A city penetrated

PANAMA. Panama’s reputation as a center for pornography continues to expand. Hundreds of web pages with adult content rest in servers located in the country, and it seems some of them at one time were within the City of Knowledge.

The collapse of servers located in the City of Knowledge, which host web pages from around the world, would mean a big loss. But the loss would not only be for the technological sciences, but also for the pornography industry.

“Panama has become the world capital of online porno,” says Marcelino Aguilar, First Circuit Prosecutor of Sexual Crimes. The worse is that there are strong indications that some of these pages have their operation bases in the City of Knowledge.

The City of Knowledge, created in 1995, has as its main goal, the promotion and establishment of investigation and innovation centers in scientific, technological, humanistic, and cultural fields, as well as any programs that allow the transfer of knowledge in productive sectors such as technology.

Being part of the City of Knowledge translates into a broad range of benefits to help companies become more efficient. Among these benefits are: fiscal and immigration incentives, access to the main higher education and scientific investigation centers in the country, access to the Panama Canal basin and a living laboratory for scientific research and technological innovation in the country’s ecosystems.

But everything points to the grim reality that the main objective behind the City was altered, because companies that offer web hosting services to the world porno industry work within its boundaries.

The prosecutor Aguilar had already warned about it. In a previous interview he stated that during a seminary in Argentina, Brazilian experts said “that Panama is the country with most pornography web sites in Latin America.”

Documents to which La Estrella obtained access contain a series of e-mail correspondences in which Raul Herrera, then account manager from Telecarrier, offers web hosting services to a representative from an online pornography company, who, it seems, ended up becoming his client.

In the e-mails, Herrera says that the company he works for “has 3-4 years of experience providing this service to the adult industry.” Among advantages for doing business with Telecarrier, Herrera mentions that “our legal standing in the City of Knowledge could not be better.

“First, because TCI (Telecarrier) is the biggest company in the area and from which (in the City of Knowledge) they receive the most money,” he said.

And additionally, because of the special conditions of the companies located within the area, Telecarrier can help them bring into the country the necessary equipment with tax exceptions, if they are registered in TCI’s name.

“That is why the $500,000 in equipment should be put in our name,” he warned in the e-mails. “We have no problem in giving you a letter in which we agree to return the equipment, but it has to be without the knowledge of the City of Knowledge,” he insisted.

Telecarrier said Herrera no longer works for them. Carlos Escobar, general manager of Telecarrier, said that Herrera left the company by mutual agreement a year and a half ago.

When asked whether Herrera left because of this or a similar matter, Escobar insisted that he could not provide details on the former’s departure.

“As I don’t have more information than that which you are giving me, I cannot tell you whether the service that Herrera provided was as his own person,” said Escobar, who insisted that “we (Telecarrier) only do business with legal companies that have the corresponding permits by the State and the necessary conditions to operate within Panama.”

He added that Telecarrier does not offer web hosting services, but it has some exceptional clients such as a human resources company. “That’s not out business. Our business is leasing out the racks (where technology equipment is stored).”

As for Telecarrier’s capacity to monitor information that passes through its servers, Escobar said: “We don’t have access to the information that our clients store. We depend on citizen complaints. If we received any, as happened two years ago, we stop the service immediately and transfer the complaint to the competent authorities.” In the case he mentioned, authorities were not able to do much.

The problem, according to Aguilar, is that Panama does not have experts that can detect online pornography. However, he said that following investigations by the First Circuit Prosecutor of Sexual Crimes, four pornography networks were taken to court.

In Panama, there are no laws against adult pornography, while child pornography is heavily penalized.