Mireya Moscoso

Mireya Moscoso (born 1946) is a Panamanian politician who served as the first female President of the Republic of Panama from September 1, 1999, to September 1, 2004 — the period during which Panama assumed full sovereignty over the Panama Canal. Born Mireya Elisa Moscoso de Gruber in the village of Pedasí on the Azuero Peninsula, she was one of six children of a rural schoolteacher and grew up in modest circumstances.

She moved to Panama City in her teens to work as a secretary and in 1964 married the three-time president Arnulfo Arias, more than forty years her senior. The 1968 military coup that ousted Arias drove the couple into exile in Miami, where Moscoso completed business studies and managed the family's coffee farm in Florida. After Arias's death in 1988 she returned to Panama and took over the leadership of his Partido Panameñista (renamed Arnulfista in his honor).

She lost the 1994 presidential election to Ernesto Pérez Balladares but won the 1999 contest against the Revolutionary Democratic Party's Martín Torrijos. Her inauguration on September 1, 1999, was followed three months later, on December 31, 1999, by the formal handover of the Panama Canal from the United States to Panama under the 1977 Torrijos–Carter treaties — a ceremony for which she presided as head of state.

Her administration created social programs for the elderly and rural schools but was dogged by accusations of corruption and patronage, and her party suffered heavy losses in the 2004 election. Her decision in late August 2004 to pardon four Cuban exiles convicted in a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro caused several Latin American countries to recall their ambassadors briefly.

The name Mireya derives from the Provençal Mirèio, from the verb mirar, "to admire." She was admired and contested in equal measure.