Thursday, February 5, 2009

Political Update



Two events happened last week that seem to be dominating the local political races. The CD candidate Ricardo Martinelli struck an alliance with Juan Carlos Varela of the Panemeňista Party. Varela was running for president supported by his party, but now will be the Vice President candidate with Martinelli. In the 2004 election the Panemeňista Party received 19.2% of the popular vote and had 17 of 78 seats in the National Assembly.

It was also reported that recently Balbina Herrera of the PRD party received a $550,000 legal settlement from the government dating from her prior business contract with the Colon Port having been cancelled. The opposition claims this is just more of the ruling party corruption. As I watched the Super Bowl on ESPN Desportes in Spanish, I saw that the CD was running political negative attack ads against Balbina over this issue.

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