From Expat Money. Caption: Before politics, Mizrachi made waves as a tech entrepreneur launching encrypted apps, importing Teslas, and challenging Panama’s outdated systems with bold innovation

Who is Mayer Mizrachi?

The question seems straightforward enough. Born August 25, 1987, in Panama City to a Panamanian father of Jewish background and a Jamaican mother. Tech entrepreneur. Social media influencer. Mayor of Panama City since July 2024. The first Jewish person to hold that office and one of the highest-ranking Jewish elected officials anywhere in Latin America.

But the simple biography obscures a stranger story. Before the mayoral sash, there was a maximum-security prison in Bogotá.

Mizrachi’s path to City Hall ran through a Colombian prison. Around 2013 he founded Criptext, an encrypted messaging platform that he licensed to Panama’s government innovation authority. When the administration turned over, officials accused him of embezzlement and non-delivery. Mizrachi held that the contract had been honored and the new government had simply shelved the licenses. In December 2015, while passing through Cartagena, he was arrested on an Interpol Red Notice at Panama’s request and spent six months inside La Picota, a prison whose population included active cartel members.

Both the embezzlement charges and a separate 2023 money laundering inquiry were eventually dropped, the former shortly after he won the mayoral race in May 2024. He has always maintained that both proceedings were politically motivated, rooted in his family’s connection to former President Ricardo Martinelli, whose brother-in-law is Mizrachi’s father Aaron “Roni” Mizrachi.

Rather than treating the prison experience as a liability, Mizrachi turned it into the foundation of his political persona. “Any difficulty a person goes through in life will build their character,” he told PragerU in June 2026. “I do not feel sorry for anyone who is going through hardship. Anyone who goes through hardship and survives will become stronger and better because of it. I am proud I would not have been able to do that if it weren’t for the challenges that God put in front of me.”

That mythology fed directly into his campaign strategy. He ran as the “Chacalde”—a portmanteau of the Spanish words for jackal and mayor—and built his political brand entirely through viral social media content, bypassing conventional advertising and major donors. On May 5, 2024, he took approximately 32.5% of the vote and roughly 156,000 ballots, outrunning his nearest rival Edison Broce, who finished at 27.4%.

In office, the anti-establishment persona has translated into aggressive administrative cuts. He trimmed City Hall’s workforce from 6,500 to roughly 3,500 and drove the municipal budget from $325 million down to $230 million—the steepest reduction in the city’s history. “By all counts, City Hall is operating faster and better with more impact,” he told Politico.

The same appetite for disruption drives his economic proposals. He has floated letting ships pay Canal transit fees in Bitcoin and entered Elon Musk’s Boring Company’s Tunnel Vision challenge, which offers the winning municipality a free tunnel that can be used for freight, pedestrians, water, utilities etc. Panama City made it to the final 16 of 487 international entries—the only non-American finalist—before being eliminated from the competition. The comparisons to Elon Musk’s DOGE operation and Trump-era disruption politics are not ones he resists.

When New York mayor Zohran Mamdani proposed routing neglected private property into community land trusts, Mizrachi fired back with an open invitation: “Dear Millionaires/Billionaires, come to Panama—0% tax on foreign income. No inheritance tax. $300K investment gets you residency. USD economy, stable banking. Pro investment capitalist policy. We reward capital, not chase it out.”

His Jewish identity is not a private matter. Mizrachi comes from a family with strong Jewish-Jamaican heritage and stands as Panama City’s first Jewish mayor, a distinction that carries particular weight in a country whose Jewish community has produced two presidents. His surname “Mizrachi”—meaning “Eastern” in Hebrew—is common among Sephardic Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent.

Panama’s Jewish community, estimated at 17,000 people, is the largest in Central America, sustaining over 50 kosher establishments, 10 synagogues, and day schools that enroll nearly all Jewish children. The country has had two Jewish presidents—Max Delvalle and his nephew Eric Arturo Delvalle—making it the only country outside Israel to have reached that threshold. The Jewish Federation of Greater Portland reports that Mizrachi has said “everything he does, he knows, reflects not only on himself but on the Jewish community of Panama and on Jews around the world. He feels that responsibility deeply—to serve the city with excellence and to honor his community by his conduct.”

Colombia elected Abelardo de la Espriella as its next president on June 21, 2026, delivering the country’s leadership to a man who spent nearly a decade publicly calling for the violent overthrow of Venezuela’s socialist government. His victory over leftist Senator Iván Cepeda by fewer than 250,000 votes marks a dramatic rightward shift for a nation that shares a porous 1,400-mile border with Venezuela and hosts millions of Venezuelan refugees.

De la Espriella takes office on August 7, 2026. If Brazil’s November presidential election delivers Flávio Bolsonaro to the Planalto Palace, the two largest nations bordering Venezuela will be governed by leaders who have explicitly endorsed forceful regime change in Caracas. Combined with the apparent willingness of acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez to cooperate with Washington, the conditions may finally exist for completing what the Trump administration attempted and failed to accomplish in 2019.

De la Espriella’s hostility toward Caracas is neither recent nor cautious. He first articulated his position on Venezuela during a 2018 appearance on Peruvian TV personality Jaime Bayly’s Miami television program. According to to his own subsequent writings, he urged Venezuelans to commit tyrannicide against Nicolás Maduro. Days later he published a column titled “Death to the Tyrant” in Barranquilla’s El Heraldo, writing that “the death of Nicolás Maduro becomes necessary to guarantee the survival of the Republic.”

When U.S. forces captured Maduro in January 2026, de la Espriella publicly celebrated, claiming he had predicted it years earlier. He sold the American operation not as an “invasion” but as “the arrest of an international criminal and head of the Cartel de los Soles,” arguing that Washington acted according to the law due to Venezuela’s alleged lack of institutional legitimacy.

His campaign platform explicitly called for a renewed military alliance with Washington. In February, De la Espriella announced that he would immediately begin “bombing the camps of the narco-terrorists and spraying drug crops,” adding that “this cannot be done without a strategic alliance with the United States and the State of Israel.” He marketed this as a 90-day security plan modeled on Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s approach, promising to retake national territory through joint task forces, aerial bombardment of criminal camps, fumigation of 330,000 hectares of coca, and the construction of 10 mega-prisons in remote jungle locations. He has also promised to establish American military bases on Colombian territory as part of a comprehensive security restructuring.

Colombia may soon find a partner in this posture across its longest border. Five months after de la Espriella’s inauguration, Brazilians will decide their own presidential election. Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, has made Venezuela the centerpiece of his campaign against incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

When Maduro was kidnapped in January, Flávio immediately seized on the moment. He posted that “Venezuela has become one of the most extreme examples of how an authoritarian regime can destroy a nation,” calling Maduro a “narcoterrorist.” At the time, his brother Eduardo texted him saying “you are elected president, because we know that a lot of things will come out of Maduro,” predicting that Maduro’s capture would expose Lula’s ties to the Venezuelan regime.

At CPAC in March 2026, Flávio displayed a photograph of Lula embracing Maduro to a crowd that booed loudly. He accused Lula of maintaining ties with leftist dictatorships through the São Paulo Forum, which he described as a network linking Lula, Cuban communism, and drug cartels. Brazil’s Supreme Court opened an investigation into Flávio for defamation, which he denounced as political censorship.

Flávio took Lula to task for “publicly criticizing President Trump’s actions on Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, and the fight against drug trafficking.” He pledged that under his presidency, Brazil would serve as a reliable U.S. partner rather than an opponent on these issues. Reuters polling in late October shows Flávio and Lula locked in a statistical tie heading into the October first round.

What these leaders propose is not new. Washington reached for it in 2019. The Trump administration’s first attempt to topple Maduro collapsed in spectacular fashion. National Security Adviser John Bolton appeared at a January 28, 2019 press conference at the White House with a notepad reading “5,000 troops to Colombia,” held visibly in front of cameras while announcing new oil sanctions against Venezuela’s state company PDVSA—signaling Washington’s interest in using Colombian territory as a staging ground for military pressure on Caracas. Colombia’s Foreign Minister Carlos Holmes Trujillo Garcia said his government had no knowledge of what the note meant.

On February 23, 2019, a U.S.-backed humanitarian aid plot from Cúcuta ended in violence when Venezuelan security forces blocked the convoy with tear gas and rubber bullets. According to a USAID Office of Inspector General report, only 8 of 368 metric tons of aid actually reached Venezuela—the rest was distributed inside Colombia or shipped to Somalia.

He operated from the shadows, shunned cameras, and cultivated an aura of mystery that made him appear less like a political consultant and more like a figure from a spy novel. Arthur Jay Finkelstein spent half a century whispering in the ears of presidents, prime ministers, and strongmen, teaching them the dark arts of political destruction. By the time he died in August 2017, his fingerprints covered the wreckage of democratic norms across three continents.

Finkelstein was born May 18, 1945 in Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood to Jewish immigrant parents from Eastern Europe. His father drove a cab and worked in the garment trade. The family relocated to Levittown and later to Queens, where young Arthur attended Forest Hills High School. As a Columbia University student he produced radio programs for Ayn Rand, the libertarian philosopher whose ideas would mold his worldview for decades. He volunteered for the Draft Goldwater Committee in 1963 and 1964, getting his start in conservative insurgent politics before earning a degree in political science from Queens College in 1967.

A 1996 CNN report captured his mystique perfectly, calling him “the stuff of Hollywood: A man who can topple even the most powerful foes, yet so secretive that few have ever seen him.” He described himself as “the playwright or the director, and not the actor.” His rivals proved less charitable. Political consultant Philip Friedmann called him “the ultimate sort of Dr. Strangelove.” In Canada, where he exported his techniques, journalists dubbed him the “Merchant of Venom.”

The venom flowed from a methodology his clients called “Finkel-think.” The core premise was elegant in its cynicism: rather than persuade voters to back your candidate, you destroy the opponent so thoroughly that even apathetic citizens drag themselves to the polls to vote against him. Finkelstein believed perception mattered more than policy, that facts were malleable, and that people could be made to hate individuals more readily than institutions. His most celebrated innovation was transforming the word “liberal” into a political epithet. Political scientist Darrell M. West told the Boston Globe in 1996 that “He uses a sledgehammer in every race. I’ve detected five phrases he uses—ultraliberal, superliberal, embarrassingly liberal, foolishly liberal and unbelievably liberal.”

It was a method that delivered results, and Finkelstein delivered them almost immediately. He climbed the political ladder rapidly. At 25, he helped James L. Buckley win New York’s six-person 1970 Senate race. In 1972, his polling helped make Jesse Helms the first Republican elected to the Senate from North Carolina since Reconstruction. By the time he signed on with Canada’s National Citizens Coalition in 1982, nearly half of Republican Senators were his clients.

His client roster read like a directory of Senate conservatism across four decades: Jesse Helms of North Carolina, Alfonse D’Amato of New York, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Don Nickles of Oklahoma, and Connie Mack III of Florida. He helped George Pataki unseat Mario Cuomo in 1994 by branding the governor as “too liberal for too long.” Finkelstein also worked on Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign.

His most celebrated international achievement came in Israel. Hired by Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 on the recommendation of cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, Finkelstein engineered a come-from-behind victory over Shimon Peres that defied all pre-election polls. He brought American-style attack advertising to Israeli soil, running television spots featuring shattering black glass, blurry photographs of Peres with Yasser Arafat, and scenes of suicide bombings. The campaign centered on the slogan “Peres will divide Jerusalem.” Netanyahu ultimately won by a single percentage point, 50.5 percent to 49.5 percent.

Through their joint firm GEB International, Finkelstein and Israeli-American political consultant George Birnbaum subsequently worked for Ariel Sharon’s 2001 prime ministerial campaign, Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party, and Jerusalem mayoral candidate Nir Barkat in 2008. His family’s statement after his death noted that he “helped develop Benjamin Netanyahu’s vision for a ‘secure peace’ and helped voters to view the hawkish war general Ariel Sharon as a leader who was also a trusted grandfatherly figure.”

His most controversial work, however, took place in Hungary. In 2008, Netanyahu introduced Orbán to Finkelstein and Birnbaum, who began advising Fidesz in secret. They helped Orbán secure a landslide in 2010 by channeling rage from the 2008 financial crisis against “the bureaucrats” and “foreign capital.” Then came the masterstroke that would define Finkelstein’s legacy and haunt it.

Hollywood motion pictures would have you believe that organized crime in America was a duopoly of Irish and Italian thugs, but there is another ethnic group that not only pioneered the corporate structure of the underworld but continues to exercise profound criminal influence to this day: organized Jewry.

The Lower East Side of the late 19th century was a pressure cooker of poverty and ambition, its tenement blocks producing men who would reshape American crime from the ground up. Out of this crucible emerged what scholars call the Kosher Nostra. When Prohibition arrived, Jewish gangsters seized the opportunity with both hands, planting themselves at the center of bootlegging networks stretching from New York to Detroit, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and Newark, while simultaneously building the financial infrastructure that would underwrite the modern drug trade.

The first generation of Jewish organized crime took shape on Manhattan’s streets in the 1890s. On the Lower East Side, the Eastman Gang assembled under Edward “Monk” Eastman—an outfit of 1,200 safecrackers, gunmen, and street brawlers who spent years trading blood with Paul Kelly’s Italian-American Five Points Gang over control of Manhattan’s underworld. What began as a mixed-ethnicity operation shifted steadily Jewish as the Eastern European immigrant tide rolled into lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, launching what historians describe as a 40 to 50 year stretch of dominant Jewish-American influence over New York’s criminal world.

Eastman, however, was a product of an earlier and simpler age of thuggery. The figure who converted organized crime into something closer to a modern enterprise came after him.

Arnold Rothstein built his reputation on two nicknames: “The Brain” and “The Fixer.” The son of a prosperous German-Jewish Manhattan family, he approached crime the way an industrialist approached a market. Crime writer Leo Katcher captured the scale of his ambition precisely: “the J.P. Morgan of the underworld; its banker and master of strategy.” From rigged card games and stock fraud to rum-running and narcotics, Rothstein touched nearly every significant criminal enterprise of his era.

He stood accused of masterminding the fix behind the 1919 World Series—the Black Sox Scandal that shook American baseball to its foundation—though prosecutors never managed to make a case stick. His more lasting contribution was human capital: he bankrolled and schooled the next generation of crime, handing Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, and Waxey Gordon both the money and the methods they needed to build their own empires. F. Scott Fitzgerald took note, translating Rothstein into the character Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby. A shooting at the Park Central Hotel cut his career short in November 1928, but the men he mentored carried his methods forward for decades.

Of all those men, none went further than Meyer Lansky. He arrived in New York’s Lower East Side in 1911 from Grodno, Russia, under the name Maier Suchowljansky, and by the late 1910s had partnered with Bugsy Siegel to run gambling operations across the city. The criminal world recognized what it saw, eventually bestowing on him the titles “Chairman of the Board” and “Mogul of the Mob”—names that only grew more apt as his reach extended far beyond New York.

Lansky built the financial backbone of the National Crime Syndicate, the joint Italian-Jewish body that governed American organized crime, which he and Lucky Luciano put together in the early 1930s. From there he pushed the mob’s tentacles outward—into Fulgencio Batista’s Cuba, the Las Vegas casino floors, the Bahamas, and reportedly the vaults of Swiss banks where dirty money could be made clean. He outlived nearly every contemporary and died of natural causes in Miami Beach in January 1983, having defeated a succession of prosecutors who were never able to land a charge that would hold.

Siegel was everything Lansky was not in temperament. Where Lansky sat behind ledgers, Siegel used his fists and worse. The two had found each other as teenagers on the Lower East Side and built the “Bugs and Meyer Mob” together, an outfit that handled the syndicate’s dirty enforcement work and laid the groundwork for what would eventually be institutionalized as Murder Inc.

The syndicate sent Siegel west in 1937, and he made himself at home in Hollywood while expanding the mob’s gambling operations through California. His entry in the historical record came through concrete and neon: the Flamingo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, which he drove into existence between 1945 and 1946. A project initially priced at $1.5 million ran to $6 million before it was finished, with suspicions mounting that Siegel had been helping himself along the way. When the Flamingo opened to indifferent crowds and bleeding ledgers, the patience of the men behind it finally ran out. Siegel was shot dead at a Beverly Hills home in June 1947, and whoever pulled the trigger was never officially identified.

The syndicate’s killing operation needed a commander, and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter was built for the role. His nickname derived from the Yiddish “Lepkeleh”— “little Louis”—though nothing about what he ran was small. A product of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Buchalter founded Murder Inc., the syndicate’s dedicated contract-killing arm, and ran it through the 1930s while simultaneously strangling New York’s garment industry and trucking sector through labor racketeering. No major American mob boss has since been executed by the government. Buchalter was the last, dying in the electric chair at Sing Sing in March 1944.

The apparatus he constructed was not limited to outside targets. Arthur Flegenheimer—the Bronx-born son of German Jewish immigrants who operated as Dutch Schultz—built an operation that touched bootlegging, the Harlem numbers racket, and restaurant extortion, and conducted himself with such erratic brutality that his own syndicate partners concluded he was more liability than asset. Murder Inc. shot him in a Newark chophouse in 1935.

On June 8, 2026, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) stood on the House floor and formally honored the survivors of the USS Liberty attack, demanding an investigation into Israel’s 1967 assault on an American naval vessel that killed 34 crew members and wounded 174 others.

Survivors of the attack watched from the House gallery as Massie delivered his remarks on the 59th anniversary of the incident.

“It’s a great honor, maybe one of the biggest honors of my lifetime, to stand here on the floor and do something that’s 59 years overdue: to recognize the survivors and those who gave their lives on the USS Liberty 59 years ago today,” Massie said.

The Kentucky Republican did not mince words about what he believes happened that day. “This was an effort to kill everybody on board. There was no intention of taking prisoners,” Massie declared on the House floor.

He pointed to the assessments of senior American officials who rejected Israel’s claim that the attack was a case of mistaken identity. “None of these distinguished men think this was an accident. They think it was intentional murder by the country of Israel, either as a false flag operation or because they simply didn’t want anybody observing what they were doing that day,” Massie stated, citing former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, CIA Director Richard Helms, NSA Director Bobby Ray Inman, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Thomas Moorer, and Navy JAG counsel Captain Ward Boston.

Massie’s speech came weeks after he lost his Republican primary to Trump-backed challenger Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL. Pro-Israel groups including AIPAC spent over $9 million to defeat him. With nothing left to lose electorally, Massie used his remaining time in Congress to raise an issue that powerful interests have worked to suppress for nearly six decades.

After his primary defeat, Massie quipped that “I would have come out sooner but I had to call my opponent to concede and it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv.”

The USS Liberty Veterans Association has fought for decades to bring attention to what happened on June 8, 1967. The organization is committed to “demanding accountability through transparency, lawful inquiry, and historical integrity,” guided by the belief that “no nation, no alliance, and no political convenience outweighs the truth or the lives of American servicemen.”

Their most significant action came on June 8, 2005, when the LVA filed a formal War Crimes Report with the Secretary of Defense. The report established prima facie evidence that Israeli forces jammed American emergency radio frequencies, used unmarked aircraft, machine-gunned life rafts, and that rescue aircraft launched from U.S. carriers were recalled while the attack continued.

Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk wrote in 1991 that he “was never satisfied with the Israeli explanation. Their sustained attack to disable and sink Liberty precluded an assault by accident or some trigger-happy local commander. … The attack was outrageous.” Captain Ward Boston, senior counsel for the Navy’s original Court of Inquiry, signed a 2004 sworn affidavit stating that President Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had ordered investigators to conclude “that the attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity’ despite ‘overwhelming evidence to the contrary.’”

Major veterans organizations have backed the survivors’ demands. The American Legion passed Resolution 40 at its 2017 national convention in Reno, calling for the first full U.S. government investigation of the attack—a resolution that called upon “the 115th United States Congress to publicly, impartially, and thoroughly investigate the attack on the USS Liberty and its aftermath.”

Admiral Thomas Moorer, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, chaired an independent commission in 2003 that concluded that “Israel committed acts of murder against American servicemen and an act of war against the United States.” Moorer asked pointedly, “Why would our government put Israel’s interests ahead of our own?”

The USS Liberty attack carries a distinction no other military incident shares. Since World War II, it remains the only attack on a U.S. Navy ship that Congress has never formally investigated. Full congressional inquiries followed the attacks on the USS Pueblo, the USS Stark, the USS Cole, and the 1983 Marine barracks bombing. The Liberty received nothing of the kind.

Massie concluded his floor speech with an urgent appeal. “While they’re still alive, they need closure. Let’s give them closure. Let’s have an investigation. Let’s pass a resolution honoring them. It’s long overdue. And then they can have their justice,” he declared.

However, this plea for an official reckoning highlights a profound disconnect between the nation’s representatives and its masters. As long as the halls of Congress remain subservient to organized jewry, such calls for accountability will be met with the same calculated indifference that has defined the last six decades.

The continued suppression of the Liberty investigation is not a failure of bureaucracy but a deliberate feature of a system entirely captured by Jewish interests. Until this ruling class is fully dispossessed of its power, the murder of our sailors will remain conveniently memory-holed to protect the sacred status of Israel.