Word: noriegas
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Wading through the 29 tracks of this double album is like watching one of those Airport films: the sheer tonnage of guest stars makes the proceedings feel a bit bloated. Here's sweet balladeer Celine Dion and nail-spitting rapper Foxy Brown. There's Jay-Z, Nas and Noriega. Even Puff Daddy drops in to co-produce a tune. What, O.J. was busy? Why does Kelly, a blue-chip producer-singer-songwriter, need to call in the cavalry? Because R. is less an album than a collection of gussied-up singles, like a meal made only of desserts. There...
...critics of Perez Balladares, a beefy, combative millionaire businessman known as Toro, or Bull, say his actions are out of step with his words. Heir to the helm of the Revolutionary Democratic Party, once in the grip of Noriega, Perez Balladares has appointed Noriega's former Foreign Minister, Jorge Ritter, as his Minister for Canal Affairs and chairman of the new 11-member Panama Canal Authority, the agency that will run the facility after 2000. In addition, the President has invited a storm of criticism by naming a passel of relatives and political cronies to the Canal Authority board. They...
...Perez Balladares appointment is more controversial than Ritter, who has thrived in politics despite his close association with the corrupt Noriega regime. Robert MacMillan, a New York lawyer who was a member of the Panama Canal Commission from 1989 to 1994 and its chairman for a year, says with Ritter as canal czar, "anybody who thinks that politics will be kept out of the Panama Canal is smoking pot and inhaling...
Falcoff points out that "there are troubling rumors concerning Ritter's ties to drug traffickers"--a reference to testimony at Noriega's trial in 1991 alleging that Ritter had purchased a car for a Colombian cocaine dealer. Robert Pastor, who helped negotiate the Panama Canal treaties and who now teaches at Emory University in Atlanta, agreed that Ritter was a "surprising" choice for a job "where you want a person who stands for integrity...
Ritter insisted in an interview that his reputation as a Noriega henchman is undeserved--that he remained in the Noriega government only to help negotiate the general's departure. As for the drug charge, he says that while he was Panama's ambassador to Colombia in 1986, he sold a car to an auto agency that he only later learned was owned by a drug lord...