Some people who attain high public office grow in their position of trust. Some, however, just bloat.
Bloat has been on spectacular display in the first months of Donald Trump’s presidential tenure. He had a disastrous start, choosing a cabinet and staff mostly made up of ideological quacks, incompetents, and Wall Street grifters.
Yet, buoyed by his explosive ego, Trump pronounced his start historic: “I don’t think there’s ever been a president elected who in this short period of time has done what we’ve done,” he boasted at a recent news conference.
Sadly, he’s right.
For example, they made a reckless, unconstitutional attempt to ban millions of Muslim immigrants from our land. They had to ax the kooky guy Trump chose to be his national security adviser. And they’ve apparently been caught colluding with Russian meddlers in our politics.
Some record!
And now Trump has embraced a GOP replacement of Obamacare, hailing the “Trumpcare” substitute that will jack-up our health care costs, cut benefits, and eliminate coverage entirely for millions of working-class and poor people — while also sneaking in yet another underhanded tax cut for the rich.
It’s so awful that even hordes of Republican lawmakers have gagged, refusing to swallow it. Yet, lost in self-deception, Trump calls it “wonderful.”
We have a president who’s detached from reality, careening from one mess to another. But who will say: “The emperor has no clothes”?
He’s so far gone that when he read his recent address to Congress straight off the teleprompter, without his usual pugnacious ranting, Republican enablers of his antics and even the media establishment applauded him for being “presidential.”
Huh? The speech was a nasty wad of lies and right-wing nonsense. If the occasional appearance of sanity is all we ask of Trump, then his reign of insanity will be our fault.
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Panamanian immigration law is a disorderly mess that Ricardo Martinelli’s ill-intended changes made worse. Panama’s immigration bureaucracy is one of the more sordid parts of a generally corrupt government. Driven by the collapse of the oil economy, climate change and political and economic upheavals, human migration is a growing and disruptive force in much of the world. Of course Panama is unable to go on as before.
The problem is that Panamanian immigration policy is forever a reaction to this or that problem of the moment, forever structured for the benefit of lawyers and corrupt public officials, forever driven by base passions and never based on a solid plan of where Panama and its economy want to go. It’s worse when the president is unpopular and on the downward slide of the second half of an administration, in which lots of money gets typically spent in futile efforts to return a ruling party to office in the next elections.
Are there scandals about foreign influence? A Brazilian-based multinational corporation has bribed many leading figures of every major Panamanian political party, but the president isn’t strong enough to take a stand against that. The nation’s legal profession, rather than zealously defending a just society for the people who live here, is mainly oriented toward helping rich foreigners evade their country’s taxes — and it doesn’t help that the president’s right-hand man was one of the most notorious offenders. We still have a racist immigration regime, which keeps us from building a high-tech industry based in large part on becoming the land of opportunity for well educated Asians who have little chance to get ahead where they are. The North American who has stolen a lot of money from whence she or he came and seeks to continue a crime wave from this isthmus has a much easier time getting into Panama and staying than does the North American of modest means and working age who has skills that this country badly needs.
And so it is that a weakened President Varela caves to pressure from xenophobic demagogues, takes the course of least resistance and attacks the easy targets. Never mind that the immigrant who runs the arepa stand or juggles at the traffic light not only doesn’t take anybody’s job but actually adds to Panama’s economy and culture. Never mind that the immigrant who has been allowed to continue the border-hopping permanent tourist may own a home, have family responsibilities and play important roles in community projects. Without consideration of equities or the wealth of communities, these people have become the scapegoats for a broken system.
Rational immigration reform presupposes leaders who will slap down ugly hatreds and uphold the national interest. Maybe that’s too much to ask.
Panamanian history tells us that we are about to see the looting of properties owned by those who are being kicked out. Perhaps the ethnic communities whose members are being dispossessed can thwart the hoodlums — who will surely include lawyers and public officials — by creating trusts to preserve the assets of those whom Varela is foolishly running out of Panama.
Russian bots?
For many years, The Panama News has had to deal with the consequences of online crime while not understanding very much about it. Often the editor could see some of the effect without knowing much about the why and how. Back in 2006 it was observed on the front page of The Panama News:
Some of you had trouble connecting to this website in September, as on a few occasions I did as well. My web server told me of several attempts to hack into the website, some of which got so far as to put things on the index page. Security measures have been upgraded. On one night I got a series of some 3,000 computer generated spam emails to my yahoo.com email box — they were a pain to clean out, but it’s a large box so it was not shut down. My other email box … was repeatedly shut down by email bombs with large attachments, emails asking me to confirm subscriptions to “Belarus Babes” and other such things that someone signed me up for and more “ordinary” spam bundles.
One curious feature of those attacks on The Panama News email boxes was that much of the spam was in the Cyrillic alphabet.
Several months later this reporter went to Parque Omar to observe and interview some folks from a local chapter of Falun Gong who would regularly gather there for exercise, meditation and discussions about the state of humanity. At the time went without notice, but the resulting article was widely copied. Later that year a bot coming from China got into The Panama News website and, without registering a single visit, ran up huge amounts of bandwidth to the exent that the website was shut down. It was the first time this reporter had heard about a bot, a bit of computer code that adds function much as if it were somebody with permission to do so reprogramming the website. This one was easily traced back to China, but as was explained at the time, it could have been sent by anyone from anywhere and just routed through someone or something in China.
Only years later was it discovered that by far the most-read article ever published by The Panama News was that little Falun Gong piece. But upon further inspection, there was no spike in unique visitors at the time, just tens of thousands of connections through London and Prague to the article. As in, a swarm of bots hurling that article in circuitous fashion at and most likely through, past or over China’s Internet firewall. So was the bot attack that shut down The Panama News for a few days the work of the Chinese government? Or was it an indignant Chinese citizen striking back at a medium in Panama that gave scandalous coverage to what he or she thought to be an evil anti-Chinese cult?
As things were explained, the good reasons for the Pentagon establishing a cyber command made ever more sense — as did the reasons to fear such a thing.
Now it turns out that there is a big political controversy in the United States, with charges of “treason” being inappropriately hurled about, that’s about Russian bots. People who hacked into the Democratic Party’s emails and databases used a Cyrillic keyboard and some known Russian software code to do what they did. Now The Guardian tells us that the ultra-right data operators of the Brexit and Trump campaigns used Russian-made bots for three nefarious political purposes:
They scour the social media to see what people say they like, identifying their personal hot-button issues and the lies that they are ready to accept without much question, so that personally-tailored propaganda pitches can be made to these millions of individuals;
Every time some bit of information — often of the whole cloth fake news — that’s derogatory to a person whose character these alt-right operators seek to assassinate appears in the social media, it gets promoted and geometrically propagated with a great many “likes” and “shares” that are not by real people but by bot-created pages; and
Bots are used to fake the popularity of preposterous positions so as to give them higher rankings by the Google algorithms, such that, for example, what the creepy little underground of Nazi Holocaust deniers publish is treated as more legitimate that the accurate story about the millions of people who were systematically murdered by the Third Reich.
So how bad of a threat are bots to modern democracies? Perhaps only to the extent that those democracies don’t properly teach civics in their schools. But perhaps they swung the 2016 US presidential election.
So does this all mean that we should follow the neocons — who helped to lead us to a disastrous war for a lie in Iraq — into Cold War II against the Russians?
Consider that the code identified in the reports so far about the DNC hack is several years old and can be bought from ordinary criminal hackers, whether or not that code was originally created for the Kremlin. And consider that Russian mafia families are involved in a wide range of computer crimes and vice, from ripoff forex sites to online pornography to the commandeering of websites and email boxes to create email spam lists to sell on the black market or to distribute spam for things like fake viagra pills.
Putin’s rise to power can in some ways be seen as atop the shoulders of factions of the Russian underworld against other Russian gangsters. Trump has long had associations with Russian mobsters, and his international fundraising spam to wildly inappropriate recipients last summer reeks of the use of a spam list purchased from the underworld.
There are some legitimate things to investigate, but those politicians and wannabe White House advisers who pretend that the world political situation is like the US-Soviet rivalry circa 1955 just prove how unfit they are by doing that.
Russian bots? They are out there and defenses must be interposed and forever improved. A simple open-and-shut case to assign blame and obtain convictions is probably not possible by way of any honest proceedings. But the truth is coming out, and if we don’t get hysterical and don’t let demagogues interpret it for us, it will go a long way toward keeping us free.
Bear in mind…
Of course the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you — if you don’t play, you can’t win.
Robert Heinlein
To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given the chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy. As everyone else, I love to dunk my crust in it. But alone, it is not a diet designed to keep body and soul together.
Bette Davis
You don’t choose the times you live in, but you do choose who you want to be. And you do choose how you think.
Grace Lee Boggs
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Editor’s note: There have recently be a number of town hall meetings by the international leaders of Democrats Abroad, almost all of them supporters of Hillary Clinton in the primary, and it was the intention to balance the above video with Bernie Sanders with one of the DA town halls on this same page. But the current leadership has suppressed the recordings of those meetings. Well, fine. However, hiding and denying access will not give them a free pass on scrutiny in The Panama News.
Meanwhile, Democrats Abroad is choosing country chapter leaders and in May in the Washington suburbs will choose the next regional and international leaders. Internationally, Democrats Abroad voted 68 percent for Sanders in last year’s primary. It was 71 percent in Panama.
Almost all of the international leadership was for Hillary. Their main accomplishment was a shrinkage of Democrats Abroad from 53 country chapters to 40 between 2013 and 2016. Some of these people used their positions to retaliate in various ways against those who supported Sanders. These people are by and large running to retain control of the international organization. There have been several online Democrats Abroad town hall meetings in recent weeks, but the international leadership has not posted the video or audio recordings of these online. If they ever do, these will be posted in The Panama News if for historical value only. But so far this is the extent of the available DA video library.
On the Democrats Abroad international Facebook page, however, they ARE posting “party unity” messages like this one, featuring renowned experts like this guy. Which is a good illustration of why there is a movement to reject the old guard’s attempt to play musical chairs and retain control of an organization that they don’t represent.
Ah, well — Democrats. A rumble under the big tent would have plenty of precedent. But the leadership will change because the games that the current ones at the international level of Democrats Abroad play are unsustainable and the rank-and-file of both the progressive and corporate factions of the party know this. Odds are that Tom Perez is not actually a party leader in the mold of Debbie Wasserman Schultz or the current international leaders of Democrats Abroad. We shall see.
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The Israeli Peace Bloc, steadfast even when they’re way down in the polls. Photo by Gush Shalom.
Perhaps the Messiah will come
by Uri Avnery — Gush Shalom
If someone had told me 50 years ago that the rulers of Israel, Jordan and Egypt had met in secret to make peace, I would have thought that I was dreaming.
If I had been told that the leaders of Egypt and Jordan had offered Israel complete peace in return for leaving the occupied territories, with some exchanges of territory and a token return of refugees, I would have thought that the Messiah had come. I would have started to believe in God or Allah or whoever there is up there.
Yet a few weeks ago it was disclosed that the rulers of Egypt and Jordan had indeed met in secret last year with the Prime Minister of Israel in Aqaba, the pleasant sea resort where the three states touch each other. The two Arab leaders, acting de facto for the entire Arab world, had made this offer. Benyamin Netanyahu gave no answer and went home.
So did the Messiah.
Donald Trump, the comedian-in-chief of the United States, some time ago gave his answer to the question about the solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Two-states, one-state, whatever the two sides agree on, he answered.
He could just as well have answered: “Two-states, one-state, three-states, four-states, take your pick!”
And indeed, if you live in la-la-land, there is no limit to the number of states. Ten states is as good as one state. The more the merrier.
Perhaps it needed a total innocent like Trump to illustrate how much nonsense can be talked about that choice.
On the fifth day of the Six-day war, I published an open letter to the Prime Minister, Levy Eshkol, urging him to offer the Palestinians the opportunity to set up a state of their own in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Immediately after the war, Eshkol invited me for a private conversation. He listened patiently while I explained to him the idea. At the end he said, with a benevolent smile: “Uri, what kind of a merchant are you? A good merchant starts by demanding the maximum and offering the minimum. Then one haggles, and in the end a compromise is reached somewhere in the middle.”
“True,” I answered, “if one wants to sell a used car. But here we want to change history!”
The fact is that at the time, nobody believed that Israel would be allowed to keep the territories. It is said that generals always fight the last war. The same is true for statesmen. On the day after the six-day war, Israeli leaders called to mind the day after the 1956 war, when the US President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Soviet President Nikolai Bulganin compelled David Ben-Gurion to give back all the occupied territory ignominiously.
So there seemed to be only one choice: to give the territories back to King Hussein of Jordan, as the great majority advocated, or to give them to the Palestinian people, as my friends and I, a tiny minority, suggested.
I remember another conversation. The Minister of Trade and Industry, Haim Zadok, a very clever lawyer, made a fiery speech in the Knesset. When he came out of the plenum, I admonished him: “But you don’t believe a single world you just said!” To which he replied, laughingly, “Anybody can make a good speech about things he believes in. The art is to make a good speech about things you don’t believe in!”
Then he added seriously: “If they compel us to give back all the territories, we shall give back all the territories. If they compel us to give back part of the territories, we shall give back part of the territories. If they don’t compel us to give back anything, we shall keep everything.”
The incredible happened. President Lyndon Johnson and the entire world did not give a damn. We were left with the entire loot, to this very day.
I cannot resist the temptation to repeat again an old joke:
Right after the foundation of the State of Israel, God appeared to David Ben-Gurion and told him: “You have done good by my people. Utter a wish and I shall grant it”.
“I wish that Israel shall be a Jewish and a democratic state and encompass all the country between the Mediterranean and the Jordan,” Ben-Gurion replied.
“That is too much even for me!” God exclaimed. “But I will grant you two of the three.” Since then we can choose between a Jewish and democratic Israel in a part of the country, a democratic state in all of the country that will not be Jewish or a Jewish state in all of the country that will not be democratic.
That is the choice we still face, after all this time.
The Jewish state in all of the country means apartheid. Israel always maintained cordial relations with the racist Afrikaner state in South Africa, until it collapsed. Creating such a state here is sheer lunacy.
The annexationists have a trick up their sleeve: to annex the West Bank, but not the Gaza Strip. This would create a state with only a 40 percent Palestinian minority. In such a country there would rage a perpetual intifada.
But in reality, even this is a pipe dream. Gaza cannot be separated forever from Palestine. It has been part of the country since time immemorial. It would have to be annexed, too. This would create a state with a slight Arab majority, a majority bereft of national and civil rights. This majority would grow rapidly.
Such a situation would be untenable in the long run. Israel would be compelled to give the vote to the Arabs.
Utopian idealists would welcome such a solution. How wonderful! The One-state solution! Democracy, equality, the end of nationalism. When I was very young, I too hoped for this solution. Life has cured me. Anyone actually living in the country knows that this is totally impossible. The two nations would fight each other. At least for the first one or two hundred years.
I have never seen a detailed plan of how such a state would function. Except once: Vladimir Jabotinsky, the brilliant leader of the Zionist far-right, wrote such a plan for the Allies in 1940. If the President of the state will be Jewish, he decreed, the Prime Minister will be Arab. And so on. Jabotinsky died a few months later, along with his plan.
Zionists came here to live in a Jewish state. That was their dominant motive. They cannot even imagine an existence as another Jewish minority. In such a situation, they would slowly emigrate, as the Afrikaners do. Indeed, such an emigration to the US and Germany is already happening under the radar. Zionism has always been a one-way street — towards Palestine. After this “solution,” it would go the other way.
Truth is that there is no choice at all.
The only real solution is the much-maligned “Two States for Two peoples,” the one declared dead many times. It’s either that solution or the destruction of both peoples.
So how do Israelis face this reality? They face it the Israeli way: by not facing the reality. They just go on living, day by day, hoping that the problem will just go away.
Perhaps the Messiah will come after all.
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Is that a Venezuelan look on your face? Do you dress like a gringo?
Police roadblocks all over Panama look for fugitives, teenagers and foreigners without proper papers
by Eric Jackson
The National Police are sending out Twitter messages about how they are setting up roadblocks on “all” streets and road in all of Panama, at every hour of the day and night, without regard to the traffic problems that they may create. They say that they are looking for people with warrants for their arrests and foreigners with “irregular” papers. In Chiriqui they have also been rounding up minors found out and about after curfew.
It’s the old-fashioned “prophylactic social action” that Panamanian police stage from time to time. If you are a foreigner, or a citizen and also a member of an ethnic group whom the police might consider non-Panamanian, be prepared to have all of your identification in order. If you are a dual citizen of Panama and somewhere else, hand them your cedula, not a foreign passport. If the past is any indication, those Panamanian citizens who speak with foreign accents may be held for questioning on suspicion of being in Panama illegally.
It’s hard to say. The crackdown is surely intended to prompt those will questionable or illegal immigration status to leave Panama, but how long the roadblocks will be up and how severe the policy shift will be remain to be seen. Security Minister Alexis Bethancourt Yau is part Chinese himself — related to a long-established community with a lot of illegal immigration with a lot of citizens who have over the years been treated as suspects because of their race. But he’s an appointed official, carrying out the policies of an elected president. Whether or not he has any sympathy, figure that the cops at the roadblocks very likely won’t.
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We arrived in Seattle on the afternoon of March 8.
We made our way to passport control with our ESTA, a letter from our American label (in which the label owner declared we would be performing a series of concerts for promotional purposes only and that we would in no way be receiving any form of payment for those shows) and a written invitation on the part of SxSw in hand. The first of us to get through passport control was Ale (our drummer), who disclosed the promotional purposes of our trip to the police officer.
Ale (our guitarist) and Andrea who both explained the exact same thing were held up and escorted to another office. Subsequently, we were all called back and interrogated individually, in three different rooms. We were able to have the agents speak directly to the owner of our American label without any success, however. After almost 4 hours of questions they told us their verdict. They had decided to deport us back to Italy and deny us entry into the United States. They declared us illegal immigrants even if our intention was by no means to look for work in the United States nor never go back to Italy.
We accepted this decision as it seemed final at that point. They took our digital fingerprints and took mugshots of us for their file. They confiscated our cell phones and we were denied the possibility of contacting our families and loved ones. Around 10:30pm, two prison officers frisked us, handcuffed us and brought us to jail in a police car. We spent the night in jail and had been escorted there as though we were three criminals. The following day, after having completed all jail-related procedures (mugshots, declaration of good health and signatures), two other agents came to get us. We were searched, handcuffed and again escorted in a police car.
They took us to the customs office we were in the previous day and we waited for our return flight which was scheduled for around 1:00pm local time. Only a short while prior to taking off were we able to get back our cell phones and bags and we were escorted right up to the airplane. We were relieved to fly back home and distance ourselves from that violent, stressful and humiliating situation. We left Italy headed towards the US with all necessary documents, passports and various declarations in which we clearly explained the purpose of our tour, confirming it is was strictly promotional and that we were in no way going to earn money from it or receive any form of payment. We knew that if we were to receive any compensation we would have had to apply for work visas. This was not the case and the people we spoke to for information told us we would be fine. We had not agreed on any payment whatsoever and the scheduled showcase performance at KEXP was most certainly not a paid performance. The point is that the control agents who did a quick check on the concerts we informed them of noticed that two of the venues were asking for entry fees and this was enough to convince them that we needed work visas instead of an ESTA.
We accepted this situation even if we tried to no end to explain the situation and that we were not receiving any form of payment, but there was simply no way of convincing the officials we spoke to. From that moment onwards, we became three illegal immigrants and were treated like criminals.
This is what happened this past Wednesday and Thursday. We would like to thank the people who supported and helped us throughout this ordeal, including Alessio Antoci, Owen Murphy and John Richards.
We would like to apologize to our fans, the owners of the venues, KEXP radio and the SxSw festival.
We would also like to apologize for having had to cancel our American tour and hope to go back soon.
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The bomberos were there along with police, SINAPROC, Seguro Social ambulances and crews and random drivers who came upon the scene and stopped to help. A number of the injured were taken by passersby to the hospital complex in Penonome in private cars. Surely those who lent their hands, whether because it was their job or because they saw it as the decent thing for a person to do in the situation, saved lives. Photo by the bomberos.
The shrine is up, the main facts are known, but larger questions remain
by Eric Jackson
On the afternoon of March 5 a bus carrying men from the Bocas del Toro part of the Ngabe-Bugle Comarca went off the road near the maternity and infant clinic in Anton and fell 30 feet into a creek. The crash instantly killed 16 people, including the driver. Two others died shortly thereafter. Another 36 were badly injured enough to be hospitalized. The bus had been chartered by the La Faustina farm in the Coronado area of Chame, to bring in laborers to pick watermelons. The less severely injured have started to go home at government expense, there is already a cross erected near the bridge and ravine into which the bus crashed and investigators have more or less embraced the theory that the driver fell asleep at the wheel toward the end of a long day’s drive.
The farm, owned by Omar Estrada, appears to have been operating according to laws and regulations. The law provides a $1.76 per hour minimum wage for farm laborers and Estrada’s business was paying $1.80. The farm provides lodging and cots for its seasonal workers. Meals for the workers are partially subsidized. The bus ride, on a vehicle that normally plies the Panama to David and back route but was specially chartered, was also at the farm’s expense.
Once upon a time the exportation of watermelons was looked upon as a big opportunity for the Panamanian economy. “Free trade” agreements were supposed to boost this “non-traditional export” — the “traditional” ones being mostly coffee and bananas — and build the local economy. However, melon exports have been less lucrative than expected and La Faustina is one of the survivors among yesteryear’s more numerous watermelon farms in Chame. Some of the phenomenon may be a consolidation of agriculture into larger operations, but mostly it’s about a Panamanian farm sector that is ailing across the board and producing less.
Farm labor is dirty, dangerous and poorly paid everywhere. For many years in many countries the Catholic Church has championed the cause of farm workers. But although it’s a wealthy institution if one looks at its total assets, the Church lacks the economic and political power to change the basic math of farm labor.
The Archdiocese of Panama’s indigenous mission quickly issued a statement that asked a number of pointed questions. They also objected to the notion that the accident was an act of God: “We don’t believe in ‘these terrible days,” nor do we believe in a predestined future.” The statement argued that when such tragedies fall mainly on the poor it’s the product of human actions, of social and economic disparities to which Catholicism objects.
Later, on March 10, the Holy See extended its condolences to the victims and their families through a note to Monsignior Aníbal Saldaña, the bishop of Bocas del Toro. That missive, in the parts that were reported in various Panamanian media, was not about social analysis but about sympathy and Catholics rendering such assistance to the injured and the families of those killed as can be mobilized.
Will insurance have covered some or all of the economic losses suffered in the crash? Perhaps there was a policy for the bus. Panama does have various public subsidies for widows, orphans and the disabled, which aren’t very substantial. On paper Panamanian labor law seems generous, but in practice those injured on the job or on the employer’s bus on the way to or from the job are usually more or less left to their own devices.
President Varela went to the hospitals where crash survivors were taken to be advised of the situation and to express his sympathy and concern. Flags were flown at half-mast the following day. But among the political caste the hard and dangerous lives of farm workers are not a topic of much discussion.
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Such an enlightened business outlook! While Marcelo Odebrecht and his executive team have turned state’s evidence in exchange for leniency, in the social pages of Brazil’s newspapers a younger set of Odebrechts glows with “the beautiful people.” There are Odebrecht charities in which they may perhaps serve en route to running the same old scams that Marcelo’s grandpa ran decades ago. But not everybody and everything that Odebrecht has touched is crooked. In the potential to confuse connection with causation there are opportunities for misdirection.
Odebrecht: false alarms?
by Eric Jackson
Modus operandi and misdirection
Odebrecht has played the public corruption game for generations, with increasing complexity but the same basic business model that prevails among construction companies that bid on public works projects in many places. Bidding procedures are rigged to raise the floor under prices, the “losers” get a cut of the action as subcontractors, the public officials who play along get a cut of the action as kickbacks. Odebrecht was the clearinghouse for that game on a Brazilian federal level at least as far back as the 1980s and in 1992 it brought down Brazilian President Fernando Collor de Mello. Norberto Odebrecht vowed to mend his and his company’s ways, and in the years to come his grandson Marcelo Odebrecht took over the company, which went multinational in a big way. But now the revelations of judicial proceedings in many countries show that while the efforts at concealment became far more sophisticated, the basic modus operandi remained the same. It is reasonable to presume that every country and public institution touched by Odebrecht was corrupted. That would include US jurisdictions like the State of Texas, Miami-Dade County and the State of Florida, and some prominent politicians of those places. That would include Panamanian public institutions and public figures.
Presumptions, maybe. But those might be rebutted, or with various combinations of shell games, destruction of evidence and perjury very real corruption will in some cases be impossible to prove.
And then there are misdirection plays. Dan Rather’s career with CBS was ended when right-wing operatives managed to sneak a forged document into his essentially truthful story about George W. Bush’s goldbricking career in the Air National Guard. Panama has seen similar traps set for journalists.
Gustavo Gorriti’s take
Peruvian journalist Gustavo Gorriti, who worked with Panama’s La Prensa for a time, and while here he also fell victim to one of those. Former President Ernesto Pérez Balladares came to office with the help of a donor base that was thuggish in many ways, and Gorriti was investigating that. Some $51,000 in campaign contributions from Cali Cartel drug smuggler José Castrillón Henao had been shown to have made to the Pérez Balladares campaign. The Peruvian was fed a forgery, a purported copy of a check for $5,000 by a company convicted in Italy of money laundering, made out to then Attorney General José Antonio Sossa. Publication of the forgery brought down discredit and prosecution on Gorriti and La Prensa, and effectively ended an investigation into demonstrably corrupt campaign financing.
Gorriti never outed the source from which he got that bogus document. Eventually he put the incident behind him and went back to Peru, where his career included many new masterpieces of good investigative journalism. Toro Pérez Balladares went on his merry way. He has never been convicted of anything but questions about government contracts and the sale of Panamanian visas and passports to Chinese citizens seeking to enter the United States have forever marred a reputation already tainted by the Castrillón Henao connection. It’s one of the big reasons why his political party, the PRD, rejected Toro’s comeback bid in contest for party secretary general last year.
Peru is adjacent to Odebrecht’s home country, Brazil, and was one of the first places where the construction giant went abroad. Now it appears that all Peruvian presidents starting in the 1990s, and many opposition political figures of those times, have taken money from Odebrecht. The United States, in denial about its own Odebrecht scandals in which payoffs to former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and former Miami-Dade Democratic Party boss Xavier Suarez have been documented, is now harboring one of the high-profile Peruvian suspects, former President Alejandro Toledo.
But Gorriti, whose reports dogged Toledo and dashed any probability of the latter’s establishment of any enduring political party or tradition, sounds a note of caution about the ongoing Odebrecht scandals. In a columnpublished in Spain’s leading newspaper, El Pais, Gorriti recounts the concerns of one of the Brazilian judges most responsible for the Odebrecht revelations, Sergio Mora. The jurist fears a set of presumptions that unfairly tarnishes all Brazilian companies, and the notion that only Brazilians pay kickbacks on public works contracts. The journalist argues that no Brazilian company “seduced” an honest Peruvian public official into becoming corrupt, that attributing the Odebrecht scandal to “Brazilian imperialism” is a broad-brush smear that both misdirects public attention from some of the real problems and the real bad actors and penalizes a lot of good people who work for bad companies. With respect to Odebrecht and its ilk, Gorriti opines:
The method that was used in big corporate corruption cases like those of Siemens and Alstrom should be applied to them. It’s not a matter of shutting down companies, leaving many innocent people as collateral victims, but obliging them to reform and to return everything that they stole.
“Reform” to Gorriti includes getting rid of those who personally approved or performed the illicit acts, and to him proper restitution is not figured as the amount of the bribe but a multiple of that to account for the proceeds of crooked transaction and the profits from the investment of those proceeds. But he’s into leaving innocent people alone, and letting them go about their work despite an association with crooks.
Odebrecht, Panamanian secrecy and the Mottas
One of the things that trapped Gorriti when he was working for La Prensa was Panamanian secrecy. To be sure, there were the laws about banking, corporate and campaign contribution secrecy in his way. The culture of secrecy is perhaps more debilitating to journalism than the laws. In any case, Gorriti had no ready way of verifying that bogus check. He relied on an informant, and that informant may have been an honest person who in turn had fallen for a deception spun by a third person. “Usually reliable sources” can have their disastrous anomalies.
And what are the sources for the Panama incarnations of the Odebrecht scandals? The complaint recently filed by Minister of Security Alexis Bethancourt relies upon data developed by Swiss prosecutors, particularly about the alleged money laundering activities of former President Ricardo Martinelli’s two sons. Attorney General Kenia Porcell went to Brasilia to meet with counterparts from 13 different countries, and they agreed to share information. Marcelo Odebrecht and his erstwhile top corporate entourage are singing to Brazilian authorities to reduce their jail time. Prosecutors in other countries, most notably for Panama in neighboring Colombia, are working the leads at their ends. In Panama there is very little independent work to show — a lot of posturing, a lot of excuses about why the law does not allow the enforcement of the law, a lot of sneering obstruction in the legislative and judicial branches and an executive who pleads that he can’t interfere, even to clean his own governmental and party houses.
And so it is that we learn from Colombia about how Odebrecht, as in Brazil and other places, bankrolled presidential campaigns by way of donations that were often in kind and always hidden behind multiple fronts. As in, say several Colombian periodicals, a scheme revealed to prosecutors by their country’s former vice minister of transportation, Gabriel García Morales, wherein in exchange for a lucrative highway contract Odebrecht moved some $6.5 million into the 2014 campaign of President Juan Manuel Santos. (The Brazilian company, so it is alleged by various sources, covered all bets by also covertly donating to the candidate whom Santos defeated, Óscar Iván Zuluaga. It also paid off the FARC rebels, for whom Santos was their great nemesis when he was defense minister.) The funding for Colombia’s presidential race, it is reported, was laundered through various intermediaries and fronts, some of them Panamanian.
Of particular note on the Santos side, it is alleged by the Colombian weekly Semana that a Panamanian publicity firm, Impressa Group Corp, was indirectly hired with Odebrecht money to produce campaign signs and posters for the Colombian president. The Santos campaign also received Odebrecht money for polling which came, it is alleged, through a Panamanian company called Paddington and then a Colombian PR firm called Sancho BBDO.
But between Odebrecht and these poster and polling donations there was a reported maze of at least eight companies through which money passed. Figuring in this alleged operation was the Colombian businessman Enrique Ghisays, who had a company called Encla SA, which in turn did nearly $1 million in transactions with Colon Free Zone giant Motta Internacional, flagship of Panama’s biggest economic combine that includes Copa Airlines, the TVN television network and many other businesses. The money, it is alleged, flowed through Encla to another company called De Lurion Trading, and then the money trail went eventually into the Santos campaign.
So have the Mottas been corrupted by Odebrecht? They are quite emphatic — as in full-page newspaper ads — that this is not the case. Ghisays, they say, was a client between 2010 and 2013, to whom they sold some $931,000 worth of household appliances. It was nothing more than that and they have all the documents to prove it.
Of course, money laundering through the Colon Free Zone has often involved overstated or otherwise false invoices. The paper trail in itself is unlikely to resolve any questions.
Then you can get into the calculus of means, motives and opportunities and ask questions not only about Motta Internacional and those in and around it. One should also inquire about people with business or political reasons to denigrate the Mottas.
On top of that one must be on the lookout for criminals looking to distract attention from themselves. If resentments against the rich — or anti-Semitism — make it easier for someone to believe in a fabricated cloud of suspicion, so much the better for those who would distract. Playing to base prejudices in such situations is as common as white petty criminals in the USA trying to pin their offenses on blacks and as historic as kings, dictators and other political figures playing ethnic hatred cards.
Were Panama in a position to call in all of the organizations and the individuals responsible for them, and look at all of their banking and corporate records, then get into phone calls, emails and other communications that leave traces, there would be a good chance that the whole matter would be cleared up. On paper prosecutors do have such powers, but they are generally unexercised.
Still, Odebrecht secured a lot of public works contracts in Panama, has a worldwide modus operandi and should be suspected of having made plenty of payoffs to public officials here, laundering the money through both legitimate and shell private businesses.
But it’s a large company, with many operations, which felt the need to compartmentalize its corruption in a special bribe department — the “Structured Operations Division” — in part to keep most of its own employees from knowing and telling the score. That sort of secrecy could help guilty parties to point fingers in other directions, and where authorities are not particularly eager to get to the bottom of the story that might suffice.
With respect to Panama, Motta Internacional and many individuals the scandal is at the point where questions are being raised and investigations demanded. But it’s far from the point where we have solid and complete answers to questions that have been raised.
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THEATER • Metropolitan opera live and HD. Theater of the Miraflores Visitor Center. March 11, from 11 am. Broadcast HD live from the New York Metropolitan Opera. Tickets on sale at Desarrollo Golf Coronado. • “The adventures of the pirate Sinbad in the seven seas”, through March 26. Saturdays 5:00 pm Sundays at 11:30 am / 2:00 pm / 4:00 pm in “Bambalinas at Teatro La Estación. Reservations at 203-6662 or teatroestacion@gmail.com Discount for ACP employees.
MUSIC • Night of Music and Memories – rock night with the hits of the national rock group Ocean. Thursday, March 16, Teatro La Plaza, Obarrio, tickets for sale at Panatickets.
VARIOUS • Biomuseo * Activities for children from four to 12 years. For more information write to ventas@biomuseopanama.org * Entrance to the galleries will be free on Sundays April 2, May 7, June 4, July 2, August 6, September 3, October 1, November 5, and December 3, from 10:00 am to 12:00 noon for Panamanians and residents who show their identification. Tickets can be used all day until closing time at 5:00 pm. • Summer season at the UP – until March 24. 8:00 pm (Tuesday to Saturday) and 4:00 pm (Sunday), at the University of Panama. There will be workshops of plastic arts, mixed volleyball, classical dance, folkloric, modern fusion and hip-hop, among others. There are also scheduled shows such as the choreography presentation of the Coraza Group and the musical concert of the UP Philharmonic Orchestra. For more information call 523-5000. • Kite Festival, March 12, Panama Pacific Complex, former Howard base. 11am – 6pm. Festival of Chinese culture with kites, traditional tambourines. Event organized by Aprochipa, www.Aprochipa.org • V Career Walk Down Panama – March 26, 6:30 am, Coastal Band, MOP Parking, organizes Panama Runners, tel. 6619-2803
REMEMBER TO VISIT • Miraflores Visitor Center – open daily from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm – Tel: 276-8617 and 276-8427. • Agua Clara Visitor Center – Gatun – open every day from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm Tel: 443-5727. • Interoceanic Canal Museum – open Tuesday through Sunday from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm – Tel: 211-1649 / 211-1650. • Museum of Biodiversity – Amateur. Monday 10:00 am-4pm- Wednesday and Thursday 10:00 am – 4:00 pm Friday, Saturday and Sunday 10:00 am to 5:00 pm. Tuesday Closed. • El Níspero- Zoo in El Valle de Antón – open every day from 7:00 am to 5:00 pm. • Metropolitan Natural Park – Open daily from 6:00 am to 5:00 pm – Tels: 232-5552 / 5516. • Archaeological Park El Caño – Tuesday to Sunday from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.- Monday and public holidays: closed. • Church of Natá- visit with specialized guide of the INAC- Tuesday to Saturday from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm. • Explora Museum – interactive museum for children – Condado del Rey. • Anthropological and Ethnographic Museum Dr. Roberto de la Guardia – located at the Félix Olivares School in David – open to the public from Monday to Friday – from 9:00 am to 12 noon and from 1:00 to 3:00 pm – guided tours – Information: 775-2854.
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The president is fooling himself. Is he fooling us, too?
And the Holy Family, too, were refugees… (Matthew 2:13-15)
