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Democracy in a time of water shortage

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Is democracy ready to handle water shortages?

by Eric Jackson

Hardcore, totally offensive to this resident’s and reporter’s eyes. A cryptic handwritten notice on the wall at the corregiduria about an Easter Sunday meeting, with a fine for those who don’t attend? In a village with Jehovah’s Witnesses who don’t believe in any government other than what they see as God’s? In a community of fewer than 1,000 households, some headed by members of the militant SUNTRACS construction workers’ union who are agnostic about God but true believers in the broad masses of workers (even if skeptical about the peasants and revolutionary intellectuals)? In a place where most people at least nominally profess Christianity, most of these Catholic? Really, a compulsory local government meeting on Easter Sunday?

Here in El Bajito, people of all faiths and no faith are well nigh unanimous in not believing in the local authorities. We’re the side of town that went eight months without water – and without our PRD representante showing his face – a couple of years ago. One neighbor asked me to report what happened at the meeting.

More than 100 people did show up. Figure that Holy Week without water, as El Bajito had just experienced, would boost interest more than any threatened fine and infinitely more than the opportunity to hobnob with someone who believes that she or he has power and/or prestige.

Did they ultimately record a vote about the fines? There was no coherent proposal, no orderly debate, no proper vote count. Anyone who gets fined and challenges it probably will not get to that point, as a public meeting with a fine for non-attendance and the temerity to call such a thing for Easter Sunday would surely merit summary dismissal as to any result. Forced association and required labor on the holiest of Christian sabbaths don’t pass constitutional muster here or in many other parts of the Western world.

But who attended despite these obvious shortcomings? It turns out the El Bajito is not the worst off, that there had been people uphill who hadn’t been getting much water for many more weeks. We were told that the water supply was sufficient but the water pressure is not and to fix that there would need to be more pumps installed.

We have this jury-rigged rural aqueduct, apart from the national IDAAN water and sewer utility. It’s cheap, unreliable and sometimes better run than other times, depending on who is on the water board at a particular time. Also, depending on which people are allowed to do which self-help modifications to the water lines. Also, depending on which weenie is dead set on impressing someone with his (not his or her, invariably his) wheels, exposed PVC pipes getting crushed be damned.

The generally reliable Señora Alicia, money collector, complaint listener, inspector and stabilizing force – secretaria” – of the water committee privately assured me that water would come the next day. At the appointed hour it didn’t but she was there inspecting and the following morning it did. Only half a tank, but it’s that time of year.

The meeting itself was fun to watch. Political skills at the table in front? Precious few. Individuals who like to hear themselves talk but have little to say? A couple of those. People with good points but limited ability to express them? One or two of those. A generation of people who went to school under the dictatorship, or after the dictatorship when discussion of what went before was banished from the schools, had few among them with any formal education in civics of which to speak. So no points of order, although such would have been well taken. The coherent voices of reason making good points? Those belonged to most of the minority of folks at the meeting who actually spoke. They were mostly schoolteachers or people who had learned their political skills in the labor movement. (Some of the teachers were both, that is, folks who learned politics through their unions.)

There are nebulous plans for some sort of a benefit in May to raise money for more pumps. Figure that by then or soon after water shortages will go to the back of most people’s minds until next year.

This reporter would like to see a water table map, with overlays of topographical maps and an aqueduct map. But were that knowledge collected, it could come with a request to serve on the water committee. But maybe that could be fended off by putting on the wild eyes and getting into apocalyptic talk about climate change.

The indoor plumbing with running water for all is one of President Varela’s promises that looks likely to go largely unkept. A proper solution in the face of climate change would likely involve unification of local rural systems with IDAAN, and money arguments to go with that. In any comprehensive and sustainable version it would surely involve desalination, to put sea water without the salt into the national water supply. It would involve cancellation of some private dibs on rivers and streams. It’s not going to happen in the next year and a half. A mandatory Easter meeting might be one thing, but God forbid forthright, intelligent and discomforting discussions in an election year.

 

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Baby steps back from the brink

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high court
REJECT! The Supreme Court says it won’t hear the Panameñistas’omplaint about the PRD and CD ganging up in the legislature and reorganizing the Credentials Committee to the disadvantage of President Varela and his party.

Baby steps back from the brink

by Eric Jackson

Consider:

    • The National Assembly, which had been sued in the Supreme Court by President Varela’s Panameñista Party for reorganizing the Credentials Committee – essentially for confirming that the 16 Panameñista votes in a 71-member assembly don’t count for much – went ahead and elected new committee members anyway.

 

    • The new committee took up old complaints against the president, the vire president and several high court magistrates. As in, a tacit warning by the legislative branch that it can mess with the judicial and executive branches if push comes to shove. But then it went on to throw out the 15 criminal complaints.

 

    • The Comptroller General, having burdened the Public Ministry with a truckload of documents detailing criminal activity by most of the legistlators in the Martinelli years – surely knowing that the resources are not there to investigate and the National Assembly is unlikely to vote to provide them – went on to say that he will audit the current legislature’s payroll. A terrible cry was heard, mostly from the assembly’s president, Yanibel Ábrego. Attorney General Kenia Porcell and the prosecutors of the Public Ministry and Comptroller General Federico Humbert are theoretically independent players. From the legislature complaints about separation of powers may have elicited private chuckles from the executive, but in any case Humbert’s people descended on the National Assembly and begin their audit. As in, a tacit warning to the legislature not to press its luck.

 

    • The theoretically autonomous Panama Canal Authority board of directors is mired in several scandals, generally not having directly to do with anything canal-related. Two of its members, Nicky Corcione and Henry Mizrachi, went on the lam for several months and stopped attending meetings. For most of that time the ACP, the president and everyone else in high governmental places insisted that nothing could be done, thanks to the authority’s constitutional autonomy. But anti-corruption czarina Angélica Maytín alleged malfeasance and cited chapter and verse of the law that created the ACP. Varela, back from another of his foreign jaunts, said that he will act on Maytín’s petition to remove the two board members, which is based not on the merits of alleged crimes but just for absenting themselves from their jobs. What action the president will take has yet to be seen.

 

    • Independent legislator Ana Matilde Gómez, also an independent presidential candidate and allegedly the Motta family’s way out of Panama’s political conundrum, had long proposed to eliminate the statute of limitations for public corruption crimes. With obvious crooks being cut loose after elaborate delay games tolerated by the courts, public outrage finally got Gómez’s proposal a proper hearing. The legislature was and is divided: elections are less than a year and a half away and even though the Electoral Tribunal has banned the publication of opinion polls and is doing its extralegal utmost to keep new parties and independent candidates who might upset old games off of the ballot, deputies get it about the public sentiment to throw all of them out of office. Not a good time to look pro-corruption. But the lost opportunity to be saved by the calendar could mean not only lost political jobs but also prison time. The law got through committee and then the run-up to Holy Week was a time of endless amendments and objections, many posturing as hardcore anti-corruption but intended to kill the measure by delay until the legislative session runs out. Perhaps most emblematic was one PRD legislator’s objection that the end of the current games would fill the prisons over capacity. People were apparently taken aside and talked to, so on the day after Easter the assembly passed the law with some modifications by a unanimous vote on second reading. It must be passed by the legislature on third reading, signed by the president and perhaps upheld in the face of challenges by the Supreme Court before effectively becoming law.

 

  • At about the same time, the administrative bench of the Supreme Court decided that it would not hear the Panameñistas’ appeal of the legislature’s decision to change the membership of its Credentials Committee.
So, just about everyone has asserted his or her institution’s power, then in most cases stepped back from its use. The amended text of the law eliminating the statute of limitations for many offenses has yet to be published. So far there have been few disappeared legislators. 

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Editorials: Netanyahu and Trump want war; and Election fraud underway here

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A Palestinian protester shot dead. It had nothing to do with a threat to the life of the Israeli soldier who shot him
nor to Israel’s national security. The massacre is the work of a bribe-taking prime minister who needs a distraction.

Reckless criminals who need a war

A huge prison whose hungry and desperate inhabitants occasionally lob missiles back and their tormentors, usually not making distinctions between enemy combatants and innocent bystanders — that’s the reality of Gaza under Israeli blockade. It’s facile enough to talk about the twisted, demagogic politics that arise in such a place but those who have created those conditions with a blockade — an act of war under international law — have no standing to complain.

Meanwhile, Israeli police accuse their country’s prime minister and members of his family of multiple bribe-taking crimes. Meanwhile, members of the US president’s erstwhile inner circle are pleading guilty to criminal charges and turning state’s evidence. We shall see what the full charges are, eventually, but there were unseemly relations with foreign powers seeking to steer the 2016 US elections and US policy since then and all sorts of criminal lies told in the denials of that. Both Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Trump want a war because they need the distraction. That’s what the Israeli massacre of more than a dozen people — some not even protesters but farmers working in their fields who became the targets of Israeli tanks because the orders were to kill Arabs and it didn’t much matter which ones — and the wounding of hundreds more — at Gaza’s Land Day protest was all about. The Trump administration and its weird fanatic ex-settler ambassador to Israel cheered while most of the rest of the world recoiled in horror.

With appointments of war criminals as National Security Advisor and CIA director, and with an announced intention of abandoning the nuclear deal with Iran in mid-May, Donald Trump is sliding the United States toward a war, wherein it is hoped that the Saudi-led Sunni jihad will join forces with Israel to take on Iran, Iraq, the Assad regime in Syria, the Houthi government in Yemen and the Lebanese Hezbollah. This would be a proxy war, or maybe a direct conflict, between the United States and Russia. It would be interesting to see what the Palestinians, the Qataris, the Turks, the Kurds and the wider Muslim world might do. It is the height of madness. Three to five nuclear-armed belligerents could be drawn in.

Antiwar activism in a time of war hysteria is always difficult and dangerous. Despite all of the personal and political risks, however, Israeli and American doves need to mobilize now.

 

Moving toward a Honduran-style election

The Electoral Tribunal, which does not count on experts at deciphering signatures, has thrown out the great majority of signatures on petitions to put Miguel Antonio Bernal on the ballot because they say that they don’t match the signatures on their records. Of course, no two signatures by the same person are exactly the same, but a competent handwriting expert can readily determine whether two signatures are by the same person. There is apparently a great fraud being perpetrated here, either by people at the Electoral Tribunal or by people in the Bernal campaign. International handwriting experts need to be brought in, the truth determined and those who committed fraud need to face criminal proceedings about it.

It’s no good to ask our system to deal with it. The magistrates of the Electoral Tribunal are from the political parties and have manifested their bias against independents. The Electoral Prosecutor is a sneering criminal who supported all of the Martinelli camp’s 2014 election crimes and should be in prison rather than in public office for that performance.

There is a problem with international assistance, of course. Certainly the United States has the expertise, but then the Trump regime is a major backer of the Honduran election fraud, and moreover, back in 1989 US forces stole Panama’s public archives and have kept them under lock and key, among other things to protect Manuel Antonio Noriega’s election fraud apparatchiki. (Recall that the Reagan administration supported Noriega’s 1984 election theft.)

Is there an acceptable broker? In the end, only the Panamanian people. The discredited power brokers intend to have everything arranged but they run the great risk of things being decided outside that law and on the streets rather than in an orderly and fair election process. But then, banana republic strongman like Mr. Hernández in Honduras or Mr. Ortega in Nicaragua is the role to which so many of them aspire.

Bear in mind…
 

If there were no strikes, this would not be a democracy.
Violeta Chamorro

 

Where man does not learn about life and carries on and risks it, he loses his value as a whole man, loses his interest in the high concepts of life, loses the joy of work that is the foundation of progress and falls into the gap of growing mediocrity, boiling with small interests and small passions.
Octavio Mendez Pereira

 

If you don’t have many possessions then you don’t need to work all your life like a slave to sustain them, and therefore you have more time for yourself.
Pepe Mujica

 

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Pascua Florida de Resurrección

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Pascua Florida

fotos por Eric Jackson

 

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¿Wappin? Good Friday and Passover / Viernes Santo y Pascua Judía

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Black Christ
El Nazareno de Portobelo. Foto por Adam Jones.

Good Friday & Passover / Viernes Santo & Pascua

Handel’s ‘Israel in Egypt,’ Age of Enlightenment
https://youtu.be/fRUS-VwEJaw

The Maccabeats – Les Misérables
https://youtu.be/qmthKpnTHYQ

Flory Jagoda – Pesah ala mano
https://youtu.be/Vh3JU9NpI_0

Arvo Pärt’s ‘Passio,’ Mogens Dahl Kammerkor
https://youtu.be/dH3bkVapmGo

JS Bach’s ‘St. Matthew Passion,’ Harnoncourt recording
https://youtu.be/P21qlB0K-Bs

 

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EFF, “Fake news” as a pretext for Latin American censorship

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Okke

Yes, we have seen it here too. Dutch journalist Okke Ornstein was jailed on criminal defamation charges. He wrote about oft-convicted Canadian fraud artist Monte Friesner, who had been a client of Mayor Blandón’s law firm. Photo by Eric Jackson.

“Fake News” offers Latin American powers an opportunity to censor opponents

by Katitza Rodriguez and Veridiana Alimonti – Electronic Frontier Foundation

Today’s headlines are dominated by the role of misinformation campaigns or “fake news” in undermining democracy in the West. From ongoing accusations of Russian meddling in Trump’s election to Russian efforts to sway the Brexit and French Presidential election votes, these countries are confronting “fake news” as an ongoing and urgent threat to democracy. Yet in Latin America, where misinformation campaigns have prevailed throughout the twentieth century, concerns over “fake news” are hardly new. Latin American media concentration, disinformation campaigns, and biased coverage have long undermined informed civic discourse.

“Fake News” as a pretext for curbing free expression in Latin America

In 2018, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia and Costa Rica, among others, will undergo electoral processes involving their respective presidencies. These governments are beginning to exploit concerns over “fake news,” as though it were a novel phenomenon, in order to adopt proposals to increase state control over online communications and expand censorship and Internet surveillance. Such rhetoric glosses over the fact that propaganda from traditional Latin American media monopolies has long been the norm in the region, and that Internet companies have played a critical role in counterbalancing this power dynamic. Frank La Rue, the former UN Special Rapporteur on Free Expression, remarked at the 2017 Internet Governance Forum on the inherent risks of importing the term “fake news” to Latin America:

I don’t like the term “fake news” because I think there is a bit of a trap in it. We are confronting campaigns of misinformation. So we should talk about information and disinformation.

La Rue believes that when distinctions between fake and real news are drawn, they are done ultimately to dissuade the public from reading news or thinking independently. He argues that “the problem again is that fake news becomes a perfect excuse to just silence or shut down any alternative or any dissident voice.” To respond to this threat, EFF co-signed an open letter along with other 34 Latin American NGOs at the end of last year.

Latam Trends

When Brazil set up a council to counter fake news, the Army and the Brazilian intelligence agency –entities with a long track record of crushing minority or dissenting voices – were invited to join. The specter of “fake news” has also been a pretext for draconian bills in Brazilian parliament. The latest one, a recent proposal of unknown authorship, led to a great controversy when it was submitted to the Communication Council of National Congress’ analysis without prior notice. The text defined as a crime the creation or sharing of false news, imposing detention penalties for those who propagate information the government deemed false. It also sought to modify a key component of Brazilian civil rights framework, the Marco Civil da Internet, by making companies liable for failing to remove or block reported posts within 24 hours or for not providing an easy tool by which the user can check whether the news is trustworthy. Internet companies would be subject to a staggering fine of up to 5% of their revenue in the previous fiscal year if they failed to remove content. Although the proposal was withdrawn as a reaction to public outcry, other bills with similar content remain in the parliament.

Mexico is also approaching election season; the country is set to hold the largest election in its history. In July 2018, Mexicans will elect not only a new president but also all federal legislators and nine state governors. The country’s National Election Institute (INE) has recently signed an agreement with Facebook Ireland to fight fake news. The INE is expected to sign similar agreements with Google and Twitter. The agreement, a copy of which was obtained by the newspaper El Universal, includes the use of Facebook’s tools to measure civic participation, access to real-time data of voting results granted by INE, and the provision of a physical space in the Institute’s office where, on election day, the company is expected to perform activities such as posting live videos. While neither party is meant to get involved in deciding what is true or false, transparency is a must. Luis Fernando Garcia, of Mexican NGO Red en Defensa de los Derechos Digitales, told EFF:

We need complete transparency about the nature of the relationship between INE and Facebook. Facebook should also refrain from adopting measures that discriminate against some media outlets and benefit others in the name of combating “fake news”.

We need an Internet where we are free to meet, create, organize, share, associate, debate and learn. And we also need elections to be free from manipulation. As we have said before, people should be empowered by the tools they use, not left passive by others’ use of such technology. But platforms should remain wary of purporting to validate news even in the face of calls to do so; if they assume this role, it will raise obvious concerns about how they’ll respond to political pressures.

Like “fake news,” policies around hate speech are often used as cover for censorship. It has served as a convenient pretext for advancing a repressive Honduran draft bill on Internet content regulation. After fraud accusations marred 2017 Honduras’s presidential elections, Honduras finds itself in a grave political crisis. Amidst the turbulence, a bill regulating online speech was introduced in the Honduran National Congress in February 2018. The bill, which was widely criticized by civil society, provides broad leeway for Internet companies to block Internet content in the name of protecting users from hate speech, discrimination, or insults. The bill compels companies to take down third-party content within 24 hours in order not to be fined or even find their services blocked. This pro-censorship bill has also spurred recent debates on the creation of a national cybersecurity committee assigned to deal with, among other issues, fake news.

Efforts to keep “fake news” in check are spreading across Latin America. Disinformation campaigns cannot serve to wreck democracy and free speech. EFF will be monitoring this issue as this year’s Latin American elections progress.

 

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Perez, Rigging the system through intimidation

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census

A reckless decision

by Tom Perez — Democratic National Committee

[From a ‘get on our database’ and ‘send money’ email by Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez, with those features redacted but republished because he has something important to say.]

This week, the Trump administration announced that they intend to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census — and now it’s up to us to stop them.

Adding this question to the census, especially at this point in the process and without any testing, is extremely reckless. It could decrease response rates in communities with large immigrant populations and produce inaccurate results due to incomplete counts. Congress depends on those results not only to decide how to distribute federal resources — but also to determine the number of congressional districts in each state.

This calculated move is a clear attempt by Republicans to maximize their political power and undermine fair representation in government. We must do everything we can to stop it.

Many immigrants are already fearful of deportation under the Trump administration. Including a citizenship question on the census will spread more fear among immigrants who are worried the information will be used against them.

But this move is not only another attempt to intimidate immigrants — it is an attempt by Republicans to sabotage important census data to rig our political system in their favor. It is critical that we speak out against it.

 

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Kermit’s birds ~ Las aves de Kermit

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SCB - KN

Shiny Cowbird / Vaquero Brilliante

photo copyright / foto derechos de autor Kermit Nourse

The Shiny Cowbird, with its shiny plumage, can easily be confused for a crow or a grackle, but with his colorful feathers has his own merits. This is Molothrus bonariensis cabanisii. Compare with the Bronzed Cowbird, Molothrus aeneus.

El Vaquero Brillante, con su brillante plumaje, puede confundirse fácilmente con un cuervo o un talingo, pero con sus coloridas plumas tiene sus propios méritos. Esto es Molothrus bonariensis cabanisii. Comparar con el Vaquero Bronceado, Molothrus aeneus.

 

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Impeachment: one more thread in the constitutional crisis

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Ana Matilde
Independent legislator and presidential hopeful Ana Matilde Gómez finds her desk the center of activity in the debate over Proposed Law 514, which would eliminate the statute of limitations for amassing wealth that can’t be legitimately explained while holding public office, extortion, influence trafficking, abuse of authority, malfeasance and public contracting fraud by government officials. There is a strong public demand for this legislation, which got the measure through committee to the National Assembly floor. Politicians who may be fond of such things but won’t say so are proposing a flood of amendments, making claims that the measure would discriminate against politicians by not also applying to such conduct in the private sector and so on. If they can send the bill back to committee or stretch the debate to the end of April, the legislative session ends and the whole process would have to start over again Photo by the National Assembly.

Impeachment but one track toward a constitutional crash

by Eric Jackson

The National Assembly’s Credentials Committee, whose legitimacy President Varela dismisses and which is challenged before the Supreme Court, has decided to take up 15 criminal complaints, a dozen of which have been pending for some time. Three of these are against the president, one against the vice president and 11 against magistrates of the Supreme Court. The dozen cases that had been pending, some of them years old, are the residue after the committee in its previous incarnation, in which Varela’s Panameñista Party held four of the nine seats, threw out a great many more complaints. Three new complaints — the gists of which are being withheld from the public — include one against the president.

The likely matter of the new complaint against Varela would probably be his receipt of millions of dollars via an indirect route from the Odebrecht construction firm. The president first denied such payments, then after a third witness said otherwise admitted them but characterized them as campaign donations rather than bribes. But even if Varela’s claim is true, there would appear to be a violation of election laws inherent in the receipt of a political contribution from a Brazilian company.

The high court has for all of the post-invasion period been a hotbed for bribery and from the middle of the Martinelli administration on has been rent by acrimonious disputes among the magistrates that have occasionally burst forth into public view. Two figures now on the outside loom large if someone wants to make it so: former presiding magistrate Alejandro Moncada Luna, now out of prison on parole after his conviction on corruption charges, has a new job at a Panama City law firm; and former tourism minister Salomón Shamah, who was Ricardo Martinelli’s courier who took orders to the magistrates about how to rule in certain cases, is in self-imposed exile in Medellin. The court is short-handed with unfilled vacancies and holdovers whose terms have expired but whose replacements have not been nominated and ratified. As an institution the Supreme Court’s reputation is so odious that it would appear unlikely that any political movement to defend it as an institution in its present configuration would garner much public support.

Yet the court was the starting point of the current constitutional impasse late last year, when the president appointed an arguably well qualified anti-corruption prosecutor and the laughably unqualified wife of one of his cabinet members to fill two vacancies that were coming as of December 32. Varela was warned that he didn’t have the votes, managed to jam the appointments through the Credentials Committee as it then was by a 5-4 vote, then was soundly defeated on the floor of the legislature as a whole. The National Assembly then moved to reconfigure the Credentials Committee in a way that likely prevents Varela from ever again pushing any matter through that body. The Panameñistas filed a constitutional challenge before the high court, which was accepted by an acting magistrate and on the face of it should have suspended both the reconfiguration of the committee and any action that the body might take. But a majority of the legislature, citing separation of powers, has ignored the court on this point. By the court’s rules there should have been a ruling on the constitutional challenge by now but that has not happened, and were it to be handed down at the first opportunity its effect would in any case lapse on July 1, when the legislature picks its leaders and makes its committee assignments for the final year of its term.

Meanwhile the legislature, including members of the Credentials Committee, is under suspicion for its own Odebrecht dealings. Committee member Elias Castillo’s law firm was paid millions by the company, in the most notorious instance. Much of the legislature is also under a cloud for the ways that members spent public funds that were part of their circuit allocations, or on payroll for staff. Comptroller General Federico Humbert has been auditing these matters. Any formal investigation and prosecution of a sitting legislator would be under the sole jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and several deputies have filed a constitutional challenge trying to extend this to the notion that a comptroller can’t audit a legislator.

The National Assembly, having lost lawsuits in the lower courts to La Prensa and individuals who were attempting to use the nation’s Transparency Law to find out the details of legislators’ spending yet maintaining its position that it does not have to provide such public documents, also filed a a bried that looked like a constitutional challenge with the high court, alleging that the Transparency Law is unconstitutional. But the high court rejected the challenge, remarking that the assembly’s president, Yanibel Ábrego, simply made an “observation” that doesn’t raise any legitimate constitutional question. The lawsuit about whether the law applies to the legislature remains pending before the court.

The president? Juan Carlos Varela has been out of the country for much of this year. As these words are written he is on a trip to Jordan with a stop in Rome on the itinerary. After the legislature formally rejected his high court nominees he said that he would deal with the issue after Carnival. Now he says that he will take up the unfolding constitutional crisis when he gets back after Holy Week.

In this majority Catholic country, the principal would-be intermediary is the Catholic Church. But at least in any fashion made public, Varela has not met with the bishops over the crisis. There is speculation that in his stop at Rome he may take up the ball of questions the Holy See. It is reported that the church considers the problem more than the ordinary political crisis, as next January Panama will play host to World Youth Day, whose most famous participant will be the pope. The prospect of Pope Francis landing in a capital where large crowds of protesters are out in the streets and there is uncertainty about who is really in charge of the government is reportedly something that the Vatican would dearly like to avoid.

Business, labor, professional and civic groups have been meeting with the various political parties and government leaders to fashion some sort of compromise way out of the impasse. But not with the president or his party, and to the extent that Supreme Court magistrates have been approached, they have been willing to hear public concerns but do not talk about cases that are before them or may come before them.

Talk to the legislature with or without the votes and it becomes readily apparent that between the PRD and Cambio Democratico caucuses President Varela does not have the votes. He must fashion a deal with them from a position of weakness or become politically crippled or be ousted, so it would seem. But the principal organizer of the legislature’s defiance of the president, legislator and PRD secretary general Pedro Miguel González, claims that Varela is looking for the Supreme Court to save his political fortunes. González warns of a crisis without precedent in the post-invasion period.

 

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New paintings by George Scribner

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fishing
       “¡A pescar!” — Santa Clara, from the beach.

New paintings by George Scribner

Artist’s note: I’m now represented online by UGallery.com and in Panama City by Habitante Galeria. For those of you in Panama, Habitante has two galleries, one on Calle Uruguay and a new gallery in Costa del Este.

 

pipa
                           “Se vende pipa fría” — Avenida Central, Panama City.

 

locks
      Miraflores Locks at 8 p.m.

 

Julio
     “Julio crosses the canal.”

 

guna
                               “La gunita.”

 

gorgona
“La salida” — Gorgona beach, Panama.

 

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