Panama’s Bad Old Times Return : Why is U.S. silent about pardoning of governmental thugs?

The initial wave of pardons came from Panama’s president himself in 1994. Right after his inauguration, Ernesto Perez Balladares granted amnesty to 222 onetime cronies of Manuel Antonio Noriega, Panama’s former dictator. Then quietly, almost surreptitiously, Vice President Tomas Altamirano Duque granted 130 pardons for other Noriega loyalists. Now the president of the Legislative Assembly wants to get into the act and extend the amnesty to 1,000 members of the Democratic Revolutionary Party, the backbone of the corrupt Noriega regime, driven from power by an American invasion in 1989 and returned to power in 1994 by the voters. Some of the party men are still jailed; others, previously released, will have their records expunged.

Without an international outcry, which has yet to be heard, Panama faces a return to power of thugs who committed innumerable atrocities under the rule of Noriega, who now sits in a U.S. prison on narcotics charges. Many of these undesirables belonged to the so-called Dignity Battalions that, in the name of the fatherland, did the dirty jobs for the dictator. Others are bureaucrats who have been accused of graft and corruption in their government positions. And some were military and paramilitary officers who carried out crimes like the notorious murder of human rights activist Dr. Hugo Spadafora.

Alarmed by this rollback to the bad times, Amnesty International has issued a statement deploring the continuing pardons, arguing they “would represent a gross setback for justice and the future of human rights in Panama by sending a message that human rights violations will go unpunished.”

Local human rights organizations and the Roman Catholic Church have also opposed the amnesty. So far, unfortunately, neither the State Department nor the U.S. Embassy in Panama have taken a public stand on the issue or, apparently, tried to convince Perez Balladares that amnesty for thugs is wrong. Why not?