Page 60 - Anatomy-of-a-Fraud

Quintero, professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law at the Panamá
University, former Dean of the Law School, a past president of the National Bar, was
a distinguished jurist in his late sixties, a capable and independent man, but a weak
person. He had sufficient scruples to denounce irregularities but apparently, he lacked
the strength of character needed to act in the face of the constant violations that he
himself revealed. He was, in fact, the ideal man to legitimize what would be an
essentially fraudulent electoral process. On the one hand, he possessed a certain
credibility; on the other, he posed no serious threat to the General Staff’s scheme to
make Barletta president at any cost.

That was then, the make-up of the new Electoral Tribunal: three justices, two
of them doing the government’s bidding and the other a capable, independent but weak
man.

Two plus zero makes three.

B. “Imagine! They don’t pay any attention to me!”

The Electoral Tribunal that Quintero had been appointed to preside over was
a court discredited by the numerous scandals that had been taking place with impunity
during the years before its reorganization. Yet, Quintero did not remove any senior
officials, some of whom had obviously been involved in previous irregularities. A case
in point is the secretary general, who kept his job even though he made no secret of his
PRD leanings and that he had been involved, in one way or another, in the scandals
that led to the ostensible reorganization of the Tribunal.

In 1977, to give an example of these irregularities, the plebiscite on the
Torrijos-Carter Treaties was held with no previous electoral registration; according to
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the Tribunal’s questionable figures, 97.33 % of the electorate voted at the plebiscite.
In 1978, at three o’clock in the afternoon on the day of the elections for district
representatives, the Electoral Tribunal tolerated anonymous orders to be issued,
authorizing unregistered citizens to vote. This resulted in large numbers of pro-
government voters, having been forewarned of this unusual relaxation of electoral
requirements, casting more than one vote. Finally, during the 1980 legislative elections,
no balloting was held in 30 communities in the Province of Veraguas in order to favor
the pro-government candidate, a first cousin of Torrijos’s who was not very popular in
the area. The same convenient method was used in Bocas del Toro, where no voting

20
Linares, Julio E., Tratado concerniente a la neutralidad permanente y a la neutralidad del
Canal de Panamá. De un colonialismo rooseveltiano a un neocolonialismo senatorial. Litografía e
Imprenta LIL, S.A., San José, 1983, page 143. This masterful study reveals, among other things, how
the regime, through lies and stratagems, trampling upon civil liberties and, looking out only for its
survival, perpetually mortgaged our sovereignty.