News
Wednesday 2nd August 2023.
August 1, 2023
The current deputy Edison Broce, who is now seeking a candidacy as mayor of the district of Panama, was the pre-candidate for free nomination (not counting those in the presidential race) with the most support signatures (he needed 8,243 signatures and received 57,088) and has just to communicate that his running mate on May 5, 2024 will be the civil engineer Antares Rodríguez .
The candidates for free application had until July 31 to communicate to the Electoral Tribunal (TE) the name of their respective substitute, although the entity is still purging the support signatures and, therefore, there are many candidacies to be formalized.
For example, Francisco Paco Carreira and Eduardo Quirós , who came fourth and fifth among the presidential candidates with the largest number of signatures (yet to be refined), announced Marta Roa and Irene Bolívar , respectively, as their substitutes.
The three presidential candidates with the largest number of signatures (and who were already unofficially recognized as candidates by the TE) are Zulay Rodríguez, Maribel Gordón and Melitón Arrocha , who have already announced that they will have Athenas Athanadiadis, Richard Morales and Aida Ureña de Maduro as substitutes. , respectively.
Ana Matilde Gómez and Walkiria Chandler , first and second place among the pre-candidates for deputy of the 8-4 circuit, chose lawyer Ramiro Esquivel and business administrator Carlos Ho Solís as their running mate , respectively.
In the 8-4 circuit, Herminia Thompson will be the substitute for the pre-candidate for deputy Roberto Zúñiga Alvarado.
The Communication and Transportation Commission of the National Assembly was left in the hands of the PRD member Juan Esquivel, who on Tuesday morning was elected as president of that legislative body.
Esquivel came to the presidency of the mentioned commission with eight votes. He even had the support of the Panameñista deputy Yessenia Rodríguez and the Cambio Democrático deputy, Sergio Chello Gálvez. The only one who voted against was the independent, Raúl Fernández.
The rest of the commission’s board of directors is made up of PRD deputies Olivares Frías (vice president) and Gonzalo González (secretary).
Also members of the commission are PRD deputy Abel Beker and Manolo Ruiz del Molirena.
In the past period, one of the issues that brought this commission into the public spotlight was the questioned project 986, which would put control of the public transport ‘apps’ in the hands of the taxi concessionaires.
The project was approved despite the opposition of drivers who belong to these platforms (such as Uber). The same awaits second and third debate.
This commission rejected the proposal of the independent deputy Raúl Fernández, for the legislative initiative to be discussed in a subcommittee and thus reach consensus.
In this regard, Esquivel indicated that he will ask the plenary to expedite the debate on said bill.
At the center of the debate was article 5 of the project, worded as follows: ” the companies dedicated to the development and commercialization of technological platforms, for the use of intermediation in the provision of the selective public passenger transport service, may only contract with the companies selective transport providers so that the licensees of operation certificates of these companies can opt for the provision of this form of luxury taxi service in their respective work area at the national level…” .
In Cambio Democrático (CD) they recognize that they have had a decrease in adherents in recent months, but they are confident that in the end the true followers will remain.
This is how the deputy of that party and secretary of the Women of CD, Ana Giselle Rosas, maintains it.
Figures from the Electoral Tribunal (TE) reveal that before the CD primary, which was held on July 9, the collective had 301,615 adherents. Instead, it now has 296,057 members. That is to say that in three weeks, it lost 5,558 persons registered, according to figures from the TE updated to last July 28.
“Most of the cases correspond to circuits where the deputies who faced Rómulo Roux and lost are. These cases were already taking place before the elections”, commented the deputy.
On July 9, Roux disputed the presidential candidacy with the deputy and general secretary of CD, Yanibel Ábrego, who leads the group of 14 dissident deputies (there are actually 13, since there is one, Alaín Cedeño, who resigned and registered in Achieving Goals).
“They had always stated that their project was in another game, so it is not a surprise what is happening. We are also serving our bases, visiting them, training them and attending to the application process, ”he added.
But Cedeño is the only one who has left CD; the rest continue to be militants in that group, although the majority say they are “Martinellistas”, as Sergio Chello Gálvez , one of the rebels, called it .
Ábrego had announced that if she won the candidacy she would make a political alliance with RM, the party led by former President Ricardo Martinelli.
Just as CD has lost followers, RM has gained them.
As of June 30 (the last cutoff, before the July 2 primary), RM had 230,497 members. It now has 236,040 enrolled.
The Ministry of the Presidency deliberately concealed from the Administration Prosecutor’s Office that an internal audit of that entity recommended filing a complaint with the Public Ministry (MP) for irregularities detected in the distribution of solidarity bonds in 2021, valued at almost $1 million, and who tried to redeem an artisanal cheese factory in Chitré. Two years ago, the Vice President and then Minister of the Presidency, José Gabriel Carrizo, was warned of the possible fraud against the State, but did not denounce the facts.
The Administration Attorney, Rigoberto González, asked the Presidency for a “recount” of the events that led to the internal audit report of the Ministry of the Presidency of August 2021, which revealed the anomalies. González’s request to the Presidency was based on a complaint filed by lawyer Ernesto Cedeño, after La Prensa revealed that Carrizo refused to allow the MP to investigate the irregularities noted in the report.
Last week González received a biased response from the Minister of the Presidency in charge, Carlos García, in which he deliberately did not include one of the four recommendations of the author, whose text is the following: “Present the complaint before the Public Ministry to determine the responsibilities”. That recommendation was ignored not just now, but by Carrizo for the past two years, despite warnings about worrisome anomalies.
In his note addressed to the Administration Attorney’s Office, García talks about transparency and accountability, but did not mention a word of the recommendation to file a complaint with the MP. He mentions that it was recommended to instruct the Execution Monitoring Secretariat and the Social Affairs Secretariat to implement the recommendations of a May 2021 memorandum and those contemplated in a report of which he did not give details.
The Third Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice sentenced the National Police to pay compensation of $332,000 to the relatives of the fisherman Rigoberto Pérez Rivera , shot dead on May 19, 2009, by police agents who confused the boat in which he was traveling with another vessel suspected of transporting drugs.
In a ruling on July 26, under the presentation of magistrate María Cristina Chen Stanziola , the Police are also forced to coordinate with the Ministry of Health to provide mental health care to the relatives of Pérez Rivera , after verifying that they suffer psychological effects as a result of his death.
The Chamber also instructed the Police to adopt an instruction plan addressed to all its officials regarding the use of lethal force and the consequences, responsibilities and sanctions derived from negligent conduct in the exercise of their functions, with the purpose of preventing police actions similar to those that occurred in this case from being repeated.
In the lawsuit, filed by the lawyer Víctor Orobio , the Police were also ordered to apologize publicly to the victim’s relatives.
On May 19, 2009, Rigoberto and his brother Dagoberto Pérez Rivera returned with some friends to Playa Leona, after fishing. At the height of Boca La Caja , they were intercepted by a Police rainwater operations boat, which was chasing a boat that was allegedly transporting drugs.
The police agents fired at the boat, causing the death of the Pérez Rivera brothers and injuring two other fishermen.
During the review of the boat in which the shot fishermen were traveling, neither drugs nor weapons were located.
In this case, the extinct Seventeenth Court found Sergeant Vionel López Frías guilty of manslaughter.
Orobio also filed a claim for compensation for the death of Dagoberto Pérez Rivera, but this is still pending.