news

Recall the CEMIS scandal that broke the unity of the PRD during the Moscoso administration. Mireya Moscoso had come into the presidency at the head of a coalition that held a slight majority in the legislature. But then the Christian Democrats (now the Partido Popular) crossed over and formed an alliance with the PRD and took control of the Assembly. However, when Mireya Moscoso nominated legislator Alberto Cigarruista and government and justice minister Winston Spadafora to the Supreme Court and the PRD thought that it had the votes to block those nominations, two PRD deputies, the late Carlos Alvarado and Carlos Afú, went against the party and voted for their confirmation.

Pedro Miguel González was particularly vitriolic in accusing Afú and Alvarado of having been bribed, whereupon Afú waved $6,000 in cash, which he claims was distributed among the PRD caucus to gain approval of a contract granting a concession for CEMIS, an expanded airport and multimodal container handling facility in France Field, adjacent to the Manzanillo International Terminal and Colon Container Terminal seaports. An investigation began, and one of the executives of the company that won the contract ended up as the subject of a formal investigation. Among the papers seized in the investigation --- and ultimately leaked to the press and published --- was a cryptic hand printed note with numbers and names, allegedly a note on who gets paid how much. The two most prominent named on that piece of paper were Martín Torrijos (then PRD secretary general) and Balbina Herrera (then more or less leader of the PRD legislative caucus).

There were other bits of circumstantial evidence to support the notion that the legislature had been bribed. Afú had told of cash in manila envelopes, and at about the time that those had allegedly been distributed, legislator Sergio Gálvez made one of his ultra-rare appearances in the Assembly chambers and was photographed counting cash that was in a manila envelope. Plus, one of the CEMIS promoters got into an acrimonious family argument that was aired in the press and, without any proofs being presented, claims of corruption were made and published.

So what happened? An investigation was begun against Afú, who had admitted taking a bribe. But the courts ruled that this investigation could not proceed because he was protected by legislative immunity. They further ruled that if a person without legislative immunity engages in a criminal enterprise with a legislator, that "civilian" is protected by the politician's immunity from investigation or prosecution. The accused company exec, an American, took the opportunity of the ruling to get out of Panama.

However, there were a few leads and bits of proof independent of Afú's statement that could justify an investigation of some other legislators, and petitions were filed to lift immunity and resume the CEMIS investigation. The constitution was amended to shift the process of lifting legislators' immunity from the National Assembly to the Supreme Court, and petitions were duly filed in the latter venure. However, the Torrijos administration came and went with action on the subject of legislators' immunity stalled.

Now Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez and President elect Ricardo Martinelli are asking the high court, which has a majority appointed by PRD presidents, to end the docket freeze on high profile corruption cases and allow the CEMIS investigation to proceed. If they get their way there would be figures in both ruling coalition and opposition parties in potential trouble but the most significant possibility would be the end of Martin Torrijos's and Balbina Herrera's political careers.

(That's not just, and may not even principally be, an opposition dream result. A lot of people in the PRD believe that the party needs to be rid of the old leadership to reorganize, heal its wounds and come back to power in five years.)

Meanwhile, the terms in the national legislature or the Central American Parliament of a bunch of politicians of various stripes are ending, and so is the immunity that sheltered them from investigation all these years. Or is it? There are some court rulings that treated immunity that was in effect when an alleged crime took place as outlasting the immune politician's term in office, and a few that go the other way. Plus there is a new Code of Criminal Procedure and the ways that its statute of limitations provisions might affect political corruption cases is mostly unexplored. Generally Panamanian law doesn't have "tolling," wherein time spent immune from investigation would not be counted as having passed for purposes of the statutes of limitations. If there is no tolling, then there is impunity for a crime that could get someone four years in prison if the person who committed it was immune from investigation or prosecution for a five-year legislative term in the time after its commission.

The Supreme Court's presiding magistrate, Harley Mitchell, is a PRD apparatchik from way back but says that he's determined to root out corruption in the legal system. He has also sternly criticized docket backlogs and has suspended several judges for alleged corruption or egregious delays in cases. And even if he has a partisan tilt on the bench --- which some allege, but none have clearly shown --- he just might end up deciding that the party is better served by running some of its members out of public life than continuing the tradition of impunity that marked its origins in the dictatorship.

One of the delays that Mitchell ended was that in responding to a US request for information in an investigation that implicates former President Ernesto Pérez Balladares and some other top people in his 1994-1999 PRD administration. The US investigation is about an American citizen who reputedly served as a front man in the steering of a lucrative contract to maintain the nation's buoys and lighthouses to PECC a company allegedly owned behind the scenes by people who were Panamanian public officials at the time, including Toro Pérez Balladares himself and Martín Torrijos's cousin Hugo Torrijos. The court agreed to send the information off to federal prosecutors looking into a possible Foreign Corrupt Practices Act case against the American after a delay of several years. In Panama, the PECC investigation was thrown out because it was held that the Comptroller General at the time, Alvin Weeden, had begun the probe in violation of Pérez Balladares's immunity as a member of the Central American Parliament. Although under the terms of the US statute and provisions of Panama's constitution none of the Panamanian public officials named in the affair are likely to be prosecuted in the United States, there is great potential for embarrassment. Despite the legal circumstances protecting them, there could be great personal political prices to pay for a US court case touching upon the behavior of Pérez Balladares and Torrijos.

The high court has also begun to take action on long-standing delays with respect to petitions to lift legislators' immunity. These cases fall on both sides of the partisan divide and the most notable one was that of Rogelio Alba, the legislator with six stalled criminal cases --- some of them open-and-shut, like getting caught in the act of smuggling liquor and cigarettes out of the Colon Free Zone without having paid duty --- whom Ricardo Martinelli appointed as governor of Kuna Yala. After widespread protests, Alba withdrew his name, saying that he had to concentrate on defending himself against the criminal charges.

The litany of stalled public corruption cases is long, but the non-aggression pact between Martín Torrijos and Mireya Moscoso is lapsing and it's not clear that there is any similar agreement between Torrijos and Martinelli. It's also not clear whether Mitchell or Gómez would respect any such understanding even if there was one.