Page 37 - Anatomy-of-a-Fraud

2. ABUSE OF GOVERNMENT POWER

The full human and material resources of the government were used –both
overtly and covertly– to support Barletta’s candidacy; this is a fact beyond any doubt.
Such actions were a flagrant violation of the National Constitution and the Electoral
Code, the ink still fresh on them after barely one year of having been promulgated. In
other words, these laws were trampled upon by those very same individuals who had
sponsored them in the first place.
Those abuses that could be documented were brought to the attention of the
Electoral District Attorney… to no avail, as was to be expected. They were also
reported by some local newspapers and finally denounced, on May 25, in the
Panamanian Episcopal Conference Declaration on the electoral process. Indeed, point
17 of the bishops’ statement reads: “In not a few cases the prevailing attitude was that
power should be obtained ‘by whatever means’, through… the improper use of
government resources and personnel and, in some places, the obvious intervention of
the National Defense Forces”. The bishop’s words were crystal clear.
The events of the debate, known as CADE 84, sponsored by the Panamanian
Association of Business Executive on April 6, 1984, are worth noticing. Presidential
or vice-presidential candidates participated in this debate. But the only one to be openly
and loudly booed was Barletta. Why? Replying to a question, Barletta said that he had
no evidence of any pressure being applied to civil servants to support his candidacy.
And yet, a few weeks earlier, La Prensa had published in its front page a photocopy
of a memorandum sent by the director of a government corporation to all its employees,
asking them to attend a Barletta rally. (See exhibit 3). But Barletta claimed that he had
no evidence and was booed for it. This took place before an audience of sober
businessmen that undoubtedly included many of his supporters. Had the audience been
more representative of the Panamanian people at large, such display of cynicism would
surely have elicited a more aggressive reaction.

Barletta had begun to show his histrionic potential but, evidently, he fell short
of Noriega’s expectations.
As with any other organization, the government’s main resource is its
personnel. We shall turn first in this section to a narration of the pressures applied to
civil servants.