Gómez was right to catch Sáez; and Climate change and legal headaches

Gómez was right to catch Sáez

Now comes a loathesome creature, formerly a well-paid public official who betrayed the institution for which he worked, the people with whom he worked and the public whom he was supposed to serve by running a cruel and greedy extortion game on the family of a prisoner. But now Arquimedes Sáez is at the center of a major political power struggle, as the alleged victim of a wiretap by which his boss, Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez, caught and busted him.

Gómez never tapped Sáez's phone, never invaded his privacy, never infringed his rights. His victims asked the attorney general to tap their phones, which she did, and when Sáez intruded into their lives, over their phones, to deprive them of their rights, he was caught.

It may be, in light of a constitutional provision that had recently been changed, that it was procedurally improper for Gómez to authorize a tap on a phone line requested by the owner of that phone line, without a judge's signature. But at the time what she did was not clearly prohibited, and if she made a mistake it was in good faith and not for a criminal purpose. She did what she did to extract a criminal from a position in which he was abusing the public trust, and to uphold the honor of the Public Ministry that she heads.

If people with ulterior motives seek to convict Ana Matilde Gómez on charges so as to remove her from office, there are unflattering things that they might truthfully say about her performance in office. But none of these things would be nearly as odious as jumping on the Arquimedes Sáez pro-corruption bandwagon.

If she is confronted with the same situation again, now the attorney general knows that she needs to get a judge to sign a warrant. It might be an inconvenient requirement, and a fatal one given the widespread corruption in our courts, but now that the Supreme Court has decided that a warrant is required, it's a procedure that should be followed.

But regardless of whether, in hindsight, she made a mistake in the way that she went after Arquimedes Sáez, she was right to catch him. Every corrupt public official ought to fear that she or he will be caught, prosecuted and ruined. And now it's important that they know that they won't be successful in taking revenge either. The crooked ex-prosecutor's charges against Ana Matilde Gómez ought to be thrown out of court.

Climate change and legal headaches

The Panama News recently published a photo that would seem to indicate that a developer illegally placed his private fence below the high-water line on a public beach. But then, old-timers who live just down the beach say that the tides that washed around the foundations of the developer's fence were higher than they had seen before.

The government just passed a new law about the titling of lands on islands and along the coasts, but consider what a pain it would be to sort out the problems with those titles if the sea level rises a foot or so. Is it right to use future conditional tense here? They may argue about the precise mix of causes and the model of how things will unfold, but most scientists expect that sea levels will rise.

Climate change is likely to raise all sorts of legal, urban policy, public infrastructure maintenance, agricultural regulation, fisheries management, public health and tourist development strategy policy issues for the government. Panama really ought to be thinking about these issues now, so that we can be prepared when the water washes over places where it never did before, the locations and compositions of our coral reefs are changed, the seasons aren't like they were before and so on.

Bear in mind...

Sometimes it's worse to win a fight than to lose.

Billie Holiday

Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.

Margot Fonteyn

The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

Nadine Gordimer

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