When it Pours Rain Daily (PRD)

When Tin Pan Alley was at its peak there were song sheets galore with lyrics carrying rain as the central theme, “In September In the Rain”...”Pennies from Heaven”...”April Showers”, all of them highlighting the benefits of those water drops from above.

There was also a Jazz classic... in which the lyrics went something like this: “They call it stormy Monday, Tuesday’s just as bad, Wednesday’s worse.”

For the governing PRD (Democratic Revolutionary Party) the Jazz classic would be the perfect theme song as bad news streamed in from all directions.

For the government spin meisters PRD could mean Pouring Rain Daily.

EMBITTERED MAYOR. First there were the attacks on President Martin Torrijos, from former buddy and former presidential aspirant Juan Carlos Navarro, Panama’s mayor. Whether he’s planning an internal coup or just burning his boats is unclear, but he managed to gain widespread publicity as he decried the failure of anti-crime campaign.

THE MILITARY TOUCH. From a different direction came continuing forays against the security program introduced by then Justice Minister Daniel Delgado Diamante (DDD) a former senior officer in the feared Dignity Battalion of former dictator Manuel Noriega.

The campaign is largely orchestrated by opposition groups who hold a weekly vigil in front of El Carmen cathedral to protest the return of militarization, following the introduction, by presidential decree, of new security laws.

MURDER THEY WROTE. The protests got a major boost when the daily newspaper, La Prensa carried a story identifying DDD, as the killer of a young soldier under the dictatorship. In spite of denials and a flurry of legal challenges DDD was forced to step aside from his post as Minister of Justice and Government, and in a rapid cabinet shuffle he was promoted sideways.

PRISON BOUND. The Torrijos name got another slamming, through no fault of his own, when a cousin was sentenced to nearly six years in jail for running a marijuana growing operation in an apartment in trendy Marbella, where the air is often thick with pot smoke, and where discos are home to shootings and swingers use their gold plated credit cards to divide up their nightly rations of coke (the white powdery kind).

ANOTHER CARNIVAL. And then came the final blow with the resignation of Mingthoy Giro, close friend of first lady Vivian Torrijos as head of the Carnival celebrations. Giro had been the subject of much criticism during her reign, but got even more publicity recently as the scandal broke over a host of missing sculptures from Parque Omar where she holds another benefice.

UELCOME RETURN. And to cap it all, news from the lawyer of Noriega, still sitting in a Miami jail facing possible deportation to France to serve an additional sentence for money laundering. The lawyer claims that the French are no longer interested in putting him in a bastille, where he would not have the comforts of “a prisoner of war”. Instead he could be released and sent to Panama as early as next January.

And how would all his previous confreres, now sitting in positions of power react to his arrival in town? There’s unlikely to be a welcoming committee at the airport for the 73-year old who wants to end his days in a peaceful retirement, unlike some of his victims who were disappeared or allegedly ejected from helicopters over Darien, without parachutes.

Certainly it could have an affect on the presidential campaign of “the heart of the people” Balbina Herrera, who was close to the dictator and is believed to have sheltered him during the 1989 American invasion. Would she like to lay down the red carpet, alerting new voters, too young to remember the horrors of the dictatorship.

The Law and Order crowd will tell you that there was less crime in those days. That was because government censors sat in newspaper offices making sure crime stats were kept off the news pages. How times have changed. Now crime stats are flaunted to build a case for “security” measure.

Added together, the last month has been a perfect storm for the PRD and its well paid flacks.