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Volume 14,
Number 21 |
Also in
this section: Paper trail doesn't support
suspended minister DDD in ever
deeper trouble by Eric Jackson, from other media Daniel
Delgado Diamante, the former lieutenant colonel who commanded the San
Miguelito garrison and served on General Noriega's general staff at the
time of the 1989 US invasion, was briefly in charge of a reorganized
and remilitarized law enforcement establishment as Minister of
Government and Justice. Now, although he's on an unpaid leave for only
30 days, it's looking ever more likely that he won't return to that
post. He may even end up as a guest of the ministry he headed, in one
of the nation's prisons.
There is no dispute that on February 8, 1970 Delgado, then a lieutenant in the old Guardia Nacional, shot and killed a subordinate, Corporal Andrés García, in the latter's home in Panama Viejo. At the time and now, Delgado claims that García had assaulted someone with a bayonet at a nearby military post and then left the premises against orders. Delgado claims that at the time he was confined and subjected to a criminal investigation, and was cleared by the legal system. There are conflicting claims about who else was in the house when García was shot (his widow claims she was, other versions say Delgado and García were the only ones there) and whether or not García was armed at the time of the shooting (the incident report refers to a search of the house in which a pistol without ammunition was found, but doesn't say that it was found on or near the corporal at the death scene). A search of all court, prosecution and historical archives fails to document Delgado's claim that he was investigated and cleared by the legal system in the case. Retired General Ruben Dario Paredes says that he remembers the incident, which happened only a few weeks after General Omar Torrijos and the man he called "my gangster," Manuel Antonio Noriega, had suppressed a coup attempt. The officer corps simply neglected to involve the prosecutors and courts, Paredes claims. Domitilo Ballesteros, who at the time of the slaying was the magistrate of the Second Tribunal to which any criminal case against Delgado would have been brought, also says that the matter never came before him and was never referred to a senior prosecutor, as any homicide case would have been. The senior prosecutor who would have in the normal course of things been assigned the investigation at that time, Raúl Olmos, also denies having dealt with the case. There are other allegations made in La Prensa by retired Guardia Nacional Colonel Amado Sanjur, an anti-Torrijos coup attempt participant who fled the country at the time and remains in exile in the United States, that Corporal García had supported the coup plotters. If true that would provide a motive both for Delgado shooting the corporal and for his military superiors keeping the investigation out of the regular legal system. Domitilo Córdoba, who was chief of the old DENI detective squad's homicide division in early 1970, contradicts Paredes, Ballesteros and Olmos, claiming that he investigated the case and handed the proofs over to assistant prosecutor Humberto Fassano, who is now deceased. But this, in turn, is contradicted by the post-invasion court testimony of the now-deceased Attorney General from the dictatorship era, Olmedo Miranda, who said that the army's G-2 intelligence, torture and psychological warfare unit rather than civilian prosecutors handled all criminal investigations of active duty military personnel. In early 1970 one Manuel Antonio Noriega had just been promoted to head G-2. During the dictatorship the military was a law unto itself, but it's highly unlikely that our current Attorney General would accept any argument that Delgado was investigated by Noriega and cleared and thus it would be double jeopardy for the García case to be reopened now. If no civilian prosecutor or court investigated and ruled on Delgado's case, it would probably be open to investigation and prosecution today. However, the courts could throw in a wild card. For example, by the plain words of Panamanian law there is no statute of limitations for murder, but in order to avoid justice for the crimes of the dictatorship the courts have occasionally held that there is by carving out various exceptions. One of these is the theory that if a body is never found the matter is one of disappearance rather than murder, for which there is a limitation that bars old cases. Former high court magistrate Graciela Dixon was rejected for a seat on the International Criminal Court for rulings of this sort. The Supreme Court is dominated by PRD appointees, and although accepting a G-2 verdict on an old murder case would be an internationally odious decision, it wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility. Although the new Penal Code has stiffened penalties, if investigated, tried and convicted the old code would apply and the maximum sentence that Delgado Diamante might face would be 20 years in prison. Due to a high court ruling that threw out the pardons the former President Mireya Moscoso issued just before leaving office, it is unlikely that Torrijos could get away with issuing a presidential pardon to Delgado. (Precedent is not binding in Panamanian courts, but the magistrates ruled that there can only be sentence commutations, rather than pardons, for ordinary "non-political" crimes like murder. But if it was a matter of the Guardia bumping off a coup plotter, that would arguably be as "political" a crime as there could be.) Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez has tread cautiously, so as to avoid an illegal investigation of someone who has already been processed through the legal system and cleared. Now, however, Delgado Diamante has been unable to substantiate his claims with any documentation and prosecutors have been calling in witnesses to testify about the Andrés García case. They have yet to call in Delgado Diamante himself for an indagatoria, or sworn deposition, which would be a prerequisite to filing formal charges. Also in
this section: News
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