After a long run, the last of the dictatorship’s apparatchiki will go

by Eric Jackson

On the morning of October 29, as part of a brief “state of the university” presentation to University of Panama faculty and staff, Gustvo García de Paredes announced that he will desist from his plans to seek a sixth term as rector in next year’s elections. Laws could change and the course of events could accelerate, but at this point it looks like the next rector will be elected next June and take office on September 1, 2016.

The Lebanese-born machine politician has always thrived in rigged systems. Back in 1938 when he was born, that country was a French dependency, the State of Greater Lebanon, gerrymandered to create a Maronite Christian majority — which has proven to be ephemeral — in a part of the old Ottoman Empire that France and the United Kingdom had divided between themselves. But Gustavo García de Paredes was Panamanian as well as international and by the time he was ready for university studies he went to Francisco Franco’s Spain. There, the venerable old University of Madrid, established by royal decree in 1293 and now known as the Complutense, had been degraded by the generalisimo and was in part financed by the sale of advanced degrees to foreigners. García de Paredes studied philosophy there and got his licenciatura in 1962. He claims to have received a doctorate from the same university in 1963.

So, all the studies for a doctorate in one year? Actually, no. A purchased doctorate from the Franco-era university yielded a diploma that looked like a legitimate one, and would be noted the same as an earned doctorate by the registrar. But those who actually earned doctorates had to write and defend dissertation, and upon successfully doing this a copy of their dissertation would be bound and put into the university library stacks at the university’s expense, and listed in the library’s catalog. You won’t find a Gustavo García de Paredes dissertation or a catalog entry for such at the Complutense. The man’s doctorate is fake.

So, what’s a guy with a fake degree to do? Certainly not to embark on a career of publishing learned articles in peer-reviewed academic journals. That has never been where “Dr.” García de Paredes was at. But an academic opportunity began to unfold for him on October 11, 1968, when Guardia Nacional officers led by Boris Martínez and Omar Torrijos toppled the elected government of Dr. Arnulfo Arias that had taken office a week and a half earlier. The University of Panama, a hotbed of both that sort of radicalism that would turn into underground, exiled and imprisoned resistance all through the more than 21 years of military rule and that sort of radicalism that would give due consideration to whatever offer a non-radical government might make, was closed. When it reopened some of the faculty and part of the student body had been eliminated, and opportunity beckoned for Gustavo García de Paredes. In 1970 he was made dean of the philosophy department.

There were detours from the climb up the ladder of university office politics. Under the dictatorship García de Paredes variously served as head of the national lottery, director of the Colon Free Zone, minister of education and Panama’s ambassador to Brazil. After the US invasion that brought down the dictatorship, García de Paredes served on the board of directors of the old Interoceanic Regional Authority (ARI), which oversaw the mad scramble for the reverted real estate and other assets of the old Canal Zone.

In 1994 García de Paredes became rector of the University of Panama. Except for one interregnum in which he left the post in the hands of a protege proxy — against whom he then turned — he has run the university ever since. In the speech in which he said he won’t run again, the Rector Magnifico — an honorific he bestowed upon himself — complained that the courts had interfered with his ability to fire faculty dissidents. While that may be true, over a generation his control over who gets hired has transformed the faculty into a cog in a political patronage machine that despite some excellent professors has put the University of Panama off of all international lists of Latin America’s better institutions of higher learning. Because Panamanian law gives the University of Panama’s Faculty Council the power to charter and approve or reject that courses offered at all of the nation’s other universities, the Rector Magnifico’s influence has served to spread the contagion of academic fraud all through Panama’s higher education system. The situation is notorious and has continued thanks to successive legislatures that have been willing to act or refrain from acting as García de Paredes requests.

Can the University of Panama withstand outside scrutiny, and should it? Under the banner of “academic freedom” the rector has resisted the comptroller general’s attempts to audit the public university, and particularly to scrutinize the dealings of a private foundation into which many private grants, fees charged by the university, aid transfers from foreign governments and other sources of university revenue have been poured by García de Paredes. The Varela administration blocked the rector’s attempt to buy an unsuitable tract of land in Chepo to supposedly replace the agricultural school’s experimental farm in Tocumen and critics are demanding to see the books on a generation’s worth of secretive real estate transaction, many of them with land bequeathed to the university by alumni. If Comptroller General Federico Humbert does not publish the findings of his auditors, look for some litigation pursuant to Panama’s transparency laws about that.

The rector says that he won’t designate a successor, but if nothing else changes it’s hard to see how the votes of faculty and staff who have been loyal to him will not determine who comes next. The political patronage machine may unify behind a successor or break into rival factions before the official nominating process for the next rector begins in March of next year.

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Navarro’s denials don’t match the allegations

by Eric Jackson

The PRD candidate in the 2014 election cycle, Juan Carlos Navarro, is charging long-time intra-party rivals Mitchell Doens and Francisco Sánchez Cárdenas, with criminal defamation, known as calumni e injuria here. So what, specifically, is the lie that Navarro said that they told about him in La Prensa? “Their recent reckless accusations, which appeared on Saturday, October 24 in La Prensa, ARE TOTALLY FALSE.” Specifically how? Navarro doesn’t say. But at an October 26 press conference, the erstwhile PRD leader responded to that story by stating that “none of Mr. Virzi’s companies, the accounts that were mentioned, Hidalgo & Hidalgo — from none of these were funds obtained in a fraudulent operation.” He also denied that Javier Martínez Acha had been his campaign treasurer.

What La Prensa specifically reported, based on leaks from the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office, was that former Vice President Felipe “Pipo” Virzi — who had served in that office from 1994 to 1999 in a PRD administration but was a central character in Ricardo Martinelli’s inner circle — had received some $5 million from Hidalgo & Hidalgo, the highly-paid contractor for a Tonosi irrigation project that was never built, and that later Virzi cut checks for more than $1 million to a company owned by then PRD undersecretary general Javier Martínez Acha and his brother Valentín Martínez Vásquez, and that another company linked to Valentín Martínez Vásquez received both that million dollars and another similar amount from Virzi. Valentín Martínez Vásquez, by Navarro’s admission, was a donor to his campaign — but to what extent we don’t know, thanks to Panama’s designed-for-corruption campaign contribution secrecy laws. (That information should be on file with the Electoral Tribunal, but by law is not available to the public. Navarro would also have those records.)

The lead paragraph of the story in La Prensa that has so annoyed Navarro was a conclusion attributed to Doens and Sánchez Cárdenas:

The existence of a Trojan Horse in the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) campaign in 2013 would be demonstrated in the management of accounts and money of one of its directors, Javier Martínez Acha, and suggests that the then president, Ricardo Martinelli, would have penetrated the party.

Suggests, perhaps, but does not fully prove. This is the stuff from which money laundering investigations are started rather than properly summed up.

That Navarro and his Blue Wave campaign that marginalized party old-timers including Doens and Sánchez Cárdenas were Martinelli plants is not a new allegation. The most noteworthy fact proffered for this conclusion was an August 2013 meeting between Navarro and Martinelli in the office dining room of businessman Mayor Alfredo Alemán. Alemán had been treasurer of Ernesto Pérez Balladares’s successful 1994 presidential campaign. Both Navarro and Alemán have acknowledged that the meeting took place but have dismissed it as a happenstance encounter at the office of a Navarro’s and Martinelli’s mutual friend. It has also been alleged that present at the meeting were Martinelli’s personal secretary, Chichi De Obarrio, and Pipo Virzi. De Obarrio is now a fugitive who is wanted in connection with several Martinelli administration scandals. Prosecutors here have requested an INTERPOL “red alert” bulletin for his arrest in and extradition from wherever he  may have run. Virzi is under house arrest and the records of his Banco Universal — in many ways a financial clearing house for Martinelli era corruption — have produced paper trails into many different public corruption scandals and provided links to the Financial Pacific brokerage firm, itself a hub for a lot of different criminal activities, some of them associated with Ricardo Martinelli and his close collaborators.

So Navarro is apparently now so annoyed with the continued allegations and insinuations that he’s bringing charges against Doens and Sánchez Cárdenas — but not La Prensa. And which lawyers has Navarro sent into the fray? Rosendo Rivera and Gabriel Carreira Pitti. Rivera was Martinelli’s lawyer, but they had some sort of falling out and it was later revealed that Rivera was one of the targets of Martinelli’s illegal electronic surveillance operations. Much of that electronic spying was carried out with Israeli equipment bought through a company called NUNVAV. Gabriel Carreira Pitti was the lawyer who organized NUNVAV’s Panamanian subsidiary.

One of the hallmarks of paranoiac ideation is the unwarranted presumption that lines of connection are lines of causation. Panama’s inbred rabiblanco aristocracy and treacherous political caste create may opportunities for this. Want to find further interesting PRD ties with Virzi? See the board of directors of Banco Universal before intervenors from the Banking Superintendency took it over, and see PRD notable and former diplomat Eloy Alfaro (who now denies that he was the board’s spokesman, although corporate filings listed him as such.) See Dora Pérez Balladares Boyd, the daughter of the former president. And if there is anything to the widespread but unspecific allegations that Panama’s securities industry corruption goes way beyond Financial Pacific, we can start with a who’s who in the nation’s securities broker business. It’s a small country and there are many overlapping and intertwined lines of connection, but what they all mean is another set of questions.

Now that Navarro has taken recourse to the criminal defamation laws, it perhaps gives the defense a golden opportunity to uncover strings and figure out who pulled them. That Navarro directly denied things that had not been directly alleged, and got vehemently specific about the rather inconsequential detail of what title Javier Martínez Acha held when working for the Navarro campaign, perhaps raises certain warning flags.

Navarro is a spent political force — as are Doens and Sánchez Cárdenas — and one wonders what, beyond egos, anyone in this argument has to defend. Within the PRD, however, and most probably among the influential people at La Prensa, there are some real interests to be affected. Within the corporate mainstream media, for example, consider that Navarro is married to the daughter of the founder of Panama’s ad agency cartel, and she’s still a player on that scene.

More important than that, consider that along with Navarro, in the internal PRD warfare that resulted in the Blue Wave victory over the party’s older guard, came Benicio Robinson as party president. With Navarro’s hasty exit after his defeat, Robinson emerged as the big boss man of the PRD and many party members, coming from many different directions, don’t like that at all. Robinson put off internal party elections until July of 2016 and has been busy packing the bodies that will run those elections with his own loyal supporters to the exclusion of other party tendencies. But Robinson was unsuccessful this summer when he formed an alliance with Ricardo Martinelli to take over the National Assembly, end all investigations against Martinelli and his people, install Martinelli’s notorious henchman Sergio Gálvez as president of the legislature’s Credentials Committee and start impeachment proceedings against President Juan Carlos Varela. Robinson failed because he couldn’t secure the votes of about one-quarter of his caucus and Martinelli lost he votes of about half of his party’s deputies.

The Coordinadora Pro Rescate Torrijista, an alliance of seven PRD factions opposed to Robinson, complained in an October 22 pronouncement of the current party in crowd’s “cold, calculated perfidy.” Surely they see the money trail reported by La Prensa as but one more proof of this. But did any of these anti-Robinson factions have anything to do with the leaks that formed a part of La Prensa’s story? If one wants to get into the “who had a motive to do this?” mode of thinking, the possibilities go well beyond the fractious world of PRD politics and into the spheres of business, the legal system and personalities. The possibility of an expanding scandal that shatters Panamanian politics well beyond Mr. Martinelli and his supporters should not be rejected out of hand. But neither should people discount the instincts of individuals or institutions to put a lid on all of this and limit the damage that the hue and cry over the systematic corruption of recent years might do to interests, careers and reputations.

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