Mireya Moscoso
Mireya Moscoso was president of Panama from 1999 to 2004, the first woman, the widow of the three-times president Arnulfo Arias, whom she had married at twenty-two when he was sixty-eight and followed into exile in Miami after the coup of 1968. She took his Panameñista party after his death in 1988, and lost the election of 1994 to Pérez Balladares by four points. She won that of May 1999 against the son of the general who had overthrown her husband, by seven. She was the president who received the Panama Canal from the United States at noon on 31 December 1999 under the Torrijos-Carter treaties of 1977, with Carter present and Clinton absent, the last American soldier having left the Canal Zone the month before. The five years that followed were the Canal's first under Panamanian management, whose revenues doubled. There were the Colón free zone and the banks, the growth that slowed to two per cent with the recession of 2001, and the social security fund's deficit that she left to her successor. There were the pardons she signed in her last week in office, in August 2004, for four Cuban exiles convicted in Panama of plotting to kill Castro, including Luis Posada Carriles, which broke relations with Cuba and Venezuela. She said she had done it because the men would have been killed if extradited. She was born in Pedasí in the Azuero peninsula in 1946, the daughter of a schoolteacher, worked as Arias's secretary in the campaign of 1968, studied interior design at Miami-Dade Community College in the exile, and ran a coffee farm on her return. She was the party's president from 1991, the widow who carried the old man's name and his voters, the Arnulfistas of the interior. The years were also the corruption cases that the auditors opened after she left, over gifts of Cartier watches to legislators and the use of state money for the party's foundation, none of which reached a conviction. There was the election of 2004 that the general's son won at the second attempt against her party's candidate by twenty points. She has lived in Panama City since, in the party's counsels and out of the offices. At the Canal's twenty-fifth anniversary in December 2024, when the American president-elect said he would take it back, she said that the handover had been the country's finest day and that it was not for sale.
- Lived: 1946 CE – ?
- Nationality: Panamanian
- Roles: president, politician
