos administration do? They got the Labor Ministry to decertify the union by the most irregular and illegal of procedures. They sent in cops to murder an unarmed union member. They obstructed the prosecutors' investigation of the murder.

What else could one expect? The Colombian hoodlum's business partner was one Héctor Alemán, the manager of Martín Torrijos's 2004 presidential campaign and now manager of Balbina Herrera's campaign.

Panama City traffic jams are horrible and getting worse, and although the Cinta Costera boondoggle is a big part of the cause, the uncontrolled development of many parts of the city ia also a big contributor. Former Housing Minister Balbina Herrera is financing her campaign largely on money raised by developers whom she allowed to act in violation of zoning laws, environmental laws, the laws protecting our national parks and wildlife reserves, the public interest in general and common sense. Part of her and the Torrijos administration's policy was to encourage all sorts of foreigners to come here and participate in the Panama upscale real estate speculative bubble.

As, for example, several Spaniards who made pre-construction sales on apartment towers that they never intended to build. The most outrageous of these simply absconded with the money, while others made a tidy profit collecting interest on the float and returned the deposits without interest after announcing their insincere regrets that their projects weren't going to happen.

And then there's the Chilean condo administrator in Punta Pacifica who, it is reported, locked Olympic gold medalist Irving Saladino out of an apartment he had rented from its owner. There are arguments about what was said, but the appearance from the circumstances and Saladino's specific claim about the words that were used were that this imported real estate manager doesn't want any black people around.

Then there's Mark Boswell alias Rex Freeman, who's operating out of Panama via Panamanian corporations that are offering unregistered banking services and an unregistered "aggressive" mutual fund that claims a 26 percent per month return on investment. The guy did time for felony fraud in Colorado and has an oustanding Costa Rican warrant for his arrest, but the Immigration office that comes under the supervision of Minister of Government and Justice Daniel Delgado Diamante gave him residency here.

For a very long time under governments of different partisan hues foreign criminals have been able to buy their way into Panama. People like that turned out to be the principal prosecution witnesses against General Noriega in his US trial --- a situation that says ugly things both about Noriega and US justice. Mireya Moscoso protected a convicted child molester former Canadian priest into whose hands hundreds of millions of dollars of a labor union's pension fund disappeared, and Martín Torrijos continued this protection. Moscoso not only protected now-jailed American swindler Tom McMurrain, her second vice president, Arturo Vallarino, actively promoted the guy's scams in Bocas and Colon before the United States requested his extradition. The current president and first lady, along with the agriculture minister, used their offices and images to promote a teak plantation scam with Genovese mafia family ties that was eventually closed by the Swiss government, the minister in question moonlighting as an officer of the Panamanian subsidiary of that international operation. And then there's the now-imprisoned notorious "offshore asset protection guru," Marc M. Harris, an American who lost his Florida CPA license for unethical behavior, whom Balbina Herrera --- then a legislator --- befriended and invited to help write Panamanian laws.

We pretty much know what the situation will be if Balbina Herrera is elected president. We can't confidently predict that it would be any different if any of the opposition candidates win.

Talk may be cheap, but a Panamanian election discourse in which nobody talks about the foreign criminal element that is allowed to buy the use of this country as both a refuge and as a base for continuing criminal activities is an indication that all sides intend to continue this unacceptable practice.