Political Careers, Corruption, and Impunity: Panama's Assembly, 1984-2009

Introduction

Introduction The scene could have hardly been more illustrative of this book’s topic. On January 16, 2002, before a crowd of cameramen and reporters, Panamanian legislator Carlos Afú, then of Partido Revolucionario Democr ático (PRD),1 extracted a stack of paper money from his jacket. Those six thousand dollars, he said, were the first installment of a payment for his vote in favor of a multimillion-dollar contract between the government of Panama and a private consortium, Centro Multimodal Industrial y de Servicios (CEMIS).2 Legislator Afú claimed to have received the money from fellow party and assembly member Mateo Castillero, chairman of the chamber’s Budget Committee. Disbursement of the bribe’s balance—US$14,000—was still pending. That was the only kickback he had received, claimed Afú, alluding to the accusation of another fellow party and assembly member, Balbina Herrera,3 that Afú had received “suitcases filled with money” to approve the appointment of two government nominees to the Supreme Court. Afú’s declarations sent shock waves throughout the country and seemed to confirm the perception of Panama’s political system as one in which corruption, impunity, and clientelism prevail. As political figures exchanged accusations and added more sleaze to the story, commentators , media, and civil society organizations called for a sweeping investigation of the “Afúdollars” case. But the tentacles of the CEMIS affair 1 2 | Political Careers, Corruption, and Impunity were spread too broadly throughout Panama’s political establishment. They stung not only the leadership of the opposition PRD—the political arm of the 1968–89 military dictatorship—but also the government of President Mireya Moscoso, Panama’s first woman president, and her Panameñista Party (PPAN), which was founded by the military’s historic adversary, Arnulfo Arias. Predictably, investigations by the ProsecutorGeneral ’s Office never succeeded. In a few months, the case was filed by the Supreme Court (Alianza Ciudadana Pro Justicia 2004).4 This book is about behaviors, such as those portrayed above, by members of representative assemblies in liberal democracies. Following Mayhew (1974, 8) as well as Shugart and Carey (1992), the term representative assembly best describes the organization with whose members this book deals. In daily usage, terms such as legislature, parliament, or congress are used interchangeably to refer to the legislative branch of government. Representative assembly, however, is preferable to legislature because discussing and enacting legislation is not the only function elected chambers perform in liberal democracies and executives in both parliamentary and presidential regimes also have important lawmaking powers. Parliament, in turn, connotes a political system in which the survival of the government depends upon the confidence of the majority in the representative chamber. Congress suggests a regime type in which the branches of government have separate origin and survival, a notion that excludes those assemblies, generally called parliaments, upon whose confidence government survival is contingent. Thus, parliaments and congresses are the two main types of representative assemblies. In 2004 Panama’s congress regained the name of National Assembly, which it had in 1904–68, and its members once again became known as “deputies.” Between 1984 and 2004 the unicameral chamber was called the Legislative Assembly and consisted of “legislators.” The regime type known as liberal democracy comprises at least three dimensions: political representation, popular elections, and civil freedoms . The representative ingredient refers to “government by the freely elected representatives of the people” in accordance with the people’s preferences (Lijphart 1984, 1; 1999, 1). In modern liberal democracies such representation is normally mediated through political parties, an indispensable component of the democratic system. For Freedom House (2009c), the electoral dimension consists, at a minimum, of the following elements: 1. A competitive, multiparty political system; 2. Universal adult suffrage for all citizens (with exceptions for restrictions that states may legitimately place on citizens as sanctions for criminal offenses); 3. Regularly contested elections conducted in conditions of ballot secrecy and reasonable ballot security, in the absence of massive voter fraud, and that yield results that are representative of the public will; 4. Significant public access of major political parties to the electorate through the media and through generally open political campaigning. The liberal component encompasses “a substantial array of civil liberties .” These include freedom of information, expression, and belief; associational and organizational rights; the rule of law, and personal autonomy and individual rights.5 In its classification of states, Freedom House (2009c) labels...