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OK, and tell Micho that if they don't reach an agreement, no way that the workers are going to waste their time, they're going to leave the table.

Well, the president has announced here that he's not going to repeal any law, nor is he going to suspend it --- that's what he told Benicio [Robinson], that he's not going to go on wasting time.


This is something we manage in a very confidential way and each magistrate makes his decisions.

There has to have been a serious crime and at least the start of an investigation of these acts. That was my experience with issuing such authorizations.

There was a crisis in Bocas del Toro and an anonymous witness advised us that some people were trying to provoke the destabilization of the country, so we had to proceed.

This means that any one of us can have our telephone calls intercepted just for being an activist and expressing opinions against some government measure.

It was a call in which we knew that they were listening to us. It was like an idiot hunt.

President Martinelli said that he knew nothing about wiretaps of union leaders and opposition political figures until he read about them in the newspaper. But whether or not that's the case, ever since he orchestrated the replacement of Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez by Giuseppe Bonissi for the supposed crime of granting the wish of a crime victim who requested that his own phone be tapped to prove that he was getting extortion calls from a corrupt prosecutor, the wiretap issue has been blowing up in the Martinelli administration's face.

Yes, distinctions will be urged: Gómez had no court order when she caught her subordinate shaking down a prisoner's family for bribes, while Bonissi had a court order when he listened in on the calls of Martinelli's political foes. In another recent wiretap scandal, it might be argued that since Administrative Prosecutor Óscar Ceville informed former President Martín Torrijos of a political problem in his office and the secretary of the Security Council at the time approved it, it was OK to tap the phones of employees in his office to see who might be sharing information with rivals. It can be argued that while the tap on someone else's phone that caught a thuggish ex-prosecutor in the act means that the charges against that disgraced public servant must be dropped --- and maybe he should go back to work as a prosecutor --- that the president's pet case, that part of the CEMIS bribery scandal that implicates the PRD, should not be negated by the unwarranted recording of conversations among former President Ernesto Pérez Balladares, former legislator Manuel De La Hoz and others, and that Bonissi can use these recording as evidence.

Distinctions can always be made, but the one that's a problem for Martinelli is that the eavesdropping he approves is all about gaining political advantage, while the stuff that he disapproves is about fighting corruption in government.

As things now stand Ceville, a Torrijos appointee, may face trial and removal by the Supreme Court in much the same fashion as  Gómez; the CEMIS case may or may not be thrown out because of the secret recordings of the former president's conversations; and there may or may not be some sort of accountability for the interception of labor and opposition political party leaders. Probably all rulings will be in favor of Martinelli and Bonissi and against PRD members and labor activists until after Martinelli and Bonissi have left office.

However, those are the matters on the legal front, in a country where the rule of law is mostly theoretical. The political front is something else.

In a certain sense, Bonissi is a throwback to the notoriously pro-corruption Attorney General José Antonio Sossa, under whom he served. The Sossa operation also leaked, or flaunted, the results of improper wiretaps and surreptitiously taken videotapes. And like Sossa, Bonissi shows off the stuff he has obtained when it does not support the allegations that it is claimed to support.

A plot to destabilize Panama? The intercepted conversations between Doens and Bennett don't show that, unless talking political strategy about repealing an unpopular law is to be interpreted in that way.

President Martinelli far from the first politician to confuse his personal political ambitions with "the nation," or opposition with "destabilization." He's also not the first Panamanian leader to get caught in compromising positions with drug cartels and lash out at his critics in response. What's unusual here is the depth of the apparent hypocrisy and the extent of the apparent paranoia. Those are appearances that Martinelli might yet alter, although probably not by any court decision.

The difficulty that Martinelli faces is that he has now convinced a wide swathe of Panamanian society, from militant communists to bedrock conservatives, that he's power-mad and entirely lacking in self-control. As one of the government's critics told this reporter, "I'm scared and you should be too. He thinks he can do anything. He's out of control and you don't know what he'll do next."