Noriega Officers Resurface; Panama Coalition Strained

Overcoming strong U.S. doubts and intense political opposition, Ricardo Arias Calderon, the first vice president of Panama, is rebuilding the military with many of the same officers and men who made up Manuel A. Noriega’s corrupt and brutal Panama Defense Forces.

At the same time, Arias, who heads Panama’s largest, best-organized and most ideologically driven political party, is moving to impose his policies in areas under the jurisdiction of President Guillermo Endara and the second vice president, Guillermo (Billy) Ford.

Diplomats and Panamanian political experts say that the three top leaders continue to work together and that their disagreements do not yet threaten the coalition government. But they say that strains are showing and are making it difficult to find consensus on key economic and political issues.

In the six months since U.S. troops drove Noriega from power and replaced him with the three-party coalition, fear and suspicion have grown in the government. On one occasion, a violent confrontation took place in front of the presidential palace involving hundreds of followers of Endara and Arias. A personal aide to the president was shot and killed.

Senior members of Arias’ Christian Democratic Party have charged that Endara’s followers are creating a private army. They cite a raid by U.S. forces on a building occupied by members of Endara’s Authentic Liberal Party in which dozens of weapons were found, including rifles and machine guns.

Behind this lie decades of animosity between the Christian Democrats and Endara’s Liberals, who belong to an offshoot of a mass political movement that was headed by the late President Arnulfo Arias Madrid.

“The Arnulfistas are essentially fascist,” a European diplomat said not long ago. “Arnulfo admired Mussolini and didn’t believe in an open democratic system. Now they are trying to create the same structure as the Dignity Battalions”--a reference to the paramilitary organization Noriega set up to intimidate his opponents.

The Christian Democrats have been taking over key Cabinet posts and taking charge of departments and bureaus on the strength of their showing in the 1989 election, which was voided by Noriega.

And although Arias’ designated responsibilities are limited to reforming the military and the justice system, he has been involving himself increasingly in other areas, particularly economics. This has brought him into conflict with Ford, who also holds the Cabinet portfolio for economic planning.

“Arias Calderon wants to be president,” one of his aides said, “and he believes he is the only minister who can handle problems.”

Ford, who heads the Liberal Republican Nationalist Movement, is an advocate of strict free-market policies, an approach scorned by the Christian Democrats as reflecting the interests of Panama’s upper classes and business leaders.

Arias, on the other hand, advocates something that Roberto Azbat, one of Arias’ closest aides, calls “a social market approach,” with major government intervention in the economy. “Neo-liberalism won’t work here,” Azbat said, “and the others (Ford and Endara) don’t realize that. They just want what they already have.”

No one has been surprised at the emergence of conflict within the government, a coalition of three parties with widely differing views, goals and personalities united only in their hatred of Noriega.

“Now that Noriega is in jail (being tried on drug charges in the United States), the old resentments are surfacing,” a European diplomat with close ties to the government said. “That includes deep personal resentment of Arias Calderon. It’s not only a question of what he is doing, but how he is doing it. He doesn’t consult enough, and he isn’t entirely fair to the others.”

All this has become focused on Arias’ plan for reforming the old Panama Defense Forces into something called the Panamanian Public Force.

He defends using holdovers from Noriega’s military on grounds that “to exclude them would be to judge them categorically and not as individuals.”

He argues that all except the very worst can be made part of a nonpolitical institution that accepts democracy and respects civil rights. To have started from zero without any of the Panama Defense Forces veterans would have meant a U.S. military occupation for five years, Azbat contends.

If the PDF officers and men were summarily thrown out, he said, they would be more likely to create some sort of violent opposition.

“We wanted them to know that there is a place for them,” Azbat said. “We didn’t want to see them become guerrillas.”

Azbat also said: “We have decentralized the military, put it under civilian control, cut it from 15,000 to no more than 12,000, and we will control the military budget. We will decide what arms to buy and how military funds will be controlled.”

Besides, Azbat said in an interview, “using the PDF is only a transitory stage that began with the need to establish law and order. It was the right decision then and has helped establish a level of normality.”

Ruben Carles, Panama’s controller general and a close ally of Ford, doesn’t think so.

“Nowhere in the world,” he told a reporter, “has a corrupt military reformed itself. A corrupt army never changes.”

Carles said that “now is the time to build a completely new Public Force, while the Americans are still here.”

Private polls indicate that most Panamanians agree with Carles. An editorial in the daily Panama American said: “Panamanians won’t accept that officers of the old Defense Forces could be those who, in a democracy, control the peace. To think about putting into uniform and arming those who for many years oppressed, punished and tortured is not an easy task.”

Louis Martinz, a senior Endara aide, is the personification of this attitude.

“You can imagine how I feel,” he said in an interview. “After spending months in jail, now to see the men who arrested and tortured me wearing the uniform of my country, going about with guns and being welcomed in government offices. . . . It is a huge mistake.”

Arias is respected by U.S. Embassy officials as an intellectual and politician. At first Washington supported the idea of rebuilding the military from the old PDF, but some diplomats have grown wary of the idea, as have some U.S. military officers. One, who is no longer stationed here, said he changed his mind after watching U.S. advisers try to retrain the PDF veterans.

“They just can’t accept the idea of politicians telling them what to do,” he said, “or Americans lecturing them on the need to respect civil rights.”

An embarrassing incident, at least for Arias, occurred in May, when some active-duty Panamanian officers were charged with murder after allegedly kidnaping and killing the 3-year-old granddaughter of Noriega’s second-in-command, Col. Marcos Justines. Prosecutors say the officers were trying to extort some of the $47 million that Justines reportedly stole from banks in the last days of the Noriega regime.

Embarrassed or not, Arias is plunging ahead, a characteristic that has defined his public history and has clearly defined his place in politics here.

Known as “the Mad Monk” for his humorlessness, his austere manner and his single-mindedness, Arias gets respect but very little popular devotion. On the other hand, there is no ambivalence among his enemies.

The incident in front of the presidential place was brought on by rumors that Arias and the army were carrying out a coup d’etat while Endara was in Europe. That sent armed Endara followers into the street, and the military was called out.

“We have expected Ricardo to try something like this,” said one of the young men who went to the palace to protect it against a coup. “We are organized, and we will protect the government.”

Another rumor also reflects the deep suspicion with which Arias is viewed: that he has kept government and judicial officials from seeing thousands of documents seized by the American troops.

“Arias Calderon is controlling the access,” said Eusebio Marchosky, a prosecutor in the controller general’s office who is trying to obtain the documents in order to bring charges against military and civilian followers of Noriega.

The theory is that Arias is trying to protect the PDF officers to get their support.

“He wants to control everything,” because Arias thinks he should be president, Marchosky said. Marchosky cited a rumor that Arias once excused himself from a meeting while Endara was out of the country. “I have to leave early,” he quoted Arias as saying, “because as you know, I am the president.”

Arias’ followers attribute all this to jealousy on the part of the other parties, which Arias describes as “frustrated and disorganized.”

Azbat said, “You can confront the military only with a man like Arias Calderon.”

When asked about the charges that his boss was trying to impose his views in areas outside his jurisdiction, Azbat laughed and said: “He is the only one who can handle the problems. . . . 1416127776labor.”

So when “we see the government not addressing the serious problems here,” he continued, “we explain our program. I don’t see any government strategy to handle unemployment or develop a new labor code.”

The other parties have no ideologies or programs, Azbat said, “so there is resentment.”

Another Arias aide, who asked not to be identified by name, said that much of the criticism is personal, and added: “He is aloof. Being an intellectual and a philosopher is not necessarily to be popular.”

Yet Arias sometimes seems determined to bait and offend the people who are supposedly his allies. He and his wife recently tried to take over the country’s largest newspaper, La Prensa, from Roberto Eisenmann, a former ally who was forced into exile by Noriega.

Although no one has a clear idea, at least not for public consumption, why the Ariases would try to take over La Prensa, several sources say it is because the Eisenmann family represents the rich people who oppose the Christian Democrats’ moderately leftist economic program.

It could also be due to La Prensa’s constant criticism of Arias’ military plan.

No one knows, of course, how this will all play out. But many say that Arias is risking his future--perhaps even the nation’s--over the military reform issue.

“If it goes through and Ricardo is proved wrong, how will we repair the damage?” Carles asked. “It took an American invasion to repair the damage that resulted from military control in the past.”