Volume 14, Number 20
October 27, 2008

news

Also in this section:
Panama City mayoral debates
A bit more than six months from Election Day, polls give PRD cause for concern
Democrat and Republican debate for students, American Society
San Carlos fishing community resists developer who happens to be Housing Minister
Indigenous networking
More Panamanian cases before Inter-American Human Rights Court
Bolivian ambassador at Che memorial
Maintenance workers arrested in scultpture theft
Terror drill in Casco Viejo
Despite Electoral Tribunal protection, PRD scandals dog Balbina
Panama News Briefs

Arrests in statue theft case, some related to earlier heist from same storehouse

First lady's gangsters, cops, maintenance workers busted
by Eric Jackson

One would think that in any reasonably well run operation, after someone stole 2,000 pairs of shoes from a storage building that was also home to hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of other property the management would increase vigilance of that facility. And it turns out that in 2007, somebody made off with 2,000 pairs of athletic shoes donated by the government of Taiwan to the First Lady's Office from the same building from which the 35-ton bronze Juegos de Antaño set of sculptures was "discovered missing" at the end of August, 2008.

It so happened that a witness came forward to identify a sergeant in the SPI presidential guards as having been seen walking away with one of the smaller pieces from the sculture, a bronze dove. When prosecutors staged a raid on that man's home, they also found some of the stolen athletic shoes.

But, according to what several of the dailies have reported is the prosecutors' theory of the sculpture theft case, what was going on in that storage building between 2007 and 2008? Even before the shoe theft, and continuing for well over a year afterwards, someone was in that building cutting up the statues. The bronze was then carted away a little bit at a time for sale as scrap.

So far at least nine people have been named as targets of the investigation. These include three maintenance workers who worked for the First Lady's Office, two purportedly former gang members who worked for the First Lady's "Contigo Juventud" program and four members of the Institutional Protection Service (SPI) presidential guards. The SPI are, in theory and largely in practice, a non-political elite security and law enforcement agency, part of the Ministry of the Presidency. The gangsters in Contigo Juventud and the maintenance workers would have been hired on the basis of political patronage by First Lady Vivian Fernández de Torrijos or by other political appointees answerable to her.

The investigation is not yet over. There are some clear loose ends that would indicate the possibility of more arrests. Consider:

The buyers of the bronze stolen from the First Lady's Office storage shed in Parque Omar, the foundry where it was melted down and those involved in the transactions of resale and probable export of the material have not been identified and arrested;

It is alleged that a recycling truck made many runs in and out of the gated park, whose gatekeepers are the SPI, to pick up the pieces of the statues and take them away;

It turns out that three large tractors, one of which was used to take the Juegos de Antaño from the museum in Curundu where the sculptures had been on display to the First Lady's Office storehouse in Parque Omar, are also missing from the First Lady's Office;

Much of the paperwork related to the movements of the Juegos de Antaño is missing; and

Nobody has explained how, after the theft of the athletic shoes from the storage building was reported in 2007, nobody in a management position with the First Lady's Office saw fit to see what else may have been missing, or to notice the ongoing dismemberment of the statues, or to admit knowing anything about anything.

In the stolen shoes case there has been a series of raids in Curundu and El Chorrillo, and it is now reported in El Panama America that they were sold in the La Barraza section of El Chorrillo for between $5 and $10 per pair. Who was involved in the sales and where the money went are among the logical next questions there.

The people who have been named in the investigation remain free while the probe continues, but they are not allowed to leave the country and must regularly report to police.

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Eric Jackson
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