Mireya Moscoso

Mireya Elisa Moscoso Rodríguez (born July 1, 1946) is a Panamanian politician who served as the President of Panama from 1999 to 2004.

She is the country's first and to date only female president.

Born into a rural family, Moscoso became active in the 1968 presidential campaign of three-time president Arnulfo Arias, following and marrying him when he went into exile after a military coup.

She joined the 1968 presidential campaign of Arnulfo Arias; Arias had already served two partial terms as president, both times being deposed by the Panamanian military.

He won the presidency but was again deposed by the military, this time after only eleven days in office.

Arias went into exile in Miami, Florida, in the US, and Moscoso followed, marrying him the subsequent year.

She was 23, and he was 67.

During this period, Moscoso studied interior design at Miami-Dade Community College.

After his death in 1988, she assumed control of his coffee business and later his political party, the Arnulfista Party (PA).

After Arias' 1988 death, she inherited his coffee business.

On September 29, 1991, almost two years after the US invasion of Panama that overthrew Manuel Noriega, she became president of her late husband's Arnulfista Party.

Also in 1991, Moscoso married businessman Richard Gruber.

The couple adopted a son, Richard (born 1992).

During the 1994 general elections for the presidency, she narrowly lost to the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) candidate Ernesto Pérez Balladares by 4% of the vote.

In 1994, Moscoso ran as the presidential candidate of her deceased husband's Arnulfista Party (PA) in the general election, seeking to succeed PA president Guillermo Endara.

Her main rivals were Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) candidate Ernesto Pérez Balladares and salsa singer Rubén Blades, who was then president of the party Papa Egoro.

Moscoso and Blades sought to emphasize Pérez Balladares' connection with military ruler Manuel Noriega, broadcasting pictures of the two together, while Pérez Balladares worked to position himself as a successor to military ruler Omar Torrijos, who was regarded as a national hero.

Moscoso's campaign, meanwhile, was hindered by public dissatisfaction with the perceived incompetence and corruption of Endara's government.

Pérez Balladares ultimately won the election with 33% of the vote, with Moscoso receiving 29% and Blades receiving 17%.

However, unlike in 1994, it was now the PRD that was hampered by the scandals of the previous administration, and Moscoso defeated Torrijos with 45% of the vote to 37%.

Moscoso and Gruber divorced in 1997.

In the 1999 general election, she defeated the PRD candidate Martín Torrijos by 7% to become Panama's first female president.

During her tenure in office, she presided over the handover of the Panama Canal from the US to Panama and the economic downturn that resulted from the loss of US personnel.

Hobbled by new spending restrictions passed by the opposition-controlled Legislative Assembly, and her administration's corruption scandals, she had difficulty passing her legislative initiatives.

Her popularity declined, and her party's candidate José Miguel Alemán lost to the PRD's Torrijos in the subsequent general elections to succeed her.

Moscoso was born into a poor family in Pedasí, Panama, as the youngest of six children.

Her schoolteacher father died when she was ten, and Moscoso began working as a secretary upon completing her high school education.

Moscoso was named the PA candidate again in the May 2, 1999, general election.

Her main opponent this time was Martín Torrijos, Omar Torrijos' son, named to represent the PRD after the failure of a constitutional referendum that would have allowed Pérez Balladares to run for a second term.

Torrijos was selected in part to try to win back left-leaning voters after the privatizations and union restrictions instituted by Pérez Balladares.

Moscoso ran on a populist platform, beginning many of her speeches with the Latin phrase "Vox populi, vox Dei" ("the voice of the people is the voice of God"), previously used by Arias to begin his own speeches.

She pledged to support education, reduce poverty, and slow the pace of privatization.

While Torrijos ran in large part on his father's memory—including using the campaign slogan "Omar lives" —Moscoso evoked that of her dead husband, leading Panamanians to joke that the election was a race between "two corpses".

Torrijos allies also criticized Moscoso for her lack of government experience or college degree.

Moscoso took office on September 1, 1999.

Because she was divorced when she assumed the presidency, her older sister Ruby Moscoso de Young served as her First Lady.

Facing a PRD-controlled Legislative Assembly, Moscoso was limited in her ability to make new policy.

She was also hampered by strict new restraints Pérez Balladares had passed on spending public money in the final days of his term, targeted specifically at her administration.

On December 31, 1999, Moscoso oversaw the handover of the Panama Canal from the US to Panama under the Torrijos–Carter Treaties.

Her government then faced the challenge of cleaning up environmental problems in the Canal Zone, where the US Army had long tested bombs, biological agents, and chemical weapons.