The father – legislator and member of the PRD national executive committee Raúl Pineda. It’s not the son – businessman and San Miguelito PRD figure Abraham “Rico” Pineda, now in La Joya awaiting trial on drug smuggling and money laundering charges. Not to presume guilt by association but notice that the father has legal immunities that the son doesn’t. From a video at the National Assembly, where the father stepped aside from his official duties while all that the reporters want to ask him is about the scandal.
“Summary Proof”
Rico Pineda is in a whole world of trouble and finds himself in preventive detention not in El Renacer near Gamboa, where politically connected inmates are usually housed, but in the much harsher and rougher La Joya prison complex. Innocent unless and until proven guilty, bu the reports leaking out look at first blush to be pretty damning.
Even more problematic, it has been reported, is that the suspect’s father was caught on a wiretap talking about one of the alleged instances of drug money laundering while it was happening. But the father, Raúl Pineda, is on the national executive committee of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) and holds powerful committee posts in the National Assembly. The party positions and history within the PRD do matter, but in this instance the key is that he’s an elected legislator.
AS PRACTICED, the law here says that members of our unicameral legislature, the National Assembly, are immune from criminal investigation unless there is a complaint to which “summary proof” that a crime has been committed and that the person accused did it. Has there been an investigation of some sort to compile such proofs? Unless it fortuitoously came up in another matter aimed at someone else, such an investigation was illegal and bars and further investigation or criminal proceedings against the person protected by the summary proof rule. In addition to the members of the national legislature, top officials from the nation’s executive and judicial branches of government. Perhaps most annoyingly, so are members of the Central American Parliament, a do-nothing booby prize for former presidents and lucky party activists.
It’s a recipe for widespread corruption in government, and by the letter of the current Panamanian constitution it’s improper because that basic document says that there shall be no privileges or immunities based upon social class.
Meanwhile the elder Pineda has not been charged, nor formally investigate, bu the names of people who over the years helped him rise to the top of the PRD – who are not convicted, charged, formally investigated or even reasonably suspected of doing anything wrong keep popping up in stories about the Pinedas.
To protect the innocent from oppression, defamation and suspicion coming from many different angles, and to have criminal justice that sorts out accountability based on facts rather than associations, Panama needs to specifically abolish the summary proof rule in all of its applications. Let’s have equal justice for everybody.
Unforced GOP error: with Donald Trump having experienced a sympathetic bump in the polls after surviving an assassination attempt by a messed-up teenager with an assault rifle, that dynamic changed when Trump’s VIP candidate introduced himself to the American public with this gun worship photo. It might have cememted the NRA endorsement but it reinforced public concerns about gun violence at large in society. NOW, going into the Labor Day weekend, Vance says that people without children “disturb” and “disorient” him.
As US Labor Day approaches
A tumultuous summer approaches its end, by ordinary US reckoning. It’s almost Labor Day weekend, a traditional staring point for the quadrennial sprint to a presidential election. The electoral math, momentum and memes have undergone dramatic changes since Joe Biden decided to step aside as his party’s candidate in favor of Kamala Harris. The Democrats are pulling ahead by many measures.
However, it’s a close race and there’s no guarantee that the Trump ticket will continue is implosion into the fall,.
The US system, with its Electoral College, is an odd relic of an 18th century compromise between Yankee traders and slave-owning Southern planters, so lately getting the most votes across the nation is often not a path to victory in a presidential race
Plus, with the divisions in US society so downright vicious as they have become, do we really want to continue with all the dysfunction, demagoguery, increased vulnerability to corruption ans stalemates about important business that divided government produces?
It’s almost time for Americans to come back from vacation to get serious. Seriously, to VOTE.
Willa Cather circa 1912. Wikimedia photo via Aime Dupont Studio, New York.
Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.
Willa Cather
Bear in mind…
That’s the trouble with a politician’s life — somebody is always interrupting it with an election.
Will Rogers
Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.
Mark Twain
Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge’s chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.
Lillian Hellman
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