Date of publication: february 17, 2010
Dear readers, meet Sherina Latorraca. In 2003 she hit a mother and 3 year old son with her BMW. The child died, the mother is paralyzed. Sherina fled the scene, hoping she wouldn’t be found and held responsible. Her mother, Zaira Santamaría de Latorraca, at the time a municipal judge, twisted and spun events to get her daughter off the hook. That worked.”Duh”, you say. This is, after all, classic behavior among Panama’s privileged class (anyone remember Nicole Chevalier?). But the story doesn’t end here.
Sherina-the-killer-bitch soon found herself rewarded for her upstanding behavior with a job at the Defensoria del Pueblo (Ombudsman) at the – get this – Human Rights department. That’s how these things work in Panama.
And then, our visionary president Ricardo Martinelli got this great idea to make her mother, the former municipal judge, a deputy magistrate in the Supreme Court. Actually the idea came from our Tourism Minister, Shlomo Salmon, and then Mentirelli embraced it. Now that was one step too far even for our legislators who are otherwise not bothered by such trivialities like “ethics” or “decency”, and they refused to approve her appointment – but only after a storm of protest had raged through civil society and the media.
Virtually every newspaper and current events blog in the country has published about the affair. So you’d think that any killer-bitch with half a brain would be glad it was over. But not Sherina! She has picked a bunch of websites and filed criminal defamation complaints against them because they called her what she is: an assassin. So the people of small independent websites like cocoas.net, elcuara.com, bebeestereo.com and garage507.com have been selected by Sherina to face criminal charges. Obviously she is too much of a coward to file criminal complaints against big media organizations like La Estrella and La Prensa.
And so the abysmal practice of our Public Ministry to leave the real criminals alone and go after those who call them out instead continues unabated under Martinelli and his second-in-command Bonissi – and from within the office of the Defensoria which has historically always frowned upon the use of criminal defamation laws. Only in Panama!