José Raúl Mulino, elected president of Panama (2024-2029), assured that the Panamanian justice system is “lame.” In his opinion it is “a parapet.” For the future president, ‘telefonazo’ justice governs, as the lawyer and former judge of the Supreme Court of Justice Arturo Hoyos described it in the past.

Mulino’s words were given in a conversation at the Chamber of Commerce, Industries and Agriculture of Panama (Cciap), which celebrated the 37 years of the creation of the Civilist Crusade, a movement promoted by businessmen that demanded democracy, justice and freedom in full military dictatorship of Manuel Antonio Noriega, in the 1980s.

Mulino assured that the country has an “imperfect democracy, but we have it.” Freedom: “no one can say that in this country there is no freedom,” he added. Justice, however, “we don’t have,” he said. A lawyer by profession and a politician, the president-elect is convinced that he himself has been a victim of justice. This is how he remembered the episode that almost ended his career for the Presidency of the Republic of Panama. “I don’t want any candidate, for any elected position, to have what they wanted to do to me happen to them,” he mentioned.

Mulino was referring to the unconstitutionality lawsuit that tried to stop his candidacy for the Presidency of Panama, a few days before the general elections of May 5, 2024. He indicated that it was a plan to disqualify him as a candidate for the Presidency, four days before the general elections. What hurt him the most – he said – was the collaboration of many people to achieve it. “It is a reckless act not to judge according to the law…,” Mulino said. Although, finally, the Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ) decided that his candidacy was not unconstitutional. The situation, however, caused a moment of uncertainty in Panamanian society. What happened is another page of the book that he turned, but that he will not forget, and of which he has many reflections left, he said. But it is not the only situation with justice in which he has experienced disappointment.

Mulino also recalled that for six months he was detained for the purchase of radars when he was Minister of Security. Therefore, he knows firsthand the political persecution of justice. He is convinced that he was the victim of a process, which he warned was void. But, according to him, he always showed his face and never took advantage of electoral jurisdiction. Although they investigated it out of time. In his opinion, in his case they were cleaned up with the Procedural Code. In August 2017, the radar case was annulled by the full Court. “When they force you to defecate in a garbage ‘cabin’, in front of others, that is worse than a shotgun or pellets. When they delay your food, so that you eat it cold, like it happened to me, that is a shot of pellets to the soul of each person,” he said. But “time and the country have changed…”, said the president-elect, an expression that seems to fill with hope in the face of a complicated economic panorama, where there are no numbers that are not in the red and there is a growing problem with the Disability program. , Old Age and Death of the Social Security Fund (CSS).

Mulino promised that the first topic he will address will be CSS. To do so, he will agree to the presidents of political parties to achieve a reform of the institution with the greatest consensus and least amount of trauma, before the end of 2024. Subsequently, he will focus on solving the problems of water and employment.