My favorite paper La Prensa today had a disturbing article about the excavations of a mass grave in the island of Coiba here in Panama.

They currently believe there to be at least 140 corpses burried there. Victims of Noriega and Omar Torrijo’s miitary dictatorship which ended in 1989 with the US invation.

Almost all the victims that have been analyzed so far have evidence of brutal torture.

One victim was found with 2 huge syringes left in his rib cage. They are guessing that the syringes were used to slowly fill the victims lungs with an unspecified liquid.

Another victim was found with 60 fractures and several were believed to have been hung and shot.

They believe that they will be able to identify many of the victims by dna. One which has allready been identified was Floyd Britton a 32 year old university student, who was brutally tortured by amongst other things ripping his toe nails out and eventually killed.

Many of these discoveries have been done as part of Panama’s thruth comission, which aims to let people move on from that era by finding out what actually went on.

For people who are planning on coming down here as tourists or otherwise you might be worried by all of this, just remember that these things happened a long time ago. Panama has been a democracy since 1989. We have elections in May and the democratic process is going strong, with satirical TV programs like the Cascara openly taking the piss of politicians in a way that probably would have gotten them killed in the eighties or seventies.