Panama Probe Uncovers Apathy

The break in the case came from an American dog named Eagle.

Panama’s truth commission had been struggling for months to investigate the darkest chapter of the country’s past, the nearly 150 killings or disappearances that took place during two decades of U.S.-backed dictatorships.

The government had provided less than half a million dollars for the task, and the public didn’t seem to care what the truth was, or whether it was uncovered. The commission was coming up empty.

Then, last June, a U.S. forensic investigator brought in Eagle, a Doberman mix trained in finding human remains.

Eagle eventually found bone fragments, buried like memories in scattered grave sites throughout the country. There wasn’t much left: a toe bone at one site, an ankle bone that bore deep scratches, possibly from manacles.

But they were enough to make Eagle a star, mobbed by children at a local hospital, praised in the press. And the findings were enough for the families too.

“This is part of our story,” said Maritza Maestre, 53, whose uncle was taken into custody and then disappeared under the dictatorship here in 1971. “We want Panama, and the world, to know it.”

Today, the commission will release its final report, but justice may be long in coming: The document won’t name names, and the country’s attorney general apparently doesn’t have enough money to pursue the cases.

In many ways, the apathetic reaction to the truth commission isn’t surprising.

For one thing, Panama’s dictators, beginning with Gen. Omar Torrijos in 1968 and ending with Gen. Manuel Noriega, ousted during a U.S. invasion in 1989, weren’t particularly vicious by Latin American standards.

Neighboring Countries Have Bloodier Records

More than 200,000 people were killed or vanished during Guatemala’s long, savage civil war. In Peru, where a truth commission is just beginning to look into the regime of disgraced former President Alberto Fujimori, 30,000 people were killed and 1,000 disappeared during battles between the government and leftist guerrillas in the 1980s and ‘90s.

For another thing, Panamanians have become preoccupied with the future.

No longer dominated by the United States and its management of the Panama Canal, the country is struggling to find its identity: Is it part of Central America? South America? An island of commerce and free trade? Or a diplomatic and political center, a sort of Brussels for Latin America?

That identity search has left questions about the past in the past. Panama’s history has remained buried, literally and figuratively, as the country moves forward.

The Panamanian version of the truth commission is one of the latest of more than 20 such panels installed around the world as nations moved from dictatorship to democracy.

The commissions, which originated in Latin America during the 1980s and gained fame in South Africa, were supposed to provide a way for countries to shed light on the dark secrets of their pasts.

But as part of that process, some of the commissions made a controversial bargain. They traded truth for justice, usually providing protection to those guilty of, or complicit in, the abuses in exchange for testimony.

Human rights groups have begun warning that the commissions must be carefully constructed to deliver what they promise.

“The risk of truth commissions is that they are conceived as a substitute for justice and accountability,” said Jose Miguel Vivanco, head of the Americas Division for New York-based Human Rights Watch.

The Panamanian commission in many ways typifies both the problems and the promise of such efforts.

It has long been known among Panamanians that people disappeared or were killed under the dictatorships of Torrijos and Noriega. In the days after the U.S. invasion, an unofficial list was even published in leading newspapers.

A “reconciliation” commission was set up in 1990 that urged investigation into individual cases, but no one ever followed up on the recommendations. A leading government official at the time now says that was a mistake, blaming a lack of resources and the chaos following the invasion.

As years went by, victims’ families tried to pressure different governments for an investigation. They got nowhere.

Then, in 1999, two former military officers confessed to priests that they had helped conceal the remains of several men on an old military base that is now part of Panama’s international airport.

The priests passed along the information to government officials, who responded quickly, attacking the site with a backhoe. They found two bodies in September of that year, but no more. Still, the discoveries were enough to convince President Mireya Moscoso’s government to set up the commission early last year.

The idea met with resistance. There was talk from opposition politicians about retaliation. Moscoso’s late husband, former President Arnulfo Arias Madrid, had been deposed by Torrijos with the help of Noriega.

The nation’s attorney general refused to back the investigation. Moscoso had to dig into a special executive fund to pay for the work. The legislation creating it gave the commission only six months to sift through 30 years of history, later extended to this month.

One of the commission’s earliest decisions continues to be controversial. Commissioners decided to limit their investigations to the period of the two dictatorships. They would not pursue cases that arose during the U.S. invasion, saying it would be too much work.

That period is still shrouded in controversy. There has never been a complete figure of how many people were killed, but informed estimates range as high as 400, including Panamanian security forces and civilians.

When work finally got underway, it quickly became clear that Panama’s investigation suffered from one unusual problem. Most commissions do their investigations in the years immediately following the end of repressive regimes.

But Panama’s investigators were examining cases up to 30 years old. In fact, the bulk of the incidents occurred during the beginning of the Torrijos regime in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when small bands of leftist student leaders and armed groups were targeted.

The age of the cases made the investigation difficult. Memories had faded. Many of the sites had been bulldozed or had returned to jungle. Most mysterious of all, perhaps, was the disappearance of the Panamanian intelligence service records.

The commission only recently learned that the records, about 15,000 pages seized during the invasion, had been taken to the United States and microfilmed. Investigators are hoping the U.S. government will release those records, just as it did in El Salvador and Guatemala. They have yet to receive a response.

And so, when work began a year ago, investigators had little concrete evidence. They sifted through the site where the two bodies had been found. They dug up new sites on the basis of imprecise and conflicting witness testimony.

And they found nothing.

“There was serious skepticism” about the commission’s work, said Bruce Broce, the head anthropologist.

That’s where Eagle came in. By chance, investigators made contact with Sandra Anderson, 46, a private forensic investigator who volunteered the dog’s services. Eagle, who usually works on law enforcement cases, can find bodies decades old, buried six feet deep or even underwater.

The researchers were skeptical. But they decided to take a chance. Anderson and Eagle came to Panama last July and started working the air base. The dog began barking along a ridge of red earth far from where the original bodies were discovered.

Unsure, the workers slowly started digging with trowels. They found nothing.

“Is there really something here?” one asked. Anderson said to keep digging. After more fruitless effort, Anderson and the investigator began arguing. Then a worker came over with a mud-encrusted “rock” that felt lighter than normal. The investigators dusted it off.

It was a toe bone--the first indication of more bodies buried at the site.

“All of a sudden, I saw his face change. He was a believer,” said Anderson, who works about 200 cases a year with Eagle, most of them for law enforcement agencies in search of bodies or trace elements such as blood.

Anderson and Eagle would come back to Panama twice more, exploring different sites on each visit. More than 30 sites were excavated. In some cases, the bones had been disturbed, as happened when the Panamanian government moved tons of earth at the original site. In other cases, animals had disturbed burial sites. In others, the bodies were never buried, and the remains became scattered over time.

The investigators have sent what they believe are bone fragments from about 20 victims to a laboratory in the U.S. for identification.

Hoping to Compare DNA to Relatives’

The investigators are hoping to compare the bones’ DNA with DNA from family members to find matches and identify the remains.

“We just want to give the families something,” Broce said.

But that alone won’t satisfy the victims’ families.

Maestre was a young girl when her uncle, Alcividades Betancourt, a member of a left-leaning student group, was snatched by Panamanian security forces Feb. 17, 1971--a date she rattles off like her own birthday.

He was never seen again, although Maestre’s brothers made repeated trips to a jail where he allegedly was being held and demanded to see him.

Maestre knows the name of the Panamanian intelligence officer, now retired, who last saw her uncle alive and hopes the commission will help find out what happened. But she also wants justice, something she fears is still far away.

The commission won’t put any names of killers or torturers in its report--Alberto Almanza, the commission president, said it isn’t in his purview.

Nor does the nation’s attorney general seem disposed to pursue the cases. A top justice official said the office simply doesn’t have the resources to prosecute without international assistance.

And so, Maestre is afraid that at the end of her 30-year-search, she will have answers but no satisfaction.

“It’s very important that those involved are investigated and punished,” Maestre said. “If they are not, it will create a sense of impunity. And then it could happen again.”