news

Dozens of suspects in thefts
from First Lady's Office
by Eric Jackson, from other media --- graphics from the Presidencia

According to La Estrella, anti-corruption prosecutor Ramsés Barrera has called some 40 low-level employees of the First Lady's Office or the Institutional Protection Service (SPI) presidential guards to testify in a growing probe of thefts from a store room in Parque Omar for which First Lady Vivian Fernández de Torrijos was ultimately responsible. The investigation began after a set of 42 bronze sculptures, weighing a combined more than 35 tons were reported missing from the store room this past August, but has now been expanded by the Sixth Circuit Penal Court to encompass the theft of some 2,000 pairs of athletic shoes donated by the government of Taiwan, whose disappearance from the same storage facility was reported in 2007.

It is now believed that the bronze "Juegos de Antaño" sculptures were cut up in the store room and carted away piece by piece since 2006, and that despite the shoe theft reported in 2007 the First Lady and her assistant Mingthoy Giro never saw fit to notice or report the gradual theft of the statues from what had by then been converted into a chop shop.

Six people, all of them low level employees of the First Lady's Office or the SPI, have been arrested, but all of them are free on their own recognizance and all who have spoken to the press deny any wrongdoing. One of the suspects, a SPI sergeant, was fingered by a witness in the bronze thefts and in an ensuing raid on his home it was reported that some of the stolen shoes were found.

Under special scrutiny by some of the media and prosecutors are two (former?) gangsters hired by the First Lady in her "Juventud Contigo" program to put young PRD activists who also belonged to criminal gangs on her payroll. But one of two "Juventud Contigo" members who has been arrested, Marco Aparicio, told Telemetro news that he never saw the items that were stolen, that soon after his hiring in 2006 he was designated as a driver and had nothing to do with the store room.

Three more of the arrested suspects, Erick Murillo, Rolando Vásquez and Jair Tapia, told La Critica that they were all park maintenance workers who had held their jobs since before the Torrijos administration came into office and not only had nothing to do with the thefts, but that they had reported a series of unusual activities by the First Lady's Office administration and now find themselves fingered by a secret alleged witness dubbed "Estatua Uno" for crimes that they did not commit.

In Panama the First Lady's Office is a state-financed organization, dedicated to social works and political propaganda. So far some $15.2 million has passed through that office in the Torrijos administration, with $2.5 million included as part of the proposed 2009 national budget now under consideration by the National Assembly. Opposition politicians are calling for the office's abolition.

It has been reported by various media that at least three metal recycling companies have had their records reviewed as part of the investigation. The government, after many years in which public safety has been compromised by the theft of steel sewer caps, aluminum road signs and other government property that has been systematically stolen and sold for scrap, has also decreed a limitation on the hours in which scrap metal may be bought or sold, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays.

It seems that another tactic previously used by the Torrijos administration to block investigations of corruption scandals may be in play.

After hundreds of persons were suspected to have been poisoned to death by toxic cough syrup distributed by the Torrijos administration, the Institute of Legal Medicine was denied the funds to conduct tests on most of the corpses in time to accurately detect the presence of residues of the poisonous diethylene glycol that had been mixed into the medicines by a government medicine lab that relied on mislabeled chemicals imported from China. The Torrijos administration then denied that any of the deaths that could not be chemically verified due to lack of funding had ever happened.

Now the president and his Ministry of Economy and Finance is cutting the 2009 budget for prosecutors' investigations from a requested $66 million to $37 million. This would mean that beyond the usual investigations of robberies, murders, rapes, minor drug dealing and other garden variety crimes, there would be little left over for complicated investigations of major, well organized crimes.

The Torrijos administration has also suggested a constitutional amendment to cut the Attorney General's term in office from 10 years to five years, so that the current occupant of that office, Ana Matilde Gómez, would not be able to continue the investigation of the scandals in the First Lady's Office after he left office. However, the PRD would probably have to win control of the 2009-2014 legislature in next year's elections for that maneuver to be possible.