Gómez throws high court magistrates' argument back at them

So, if Article 224 of the Panamanian constitution, which provides that the Attorney General and the Administrative Prosecutor designate people to take their place in their absence is invalid, and the 2004 elimination of the posts of alternate Attorney General and alternate Administrative Prosecutor (procuradores suplentes) is also invalid and thus the replacement of a suspended Attorney General must be by a presidentially appointed alternate, then....

Then at her indagatoria (deposition for use in the trial dossier) with Nelson Rojas, who was appointed by the Administrative Prosecutor (Procurador de Administración)Oscar Ceville to act in his stead, suspended Attorney General (Procuradora General) Ana Matilde Gómez answered the prosecution's first question with one of her own. She asked Rojas if he was asking that question as a presidentially appointed alternate Administrative Prosecutor pursuant to the procedure provided for by the five magistrates of the Martinelli faction of the Supreme Court when the president took over the Public Ministry. Rojas ended the session right there and sent the issue to the high court. Gómez never got an answer to her question. After about a week of hemming and hawing, the Supreme Court sent the question back to Rojas for his answer to the legal issues raised by Ana Matilde's question.

Is the Supreme Court going to apply its interpretation of Article 224 to both Gómez and Ceville? If it does that, then Rojas's investigation and his petition to the high court to suspend Gómez are void, there is no vacancy for Giuseppe Bonissi to fill at the Public Ministry, Gómez at least temporarily comes back to her old office and most likely all of the Martinelli people whom Bonissi brought in are fired. This sort of musical offices game would not be unprecedented in Panamanian politics, but it would not be pretty.

But of course, there is no rule of law that's going to stop Martinelli's power play, so the five Supreme Court magistrates will come up with some convoluted reason why their nullification of Article 224 applies to Gómez but not Ceville. They have the power to do that, by the exercise of which they are rather sure to make asses of themselves. It would likely deepen the constitutional crisis set off by President Martinelli's move to grab control over the theoretically independent Public Ministry, not necessarily by setting institutions of government against one another but by further eroding Martinelli's public support, which polls suggest has dropped at least 17 points since the beginning of the year.

Gómez is now professing that she has little hope of returning to her job, as the high court can delay a decision in her case for the slightly less than four years left in her term and the stuffing of the Public Ministry with Martinelli loyalists is a pretty good sign that this is what will happen. Thus the delay that has been caused by her challenge to Rojas's appointment --- which could add years to the case --- becomes less consequential as her legal defense aims shift.

How much have Ana Matilde's aims changed? In La Estrella we have seen an op-ed column and an item in the La Llorona gossip feature raising the possibility of a Gómez presidential candidacy in 2014. However, the suspended Attorney General herself has made no such declaration.

Meanwhile, the firings and transfers in the Public Ministry under Bonissi's control continue, as does the Martinelli legal offensive against Gómez and the people who were closest to her in the ministry.

The case against Gómez is that she allegedly abused her power by approving the wiretaps of extortion victims' phones --- at the request of those victims --- and caught erstwhile La Chorrera prosecutor Arquimedes Sáez shaking down a jail inmate's family for payoffs. Named as a co-defendant of Gómez is the former secretary general of the Public Ministry, Rigoberto González, but he's being prosecuted separately, not by Rojas but by anti-corruption prosecutor Yolanda Austin and privately by Arquimedes Sáez.

Sáez has accused González of another crime, and Austin has picked up the cudgel for the extortionist and opened a formal investigation. Sáez says that González illegally removed the videotape of himself taking the marked money from his victims from his case file. There is no written record of that happening, and a February 12 inspection of the file indicated that the unaltered recording was in its proper place in the Public Ministry's filing system.

However, to keep a job at the Public Ministry, it is now obligatory to support Sáez and oppose Gómez and González. Thus one Maribel Vergara, in charge of the ministry's evidence room, says that González removed the recording. In her testimony, however, she gave conflicting dates of when that supposedly happened and could not explain why she made no record of its removal or why it is in the file. González denies ever taking the recording, and denies having copied it.

So, if Team Martinelli continues to press this latest criminal prosecution, Sáez impugns the video of his crime by challenging the chain of custody, gets that evidence tossed out, gets the extortion case against himself thrown out, gets his firing overturned, and returns to his job as prosecutor to run more extortion scams. But this course of action is fraught with political dangers, especially if Martinelli is so weakened by the appearance of a pro-corruption stand that he will lack the votes to change the constitution or to ensure that someone friendly to him succeeds him in 2014. Then there might be a new Attorney General who's inclined to prosecute members of the current administration.

What's more likely to happen is that the person who gets into the most trouble over the alleged taking of the video from the file will be Maribel Vergara. That could give Bonissi another post to fill and a chance to distance himself from the notorious extortionist who has become the poster boy for the Martinelli administration.

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