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According to La Prensa's Unimer poll, Ricardo Martinelli has overtaken Balbina Herrera in the presidential preference polls. El Panama America's Dichter & Neira poll has Herrera maintaining a slim lead over Martinelli, with the latter gaining ground. Both of these polls were taken in mid-October, and when one takes margins of error into account, both have the two leading candidates in a statistical tie. Some of the difference could be explained by a natural deflation in the wake of the hotly contested September 7 PRD primary, as Balbina's image has not been before the public since then.

But there's clearly another factor at work, affecting the PRD in general. Since the PRD primary the national news has been dominated by scandals about the PRD, some of which come very close to Balbina.

Yes, she has a certain veneer of impunity. A case in point was the Electoral Tribunal's September ruling that Administrative Prosecutor Alma Montenegro de Fletcher's pro-Balbina speech during working hours at a "women's leadership luncheon" funded by the Housing Ministry (MIVI) wasn't an illegal use of public funds for campaign purposes because Balbina hadn't yet declared her candidacy at the time. The legions of PRD activists decked out in Transito vests all around the capital doing essentially nothing is an even more visible sign that the government is going to be allowed to use all of the resources that it has or can borrow to promote the ruling party's fortunes in next May's elections. We should have known from the illegally state-funded "yes" campaign in the 2006 canal expansion referendum that laws against the funding of campaigns with state resources is a dead letter when the PRD --- which holds two of the three seats on the Electoral Tribunal --- does it.

Still, even though the primary night vote count was rigged to show Balbina winning a double digit victory, she only beat Panama City Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro by a little more than four percentage points, taking the nomination by a plurality rather than a majority of party members. Navarro's snide comments about how he paid for his campaign with his own and his supporters' resources did have some effect.

For the general election contest, presuming that Martinelli maintains his position as the dominant opposition candidate, the public funds issue won't be so potent. If the supermarket baron touches that issue, then he runs the risk of voters being reminded that when his party had the IDAAN water and sewer utility as its fiefdom in the Moscoso administration, there was an illegal Cambio Democratico party dues deduction from the utility workers' paychecks, and meanwhile the government located some new post offices in Martinelli's Super 99 stores.

But the general perception of corruption with impunity still sticks to Balbina. Every weekday morning in front of the Supreme Court in Ancon, middle class protesters denounce the systematic violation of zoning and building code laws by MIVI under Balbina's direction.

Of far more relevance to the presidential race now becoming a close contest when this time last year it looked like a PRD runaway is the scandal about the theft of 35 tons of bronze sculptures from the First Lady's Office. That was the subject of many headlines and investigative reports when La Prensa's and El Panama America's pollsters were going around on October 10 through 12. Even if a few maintenance workers and a presidential guard or two end up taking the fall, surely many Panamanians will still presume that responsibility for the theft goes to the very top of the Torrijos administration. No, this is not Balbina's very own scandal, but the first lady did weigh in to tip the primary balance in favor of Herrera and some of the slop has clearly spilled over onto the party's presidential standard bearer.

Since the poll was taken three more scandals, one of them likely bogus, have broken into the news to Balbina's likely detriment, and one major damaging rumor persists.

The probably spurious allegation, coming from far-right Venezuelan and Cuban exile circles in the United States and being echoed down here as if it were serious news, is that Hugo Chávez is bankrolling Balbina's campaign. No evidence has been presented of this and Herrera flatly denies it. However, campaign finance secrecy undermines any and all denials.

The damaging rumor is that Medicom SA, the chemical company that provided the mislabeled toxin diethylene glycol to the Social Security Fund's medicine production lab, is owned by one of Balbina's children. Due to Panamanian corporate and banking secrecy neither the press nor prosecutors have been able to establish just who does own Medicom. The poisonous cough syrup scandal and its clumsy but deadly cover-up is bound to stick to the PRD and its candidates and will probably be accentuated by the presence of one of the people who by virtue of his position at the time should reasonably have been expected to do more to protect the public as the Panama City vice mayoral candidate on the PRD ticket. So is the Herrera family connection to the chain of possession in the poisoning deaths of several hundred Panamanians just a malicious campaign lie that many of the cabbies in town --- among many other citizens --- believe to be the Gospel truth? Could be, but Balbina was in the Cabinet Council when that body took the decision to cover up the extent of the scandal by denying funds to do the toxicology tests on most of the suspect cadavers in time to detect the poison's residue.

The two more substantive scandals that are bound to play themselves out during the coming months of the campaign season are the continuation of the School Excellence and Equity Fund (FECE) embezzlement case and the murder investigation against Colonel Daniel Delgado Diamante, in 1989 of the Noriega general staff and now the Minister of Government and Justice.

The FECE scandal centers around the theft of some $1.3 million from the San Miguelito - Chilibre - Las Cumbres district, and although the general outlines of the case have been known for nearly one year, on October 17 the former FECE director for that region, Betzy Guzmán, was jailed. Balbina Herrera was mayor of San Miguelito during Noriega times and a legislator from there for three terms afterwards, and Guzmán was a key San Miguelito PRD activist and member of Balbina's entourage. Almost all of the other people arrested in the case have similar political ties. Denials and distancing nothwithstanding, the FECE scandal is back in the news and it does reflect on Balbina from her erstwhile San Miguelito inner circle.

On October 20, after an investigative report in La Prensa, Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez opened a murder investigation directed at Daniel Delgado Diamante, the old Noriguista who now heads Panama's remilitarized police forces by virtue of his post as Minister of Government and Justice. It's not just an allegation or a circumstantial case: on February 8, 1970 Delgado, then a lieutenant in the old Guardia Nacional and son of the dictatorship's governor of Colon at the time, burst into the Panama Viejo home of Guardia Nacional Corporal Andrés García, and shot him three times at point blank range in the presence of the latter's wife Jean Black. Delgado admits the killing and claims that it was an internal police matter and that he was confined to barracks, investigated and cleared. However, his military records show no such investigation and the regular legal and judicial systems have never taken up the case.

This, of course, was not Balbina, but one of her former Cabinet Council colleagues. Moreover, it was more than 38 years ago. However, it was not the only old murder allegation against Delgado and Balbina Herrera herself used the bully pulpit of the San Miguelito mayor's office to threaten anti-Noriega Civilista activists with death --- "Civilista Visto, Civilista Muerto" was her infamous slogan. As a leader of the Dignity Battalions in San Miguelito, Balbina was an organizer of the mob that actually killed protester Alexis Baulés in an attack on a peaceful Civilista march in San Miguelito.

Fast forward to 2007 and 2008, and Balbina was serving as Housing Minister in a Torrijos administration engaged in a bloody vendetta against the leftist SUNTRACS construction workers' union that has left three of that union's members dead. After a Colombian developer of the Isla Viveros project made death threats in La Prensa, the National Police obliged him by assassinating unarmed union member Luigi Argüelles. One of the Colombian developer's partners in the Isla Viveros project is, probably not coincidentally, one Héctor Alemán ---  a PRD legislator and Balbina Herrera's campaign manager.

The bottom line is that the new investigation of an old slaying by Daniel Delgado Diamante is bound to reinforce the notion that Balbina Herrera is heiress to a gang of thugs with copious blood on their hands.

At the height of Noriega's abuses, about 30 percent of Panamanians voted PRD in the May 1989 elections. A lot of today's voters, about one-third of whom are loyal to the PRD, are too young to remember those days, but then there are plenty of elders around to remind them. Balbina's problem is that if all the scandals limit her to just the PRD base and Martinelli gets substantially more votes than the other two opposition candidates combined, Balbina loses the election --- and at the moment, that seems to be the direction in which the polls are moving.