Panama’s Vote: All Notes Are Sour : Mudslinging Taken to New Lows by Both Sides in Campaign

The Panamanian election campaign is to political debate what a screech is to a Beethoven symphony. Both are noises, but the similarity ends there.

It is widely assumed that the outcome of Sunday’s voting will be determined by fraud, and “traitor” is the kindest characterization of the opposition candidates by the government party of Gen. Manuel A. Noriega, Panama’s strongman.

The tone of the campaign is exemplified by Critica, the country’s largest newspaper, which makes the most lurid American supermarket tabloid look mild by comparison.

Thursday’s issue of Critica contained a front-page story about Guillermo Ford, one of the two vice presidential candidates of the anti-Noriega coalition called the Civic Opposition Democratic Alliance. It accused him of drugging and raping a young girl.

The headline, printed in red in outsize type, made an obscene play on Ford’s party’s symbol and the fact that his voice is hoarse.

The opposition, fearful of provoking the government into violence--and possibly into canceling the election--has been more restrained in its public attacks on Carlos Duque, Noriega’s handpicked candidate to head the ticket of the Nationalist Liberation Coalition, an alliance formed around the ruling party.

‘Black Sheep Scum’

Still, the opposition distributes mimeographed sheets that refer to Duque, who never got beyond high school, as an illiterate and the “black sheep scum” of his prominent family.

Noriega is often called “pineapple face,” a reference to his scarred complexion. Opposition rallies feature a coffin with a pineapple on top.

But the Nationalist Coalition goes further. In March, armed members of the party raided a building occupied by the Christian Democratic Party, one of the three main elements of the anti-Noriega alliance. The building was ransacked and then burned down.

“If Watergate was an attack on the American constitutional and political system, what can you possibly call this government’s tactics?” a Western diplomat--not an American--asked the other day.

The Noriega forces have conducted a campaign of intimidation against the foreign journalists here to report on the campaign. They threaten to arrest and deport journalists who report any tabulation of the vote other than the official results to be issued Monday by the government-controlled Electoral Tribunal.

Government security agents have taken control of the Marriott Hotel, where many foreign correspondents are staying. They follow reporters around the lobby and other public areas and prohibit television crews from conducting interviews in the hotel.

At least one American reporter, Charles Lane of Newsweek magazine, was detained by security personnel. Others have been evicted from the Marriott and forbidden to use its facilities. There is evidence that reporters’ telephone conversations and news transmissions are monitored.

The level of the campaign is not helped by the candidates themselves. Duque, described even by his enemies as “a nice man,” is best known in Panama as the head of Transit S.A., a military-dominated company that controls all imports and exports through Panama’s free trade zone.

“You can’t ship or receive anything without paying Duque,” a man who does business in the zone said. “The cost is 1% of the value of the shipment and a surcharge for each container. For instance, Duque gets a dollar for every carton of cigarettes shipped.”

Opposition and diplomatic sources say that Duque, who began his business life as a driver and civilian aide for the late military strongman Omar Torrijos, is said to have won Noriega’s favor by giving the general and other military officers large shares of Transit S.A. funds.

Duque, who is overweight and speaks with a wheeze, was selected by Noriega to run for president because of his fealty and his lack of personal political ambition, according to sources close to the government coalition.

Guillermo Endara, presidential candidate of the three-party opposition alliance, is regarded even by supporters as the least popular of the three men at the top of the alliance slate.

He was selected to head the ticket as the least objectionable choice when opposition leaders found they could not agree on more prominent politicians, among them Ford and the alliance’s other vice presidential candidate, Ricardo Arias Calderon, head of the Christian Democratic Party.

“None of the leaders (of the three alliance parties) could agree on who would run,” a diplomat said. “So they picked the least offensive, to themselves and to Noriega.”

Even though both presidential candidates are fronting for others--Duque for Noriega and Endara for his better-known vice presidential candidates--the rhetoric on both sides almost suggests that the race is between two men now dead.

Duque and his followers constantly call up the memory of Torrijos, a charismatic and popular military dictator whose government negotiated the treaties under which the United States agreed to turn the Panama Canal over to this country. Torrijos died in a plane crash in 1981.

Endara invokes the ghost of Arnulfo Arias Madrid, a nationalistic, populist politician who was elected president three times and was three times deposed by the military.

There is a further irony in the presidential race. Although the names of Arias and Torrijos are cited in the name of democracy, neither was a champion of democracy.

Torrijos’ power rested with the military, and Arias was an acknowledged admirer of European fascism.