MESOAMERICA
VOLUME 26, NUMBER 10, OCTOBER 2007
PANAMA
Panama to Probe
Island-Owning Colombian Drug Lord
On 21 Sep, Panamanian
authorities said they would investigate how a known Colombian drug trafficker
managed to obtain Panamanian residence, ID cards, bank accounts and even a $12
million private island without being noticed.
President Martin
Torrijos said a probe would be opened into how José Urrego carried on illicit
activities unnoticed in Panama for at least three years until his arrest in
mid-Sep.
Urrego, 53, was
arrested on Chapera Island, located on the Pacific coast. A police spokesman said that Urrego is the
communications chief for Colombia’s Norte del Valle drug cartel.
Police investigators
discovered that Urrego owned Chapera Island, valued at $12 million, and had
deposited large sums of money in a Panamanian bank account, apparently
unnoticed by the proper authorities.
Urrego, who was
arrested in ’98 in Colombia for activities related to drug smuggling and served
a short prison term, obtained a Panamanian identity card in ’04 and later
established several businesses in Panama.
Panama’s banking
sector has long tried to shake off its image as an international money
laundering center amid criticism of its safeguards against the deposit of
illicit funds.
President Torrijos
admitted that the Urrego case had damaged the country’s image, but vowed to
continue the fight against money laundering and narco-trafficking.
A Journalist’s View of the
Urrego Case
On 15 Sep, a boatload
of heavily armed members of the National Police arrived at Isla Chapera in the
Perlas Archipelago and its owner, José Nelson Urrego Cárdenas, greeted them
with an offer of a cup of coffee. The offer wasn’t accepted, according to Eric
Jackson, editor of The Panama News.
Urrego, a Colombian
said to have vast holdings in Panama, Costa Rica, Spain, the US and his native
Colombia, was handcuffed and taken away. Arrested along with Urrego was a
20-year-old female companion, Marisol Plaza Torre, Colon Free Zone Merchant
Rafael Jiménez Sandoval (a Panamanian), that man’s Colombian companion Myrna
Rodríguez, and a Colombian named Enrique Vallejos. Urrego and his associates
were accused of laundering the proceeds of drug trafficking and are being held
without bail under preventive detention.
There ensued a series
of revelations that implicated the Torrijos administration and its predecessor,
as well as some of Panama’s leading banks and law firms in which prominent
political figures are partners. So far
fingers are not being pointed at people in high places, and skeptics are
predicting that wherever the evidence may lead, nobody high up in business or
political circles will ever be formally implicated.
The underlying
allegation against Urrego is that he’s the communications director for the Norte
del Valle Cartel, which hails from the northern part of the Cauca River valley
in southern Colombia. The man has been arrested and tried twice in Colombia and
once in the US on drug-related charges and has spent some substantial time
behind bars awaiting trials but has in the end avoided convictions.
Mexican Drug Cartel Hitmen
Arrested
A group of five
Colombian and two Ecuadoran hitmen, allegedly on the payroll of the Mexican
Sinaloa drug cartel, were arrested in mid-Sep by Panamanian authorities, who
reported on 27 Sep that the gang intended to assassinate high-ranking police
and judicial authorities in Panama City.
Cornelio Sánchez, a
spokesman for the Judicial Technical Police (JTP), confirmed that the arrests
were made in various sectors of the capital city during “the past few weeks.”
The arrests followed
a careful investigation by the JTP about an alleged plot to murder Panamanian
officials to avenge for the confiscation of several large, illegal drug
shipments in Panamanian territory, including 20 tons of cocaine found on the
island of Coiba last Mar.
TI Report Card on
Corruption: Bad
The ’07 Transparency
International report on the public perception of corruption ranked Panama with
3.2 points on a scale of 10, which means that this nation continues to be
placed among those with the worst image out of 32 nations investigated in the
Americas.
The public sector has
not been able to disassociate itself from the deplorable image of dishonesty
that it has had for several years, stated Angélica Maytín, director of the
Foundation for the Development of Citizen Liberty (the Panamanian chapter of
TI), on 27 Sep.
Maytín said that the
TI ranking of Panama reflects a stable tendency (3.5 in ‘05 and 3.1 in ‘06),
which is below the average of 3.64 for the 32 countries surveyed in the region
of the Americas. By comparison, Costa Rica
scored 5.0, El Salvador 4.0, Guatemala 2.8, Nicaragua 2.6, Honduras 2.5.
The objectives of the
survey were: (1) to collect evidence on
the levels of perception of corruption; (2) to raise awareness in the
population of the serious damage corruption causes; and (3) to have the
citizens propose solutions to the problem.
The focus of the
study was the adult population (18+) living in Panama at the time of the
survey, in total about 1,062,260 persons. The provinces Darién and Bocas del
Toro were excluded as a result of their distant location from the capital. In each of the surveys, the final sample was
approximately 1,200 people. The sample
was stratified to reflect the actual demographic characteristics of the
population, as well as the proportional representation of different provinces.
The Man Who Exposed Tainted
Toothpaste
Eduardo Arias hardly
fits the profile of someone capable of humbling one of the world’s most
formidable economic powers: the
People’s Republic of China.
A 51-year-old Kuna
Indian, Arias grew up on a tribal reservation paddling dugout canoes near his
home on one of the San Blas islands on Panama’s Caribbean coast. He now lives
in a small apartment above a food stand in Panama City, the nation’s capital.
But in May ’07, Arias
did something that would reverberate across six continents. He read the label on a 59-cent tube of
toothpaste. On it were two words that had been overlooked by government
inspectors and health authorities in dozens of countries: diethylene glycol,
the same sweet-tasting, poisonous ingredient used in antifreeze that had been
mixed into cold syrup that killed or disabled at least 138 Panamanians last
year (Vol. 25, Nos. 10, 11).
Arias reported his
discovery to Panamanian health authorities, setting off a worldwide hunt for
tainted toothpaste that turned out to be manufactured in China. Health alerts
have now been issued in 34 countries, from Vietnam to Kenya, from Tonga in the
Pacific to Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean.
Canadian authorities found 24 contaminated brands and New Zealand found
16. Japan had 20 million tubes. US officials unwittingly gave the toothpaste
to prisoners, the mentally disabled and troubled youths. Hospitals gave it to the sick, while
high-end hotels gave it to the wealthy.
People around the
world had been putting a dangerous ingredient used in antifreeze in their
mouths, and until Panamanian health authorities blew the whistle, no one seemed
to know it.
The toothpaste scare
helped galvanize global concerns about the quality of China’s exports in
general, prompting the government there to promise to reform how food, medicine
and consumer products are regulated. And other countries are re-examining how
well their own health officials monitor imported products.
Lost in this swirl of
activity was the identity of the person who started it all—Mr. Arias. Until The New York Times tracked him
down with the help of the Panama City mayor’s office, his name had not been
known, even to some people working on the case. “We haven’t been able to find him,” said Julio César Laffaurie,
the Panamanian prosecutor pursuing the case of the contaminated toothpaste.
In looking back over
events of the past year, Dr. Jorge Motta, director of the Gorgas Memorial
Institute, a prominent research center in Panama City, said he was grateful
that some good had come from the national trauma brought on by the toxic cough
syrup.
“The whole
questioning about Chinese goods began in Panama with our deaths,” he said,
putting a twist on an old Chinese saying by adding, “A little butterfly in
Panama beat her wings and created a storm in China.”