Cables offer dim view of Panama's president, whom Obama is about to meet

[Judi Lynn]

Source: McClatchy News

April 26, 2011
Cables offer dim view of Panama's president, whom Obama is about to meet

WASHINGTON, Apr 26, 2011 (McClatchy Newspapers - McClatchy-Tribune News Service via COMTEX) --

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The cables aren't kind to Martinelli. They describe him as a man of "limited attention span" who "makes strong impulsive decisions with minimal information." They cast him as vindictive, authoritarian, fixated on spying on his political foes and contemptuous of checks on what one cable calls his "hyper-presidency." If diplomacy is the art of discretion and subtlety, these cables miss the mark. But they lay out the contours of an often-abrasive relationship between then-U.S. Ambassador to Panama Barbara J. Stephenson and Martinelli, a University of Arkansas graduate and self-made millionaire who took office July 1, 2009.

Martinelli, who founded Panama's Super 99 supermarket chain, cast himself as a right-of-center counterweight in Latin America to Hugo Chavez, the radical Venezuelan leader. Martinelli's isthmus nation, which occupies a choke point at the center of the Americas, is a global transit point for commerce. Two-thirds of the ships that cross the isthmus are either going to or coming from the United States.

Roughhouse skirmishes between Martinelli and Stephenson began days after his inauguration, and the cables peel back the issues at stake.

Stephenson sent a cable to Washington relating how Martinelli sent her "a cryptic BlackBerry message that said, 'I need help with tapping phones.'" In follow-up meetings, Martinelli and his aides demanded that a U.S.-designed wiretap program to catch drug traffickers be expanded to target his domestic political foes, a move that was illegal under Panamanian and U.S. law. He threatened to reduce counter-narcotics cooperation if Washington "did not help him on wiretaps." Martinelli's chief security aide, Olmedo Alfaro, confided to a U.S. counter-all drug agent that the president had an ulterior motive.

Read more: http://it.tmcnet.com/news/2011/04/26/5469177.htm