Home Appointments President
President
Panama Government
| Appointee | Mireya Moscoso |
|---|---|
| Role | President |
| Organisation | Panama Government |
| Domain | Politics |
| Start | 1 September 1999 |
| End | 1 September 2004 |
| Notes | First woman President of Panama |
Institutional context
The President of Panama is the head of state and head of government, elected by direct popular vote. The office dates to Panama's separation from Colombia in 1903. From 1904 through August 1999 every holder was male.
Career path
Mireya Moscoso (born 1946) is the widow of Arnulfo Arias, three-time President of Panama in the mid-twentieth century. She succeeded Arias as leader of the Arnulfista Party and contested the presidency unsuccessfully in 1994 before winning in 1999.
Appointment
She defeated Martín Torrijos in the May 1999 presidential election and was sworn in on 1 September 1999 — three months before the United States transferred control of the Panama Canal to Panama under the 1977 Torrijos–Carter Treaties. She is the first woman President of Panama.
Tenure
Five years. Her tenure included the assumption of full Panamanian sovereignty over the Canal, substantial public-works investment, and a recurrent dispute over Panama's relationship with Taiwan and the People's Republic of China. She left office on 1 September 2004 and was succeeded by Martín Torrijos.
Cluster context
Moscoso's 1999 appointment is the second elected woman head of state in the Western Hemisphere after Chamorro (Nicaragua 1990). Together with the subsequent wave (Bachelet 2006, Fernández de Kirchner 2007, Chinchilla 2010, Rousseff 2011), the Latin American sequence demonstrates a sustained regional pattern that predates the Western European institutional cluster by approximately a decade.