Old Guard Vies With Salsa Star in Panama Vote

Panama’s first presidential election since a U.S. military invasion changed the country’s history has boiled down to a contest between the onetime political party of ousted Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega and salsa star Ruben Blades.

The unlikely options in today’s vote speak to ways Panama has changed in the five years since the invasion, and ways it has not. The elections also highlight both the success and failure of a U.S. policy designed to build democracy.

The conservative coalition government of outgoing President Guillermo Endara, installed by U.S. troops once Noriega was toppled, is highly unpopular, and public anger is turning voters away from the ruling parties.

Still, this election is expected to be the fairest and most free in Panamanian history.

The winner will control the country’s preparations for taking over the vital Panama Canal and thousands of acres of prime real estate that become available to Panama as U.S. troops stationed here withdraw gradually by the year 2000.

It is the first time in 25 years that Panamanians will vote for president removed from the shadows of military dictatorship, and it is the first time in decades that the results are likely to be respected.

So it may seem ironic to many Americans that the party that the U.S. government battled to oust--at the cost of 23 American and hundreds of Panamanian lives--stands a good chance of returning to power.

And it may seem unusual that the next most probable victor is a musician and Hollywood actor who has not lived in Panama for nearly two decades.

Ernesto Perez Balladares, the charismatic candidate for the Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD, which backed Noriega throughout the 1980s, is leading the polls with a 3- to 10-point margin. Blades, whose campaign seemed dead in the water a few weeks ago, places a strong second.

Perez Balladares had been the seemingly uncatchable leader for most of the year, but opponents have exploited his past ties to Noriega to erode his support. And the mercurial Blades, who for a long time seemed ambivalent about the campaign and fell dramatically in the polls, has suddenly taken to the streets in the last month, shaking hands and offering free salsa concerts to capture the imagination of a generally disenchanted public.

Panamanians who believed that democracy and a better way of life would be the automatic results of the 1989 invasion that ousted Noriega have been bitterly disappointed. There have been gains in political and personal freedoms and an impressive economic recovery, but few of the benefits have trickled down to the poor. A reduction of the state bureaucracy has cost many jobs, crime and drug abuse are growing, and many Panamanians see the Endara government as elitist.

“We are the real opportunity for change,” Blades told a jubilant crowd of mostly young Panamanians last week in his final campaign rally outside a soccer stadium in one of the city’s working-class neighborhoods.

Wearing a fluorescent orange baseball cap backward, Blades did more singing than speaking, running through renditions of the salsa hits that made him an international superstar, including “Decisiones,” which, with its risque subject, was banned in Panama during most of the Noriega dictatorship.

Blades launched his maverick candidacy last year, moving from his home in Santa Monica back to Panama after a self-imposed exile of 18 years. He casts himself as the ultimate outsider, a unique chance to break from the past, and that seems to be a big plus in the minds of voters.

Judging by the polls, Blades, 45, is the only candidate who has a chance--though a slight one--at preventing the return of the PRD.

Capitalizing on widespread anti-government sentiment while offering old-style populism, Perez Balladares has campaigned tirelessly to distance himself and his party from Noriega.

*

Instead, he revived the image and memory of party founder Gen. Omar Torrijos, the military strongman who overthrew an elected government in 1968 and ruled until his death in a plane crash in 1981. Despite his iron fist, Torrijos exploited Panama’s class and racial differences to appeal to the poor masses.

Perez Balladares, an economist and millionaire businessman, maintains that with Noriega serving a 40-year drug-trafficking sentence in Florida, the party has been purged of its most corrupt thugs.

“The PRD of 1994 has absolutely nothing to do with the PRD of 1989,” he said in an interview in one of several campaign headquarters. “Although (today’s party) may have many of the same people who participated in ‘89, their philosophy, their behavior, their orientation is totally opposed to what it was in ’89. . . .

“There is a problem that I have to admit. People still believe the PRD is Noriega’s party. . . . As long as the American public doesn’t get to recognize that this is a different situation, it will be very hard for them to understand why we won.”

But his opponents say Perez Balladares’ memory is selective and revisionist. His campaign ads, for example, offer a detailed biographical sketch from his birth until his participation in the negotiations for the 1977 Panama Canal Treaties. Suddenly, there is an abrupt jump to today, when the candidate is described as a “renowned businessman.”

Perez Balladares lost his party’s presidential nomination in 1984 to a Noriega selection. But he ran the PRD’s 1989 campaign for Carlos Duque, Noriega’s handpicked candidate.

That election ended in rampant fraud when Noriega annulled results that favored Endara. Perez Balladares has denied participating in the fraud but defends his work for Duque as what he calls a moral obligation to the party.

When thousands of U.S. troops landed Dec. 20, 1989, to capture Noriega and destroy his army, Perez Balladares was arrested by the Americans and held for a few hours until associates applied pressure for his release.

Nicknamed “the Bull” because of his enormous neck and bulky build, Perez Balladares has further worried opponents today by naming as his running mate Tomas Gabriel Altamirano Duque, publisher of Panama’s oldest newspaper, which frequently served as a mouthpiece for the Noriega regime.

Despite Perez Balladares’ claim that the party has cleaned up its act, other well-known Noriega cronies are running for office on its slate. These include former Noriega spokesman and close friend Mario Rognoni, who is a candidate for the legislature. And the party’s president, Gerardo Gonzalez, is seen as a hard-liner whose son is the prime suspect in the killing of a U.S. soldier on the eve of former President George Bush’s disastrous 1992 trip to Panama.

“The question is, how changed is the party, and it’s an unknown,” said a source familiar with U.S. policy. “The question is, how effectively will (Perez Balladares) be able to marginalize the radicals and whether that’s his intention.”

Businessman Roberto Brenes, who is directing the campaign of another candidate, said: “The problem is not the Bull but the tail. Can he manage all of the people who come with him? If the ticket is any indication, you can expect about one-third of his people to be corrupt and one-third to be opportunists.”

Opponents also fear that those military officers who once swore allegiance to Noriega are waiting in the wings to resume prominent roles in government.

Perez Balladares has pledged not to rebuild the military, which the Americans disbanded after the invasion.

Perhaps one explanation for the revival of the PRD can be found in El Chorrillo, a slum neighborhood that was bombed by the invading Americans.

One day last week, five women were seated on the stoop of a tenement house. It was near noon, but there was nowhere else they had to be.

“Life was very much better” under Noriega, Suzanne Lovet said as her neighbors chimed in and echoed her. “You used to have work. Now you have nothing. (The Americans) give the money, but we didn’t get it. . . . For the last four years, we don’t get anything. No jobs, no money and no house. The rich people getting richer, the poor people getting poorer. Just like that.”

“With the dictatorship there were more jobs for the poor people than with the democracy,” said Mare Angulo, 33, an unemployed mother.

Blades seems to recognize the phenomenon of the PRD popularity and has styled his own campaign--with less success--to channel the anti-government discontent.

“They (the PRD) are back strong because of the spectacular failure of the parties, the other traditional parties, in not just solving problems but showing compassion for people in Panama,” he said last week. “The PRD brings memories to many people of a time, whether paternalistic or not, (when) there was an effort made to take into consideration the needs of the poor and the disadvantaged and the disenfranchised.”

Endara’s coalition, a mishmash of conservative parties that banded together as the so-called Civilista Movement to oppose Noriega, won the 1989 elections but was prevented by Noriega’s henchmen from taking office. Only after the invasion was Endara sworn in, during a ceremony at a U.S. military base.

*

But under Endara, many of the supposed sins of Noriega--corruption, nepotism and the money-laundering of drug dollars--continued apace.

Endara is barred constitutionally from seeking reelection. His coalition proceeded to commit political suicide by failing to agree on a single candidate and splitting apart.

Two of the governing parties are running separate and not particularly charismatic candidates: Ruben Dario Carles, a gruff-voiced and cantankerous 73-year-old former controller, and Mireya Moscoso de Gruber, whose principal qualification seems to be that she is the remarried widow of Arnulfo Arias, a legendary politician who was thrice elected president in the 1940s and 1960s--and thrice overthrown by the army.

Some analysts see the demise of the ruling coalition and the resurrection of Noriega’s old party as an indictment of U.S. policy, a policy doomed to fail because it focused on the military problem of Noriega without focusing on the political aftermath.

“They (the U.S. government) handed power over to people who didn’t represent anyone, who had won elections but under a set of completely different rules, where everyone was supporting them because they didn’t want the military,” said analyst Marco Gandasegui, who heads Panama’s Latin American Studies Center. “People saw that Endara didn’t solve any problem, so a lot of people now are saying give us back (the PRD). . . . It tells you the degree of frustration that exists.”