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Patria Portugal was six years old when the dictatorship took her father away. On May 14, 1970, labor activist Heliodoro Portugal was at the Coca-Cola Cafe in Santa Ana when four men in plain clothes grabbed him and hustled him into a waiting unmarked car and drove off. His family and friends never saw him again.

But one of his fellow political prisoners did, at the dictatorship's clandestine jails. The witness said that Portugal was alive and in captivity at the notorious "Casa de Miraflores" secret prison six months after his abduction, in October of 1970.

In 1977, the Inter-American Human Rights Commission formally asked the Panamanian government, still under the rule of soldiers who took over in October of 1968, about Heliodoro Portugal's whereabouts. The Torrijos regime told the commissioners that it did not know.

By 2000 the dictatorship had been out of power for more than a decade, and in that year a set of human remains was dug up from under a parking lot at the former Pumas Infantry Barracks in Tocumen. The pro-corruption Attorney General at the time, José Antonio Sossa, and the men under him made a televised show of disrespecting and mishandling the remains, and hired a disreputable laboratory to get a false identification. But one Ramón Fonseca and the Catholic Church came up with the money to do proper DNA tests, which showed that the remains were those of Heliodoro Portugal.

Patria Portugal had sued the government over her father's disappearance in May of 1990. No Panamanian court ever issued a ruling in that case.

But there were more than 100 other people who had been disappeared or murdered by the dictatorship, and some of them brought other cases. Sossa and a collection of discredited judges --- most of them still on the bench --- blocked all avenues of legal redress. Despite the fact that there is no statute of limitations for murder under Panamanian law, a bogus distinction was made that held that if someone was made to disappear and happened to die in the process, that's a different crime and there is limitation on legal responsibility for such a crime.

One of the pro-impunity Supreme Court magistrates, Graciela Dixon, was nominated by Martín Torrijos for a seat on the International Criminal Court bench. Patria Portugal and other Panamanian human rights activists objected, the Argentine Mothers of  the Plaza de Mayo took up the cause, and after a whirlwind international campaign Dixon's nomination was rejected.

After having been ignored by the Panamanian courts, Patria Portugal took the case to the Inter-American Human Rights Court, by treaty the court of last resort for cases of this type arising in Panama. The lawyers for the Panamanian government argued that the international tribunal had no jurisdiction because the Portugal family had not exhausted all remedies under Panama's laws, as their 1990 lawsuit was still pending in October of 2002 when Patria petitioned for international relief; and because Panama had not accepted the court's jurisdiction at the time of the crime.

In 2004 the dictator's son was elected president, and in 2008, while he was in office, the case came to trial before the international panel, meeting in San Jose, Costa Rica. The Torrijos administration spent some $200,000 to fight the case, and made vile arguments challenging the familial relationships among the surviving Portugal family.

On August 12, 2008 the court rendered its decision. The decision said that although the specific cause of death could not be ascertained, "it is clear that Mr. Portugal was detained and transferred to an unknown place, where he was mistreated and subsequently executed." The Panamanian government was ordered to pay $20,000 in damages to Heliodoro Portugal's survivors, and $30,000 to Patria Portugal for the expenses she incurred pursuing the case; to publish the court's judgment in the local newspapers; to make a public official apology to the Portugal family; to investigate the facts of the case and to try and if convicted punish those responsible; to provide free medical and psychological care for Heliodoro Portugal's survivors; and to pass legislation specifically making forced disappearance a crime.

Martín Torrijos refused to comply with the judgment.

But the Martinelli administration has a different policy, and on May 27 the president, on behalf of the government, apologized to the Portugal family and the other victims of the dictatorship's human rights violations. President Martinelli said that he would comply with the international court's judgment. "A thousand thanks for the lesson you have given us in dignity," the president told the family.