Panamanian police on Friday arrested a former soldier who had been a fugitive since 1994 for the murder of a Colombian priest in the 1970s, during the regime of nationalist leader Omar Torrijos, according to the authorities and local media. The arrest took place in the province of Chiriquí, in the southwest of the country near the border with Costa Rica, the police said in a brief statement posted on Instagram.
Although the security forces did not disclose the name of the detainee, local media reported that it is Eugenio Magallón, who had been on the run for three decades after being sentenced to 15 years in prison for the homicide of Colombian priest Héctor Gallego, a crime committed in 1971. Magallón “has a 15-year prison sentence for the crime of homicide” of Gallego, stated the Panamanian police.
Gallego was a Catholic priest who organized peasants into cooperatives in the town of Santa Fe, in the central province of Veraguas, which led to conflicts with local landowners. The priest was kidnapped by soldiers on June 9, 1971, during the military regime of Torrijos, the nationalist leader who signed the treaties with then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter, under which the United States handed over the Panama Canal to the Panamanians in 1999.
Some accounts claim that the priest, whose body has never been found, was tortured and thrown into the sea from a helicopter. In addition to Magallón, two other military officers were sentenced to 15 years in prison for the crime; one of them has died and the other has already served his sentence.
In 2002, a Truth Commission documented 110 cases of murders and disappearances between 1968 and 1989 during the military governments of Torrijos and Manuel Antonio Noriega. Torrijos died in a mysterious plane crash in 1981, while Noriega died in 2017 after being convicted in the United States, France, and Panama for the disappearance of opponents and money laundering.
