Yeah, yeah. She can get Government and Justice Minister Arnulfo Escalona, a man who apparently knows which side of the bread gets buttered and very little else, to go on TV and tell everybody that it strengthens democracy, whose three pillars he describes as the political parties, the Electoral Tribunal and the Electoral Prosecutor. But nobody is fooled by the president's proposed election law revision.

She wants to eliminate presidential primaries so that she can hand-pick one of her in-crowd as the 2004 Arnulfista nominee. She wants to enshrine the corrupting influence of unlimited secret campaign contributions in the Electoral Code. She wanted to suppress freedom of the press by making campaign coverage by The Panama News and other mass communications media subject to regulation by the Electoral Tribunal, but most of those provisions have been killed in legislative committee. Still, Mireya probably has the votes in the Legislative Assembly and on the Supreme Court to carry out most of her assault on democracy.

However, the voters, whom Escalona revealingly excludes from his discourse on the pillars of democracy, are not in Mireya Moscoso's pocket.

The silver lining to this latest cloud on Panamanian democracy is that while Mireya will pick Escalona, Foreign Minister José Miguel Alemán or one of the other unworthies of her entourage to be the 2004 Arnulfista standard bearer, that will most probably destroy the Arnulfista Party. If Mireya persists Alberto Vallarino will create his own party or garner the nomination of one or more small parties, the anti-PRD vote will be split and the odds are that Martín Torrijos will be elected president and Mireya's choice will finish a pathetic third. It would be a fitting end for one of the most inept and corrupt governments in Panamanian history.

Most Panamanians, and a majority of those who read The Panama News, may well object to that possibility, arguing that Torrijos and the PRD are bad guys too. Such sentiments are Alberto Vallarino's hope, and it's possible that he could ride them into the Palacio de las Garzas. A Vallarino presidency, won without the Arnulfista nomination, would mean even more certain political oblivion for the Moscoso crowd.

It's a problem when we have an election in which the choices are limited by undemocratic rules and ultimately made by an electorate that votes on the basis of whom it hates the most. That's unlikely to resolve this nation's problems, but that's the situation we face.

It's time to make the best of a bad situation. Let's forget Mireya and her followers as sources of solutions and reserve for them the condemnation that is their due. We should now concentrate our attention on Alberto Vallarino and Martín Torrijos, one of whom will, unless miracles or tragedies intervene, be the next president. We need to let them know that the one who will give us a stronger democracy and bring the sneering crooks to justice will be the candidate who prevails.

A nation is a society united by delusions about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbors.

W. R. Inge

Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.

Rastafari

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

Jeannette Rankin