Balbina picks Navarro as her running mate

photo by Balbina's campaign

Balbina picks Navarro as her running mate
by Eric Jackson

Spin it this way or that way, but color this move defensive. After a sometimes bitter primary fight that ended up much closer after all the votes were counted --- if they were --- than was announced on Primary Election Night, and after a series of pointed criticisms of the Torrijos administration's failure to control crime by Panama City Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro, PRD presidential candidate did what she said she wouldn't do and chose Navarro as her running mate.

Due to a series of scandals, a wave of violent crime, fears of a return to the abuses of the dictatorship, unease about the state of the economy despite record low unemployment and a sense that the president is more interested in a jet set lifestyle than staying home to address Panama's problems, Martín Torrijos's approval rating has turned south and he's taking his party down in the polls with him. Many things can change between now and May 3, but at this point it appears that PRD candidates need to put some distance between themselves and the president.

Balbina is the consummate political chameleon, but there are plenty of old videos of her Noriega-era performances. Death threats against civilistas, appearances with Piña himself, street scenes from San Miguelito wherein Dignity Battalion goons of whom she was a leader opening fire on protesters --- these don't play well when people are concerned about the militarization of Panama's law enforcement agencies. As director of the National Association for the Conservation of Nature (ANCON), Navarro had his working relationship with the dictatorship, but he's popularly identified with a generation of PRD members who weren't tainted by the abuses of military rule. The support of the old guard alone now seems not enough to maintain the PRD's disciplined voting bloc of one-third of the electorate, and that has been underlined not just by defections of the party's Partido Popular, Liberal and independent allies to the Martinelli camp, but even some PRD members switching sides. Balbina needed to reach out within her own party to avoid being isolated in the public mind as an obsolete remnant of a bygone and not too golden age.

Thus the Navarro choice made a certain amount of sense. Not only does he speak for a large part of the PRD that Balbina does not, in two mayoral campaigns --- particularly the second one --- he has been able to mobilize support beyond that of his own party. She has become wealthy by most people's standards, but she comes from a humble background and doesn't have the money to pay for a presidential campaign of her own. He is the scion of the Tropigas family fortune and grew up with all the privileges, associations and family ties of the rabiblanco aristocracy that by and large finances Panama's political campaigns.

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