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Volume
15, Number 12 |
Also in this
section: Martinelli's
ambassadors
by Eric Jackson Panama's new ambassador to the United Nations, Pablo Antonio Thalassinos, once posed for publicity photos with imprisoned "offshore asset protection guru" Marc M. Harris, at a time when the Harris empire was crumbling and attracting a lot of negative press coverage. Thalassinos, a PRD member, is a psychologist by education and was in charge of the focus groups and polling operations in the 1994 campaign that brought Ernesto Pérez Balladares to the Palacio de las Garzas. Thalassinos then served in the Pérez Balladares cabinet with Ricardo Martinelli, the new UN ambassador as Minister of Education and the new president as director of the Social Security Fund. As Harris's financial operations garnered increasing public scrutiny, particularly in the pages of La Prensa and also in The Panama News, the former Florida Young Republican whiz kid and current federal inmate made a charitable contribution to the public schools, and posed with Thalassinos with an oversized check in a photo that was published in several of Panama's daily newspapers. Thalassinos presented his credentials to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on July 17. The new Panamanian ambassador to Bolivia, former Kuna Yala legislator Enrique Garrido, also has an interesting past. In the course of the 2004 election campaign he was accused by opponents and constituents of exchanging government scholarships for votes. An investigation was begun by then Electoral Prosecutor Gerardo Solís, who is now an Electoral Tribunal magistrate. An application to lift his legislator's immunity from investigation and prosecution was then filed, but in a 2007 decision the Supreme Court held that the investigation against Garrido had improperly begun in violation of his immunity, and thus there could be no investigation or prosecution regardless of whether or not Garrido actually used public funds to buy votes in his re-election bid. Panama's new ambassador to the United States, attorney Jaime Alemán, has had some controversial clients over the years, as most good lawyers would tend to have. At the moment the most notorious of these would be the collapsed financial empire of one Allen Stanford. Alemán's law firm did the legal paperwork to set up the Panama branch of the Stanford Trust Company, part of the corporate maze that included Stanford Bank (Panama) SA and the Stanford Casa de Valores SA securities brokerage firm in this country, along with hundreds of other corporations in many other countries. US prosecutors are alleging that the Stanford financial group was a massive fraud, to the tune of some $8 billion. Mr. Stanford and his supporters deny this, and say that the business collapsed not because it was unsound but because the US government unjustifiably shut it down. The Torrijos administration was strongly criticized, particularly by members of the old anti-dictatorship Civilista movement, for remilitarizing the National Police. The break with the former post-invasion practice of appointing a civilian to head the police came in the form of Francisco Troya, a career cop whose career dates back to Noriega times. Troya is now Panama's ambassador to Mexico, and there are various logics that could be at work in this appointment. Martinelli has chosen a former officer in Noriega's feared anti-terrorist unit --- Gustavo Pérez hijo, who is also a PRD member --- as his police chief, and there are going to be some organizational changes in the National Police. It would be expected that a diplomatic posting of the old chief abroad would give Pérez an opportunity to make changes with old networks thus weakened. On another level, probably a more important one, National Police Chief Troya's major headaches included the rise of Mexican drug cartels and their takeover of smuggling routes that run through Panamanian territory. The Mexican government is in something approaching a life and death struggle against the drug cartels and its relations with Panama necessarily include a large law enforcement component. It would therefore make sense to have the former police chief as ambassador to that country. Among President Martinelli's other ambassadorial appointments:
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