opinion

Drawing lines in the mayor's race
by Eric Jackson

At Miguel Antonio Bernal's January 23 dinner dance at Lung Fung, the independent candidate finally got in front of a large group of people and said the unpleasant thing that a lot of the people in the room have been saying for some time: not in so many words, but his Panameñista opponent Bosco Vallarino has been making an ass of himself on the campaign trail.

"Now he says that he's going to raise the penalties for crimes," Bernal noted. "How is this a function of the mayor's office? So now we know that if he's elected he intends to exceed his authority and abuse his powers." On the hot button issue of urban planning, Bernal took notice of Vallarino's partnership in some of the city's most ill-advised construction projects and asked how he could then be expected to make decisions about these matters in the public interest.

Yep. And all those nice round numbers about how many garbage trucks that Vallarino says he's going to buy and how many people he's going to employ for this or that are the hallmarks of a candidate who's pulling "facts" and "plans" out of the thin air, of somebody who hasn't done his homework and so shouldn't be taken very seriously.

But of course, Bernal has to take Vallarino seriously because the polls have still been putting the man in second place and the independent candidate needs to overtake him and then make the mayoral race a two-way choice and a referendum on the PRD's urban policy legacy. At least, that's a conventional way of looking at it.

(Things could work out differently, though. Recall in 1999 when incumbent Mayor Mayín Correa was the runaway favorite, with Bernal a distant third, and second-place Juan Carlos Navarro and Bernal came zooming up in the last days of the campaign to a photo-finish that came close to a three-way tie, with Navarro edging Bernal and Correa in third place. Because public and media attention focuses on presidential races, it isn't uncommon for races for lower offices to be extremely volatile at the end of a campaign.)

Vallarino and I could both stand to lose 100 pounds and then some, but despite that he's a lightweight. It's good that Bernal has sharpened his criticism of that opponent, but he also needs to take on the front runner, the PRD's Bobby Velásquez.

Bobby looks ever so cute in his message-free billboards. That alone --- the mobilization of public indignation after five years of government by, in the interests of, and under bombardment of propaganda from the ad agency cartel --- can be a potent enough campaign issue. The grafting of things that Mayor Navarro didn't get right and the wholesale abuses of Housing Minister Herrera onto the public expectations of a Velásquez city administration becomes much easier when the PRD hopeful is saying essentially nothing.

But Bobby Velásquez does not come to this race as a man without a record in public life, and that's the 800-pound gorilla that's dozing in the corner of this mayoral cage match.

See, Bobby is not just a cute face. He's the guy who was the head of SINAPROC, the nation's disaster relief agency, during the deadliest public catastrophe Panama has experienced since the 1989 US invasion. He was the guy in charge of the agency that's there to respond in case of toxic spills, big explosions, the aftermath of fires that burn down neighborhoods, floods, tidal waves, killer storms, earthquakes, biological warfare attacks and yes, mass poisonings.

SINAPROC was one of several government agencies that screwed up in spectacular fashion in the poisoned cough syrup affair. Yes, we can talk about other government departments' worse performances in this situation, and also about SINAPROC's lesser failures with Bobby Velásquez at its helm.

But what the PRD candidate did and did not do as head of SINAPROC in the face of a major toxic disaster, and in the subsequent disgraceful cover-up by the PRD administration, is an issue that needs to come front and center in the Panama City mayoral race.