...Bushwhacko Ricardo Martinelli, the mafia don of Panama, pal of the Bush-installed mafia don of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe. Varela was Martinelli's VP and also Foreign Minister, and broke with Martinelli prior to this presidential election, reportedly on issues of Martinelli's corruption. Martinelli is the guy who called up the U.S. (Bushwhack) ambassador on his cell phone and demanded that the U.S. provide him the same help that they were providing to Alvaro Uribe to spy on his "enemies" (labor leaders, leftists). (Wikileaks docs.) Uribe apparently used his U.S. (Bushwhack) spying help to draw up hit lists for his death squads, and we can only presume that Martinelli intended the same. Vast corruption and murdering your political "enemies" very often go hand in hand, though Panama was not quite as developed as a Murder, Inc., state, as Colombia was, under Uribe (& the Bush Junta). It's interesting that Colombia, too, now has a less-than murdering rightwinger as president. This seems to be the trend in U.S. client states--image cleanup.*
The fact that Martinelli asked for spying help was disclosed in a secret memo from the Bush Junta ambassador to the Bush Junta, but it is not known what the answer was. We can be sure that Panama was infested with Bushwhack spies, and spies from many allied or contending parties--CIA, DEA, FBI, Pentagon, Big Corporate--but whether, or how much, they were helping Martinelli is unknown. And some of them had quite a lot on their plates, already, including trying to cover up Uribe's crimes in Colombia and the Bush Junta's connection to them. It's pretty clear that U.S. spying entities (probably CIA) strong-armed Martinelli in Panama to give instant asylum to Uribe's spy chief when she fled Colombian prosecutors. (And it's pretty clear that this was a Leon Panetta cleanup after Bush Jr., at the behest of Bush Sr.) Martinelli doesn't seem to have been as favored by the Bush Junta as Uribe was. That asylum caused him serious political trouble in Panama and in the region.
It was characteristic of both Uribe and Martinelli to be hostile to the Chavez government in Venezuela. Uribe tried to start a war between the U.S./Colombia and Venezuela/Ecuador, by bombing a FARC peace negotiation camp, just inside Ecuador's border in March 2008, slaughtering some 25 sleeping people; then he claimed to have retrieved the FARC's laptop from that bombed site (500 lb. U.S. "smart bombs," according to Ecuador's military) and claimed that it contained proof that the presidents of Venezuela and Ecuador were trying to help the FARC obtain a "dirty bomb" and other wild and since utterly debunked charges. Uribe is likely tied to the "Black Eagles" death squad that was found to have infiltrated Venezuela. (They were routed out.) And he is known to be part of a region-wide fascist group planning the overthrow of the fabulously successful leftist democracy movement in Latin America. As his close pal, Martinelli was/is surely colluding in these fascist plots.
So far, then, Varella seems different, and somewhat better. We'll see what happens next.
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*(I have to say, though, that, in view of the peace talks in Cuba between the Santos government and the FARC guerillas, to end Colombia's 70-year civil war (aka, U.S. military boondoggle), Santos may be something better than a mere CIA image-cleanup. Also, Uribe hates Santos. Point to Santos. But this doesn't mean that Santos is a good guy. I think that the fundamental issue in the Cuba talks, for him, is how Big Ag and Big Pharma are going to profit from/control the legalization of drugs. Santos, early on, called for the legalization of all drugs. He also invited Uruguay's president, Jose Mujica, to help with the peace talks (though it may have been the FARC who asked for Mujica's help, and Santos merely agreed). Mujica, a leftist (and former leftist guerrilla fighter against the fascist junta in Uruguay), just presided over the legalization of marijuana in Uruguay, which is being turned into a state-run enterprise. I imagine that state-run vs corporate-run legalized drugs is an issue to the FARC (who would likely favor state-run in a future context of demobilization), as it is an issue for Santos, Obama and others, on the corporate side. It would be hilarious--if the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs" was not so humongously horrible--how the corpo press handles these events and issues. The "black holes" in their 'news' coverage could fill a couple of parallel universes.)
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