Harrington, Critique of a critical story that the local establishment ignores

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NYT
This story has been widely distributed via the social media, but the rabiblano press has pretty much ignored it. From the online edition of The New York Times.

About the article in The New York Times

by Kevin Harrington-Shelton

[Editor’s note: See http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/06/22/world/americas/panama-canal.html ]

Disappointing sensational twist, to what has effectively exposed the local media trust’s complicity in the expansion project from its onset.

Yet unwarranted insinuations of malfeasance by the younger Mr. Jorge Quijano (contradicted thereinafter) hardly qualify as “all the news that’s fit to print.” I have long been at odds with the elder Mr. Quijano on official matters, but there is no call for such guilt by association. Researching the parliamentary record on this very point would have avoided much embarrassment.

Regrettably, (too) many in local media fail to acknowledge deficiencies in the rule of law as the root of many of our problems.

Example. The 2006 legislation enabling the expansion established an obligation for the elder Mr. Quijano (and former Administrator Alberto Alemán, on his watch), plus Canal Affairs Minister Roberto Roy, to testify on the Assembly floor every six months. This has not been discharged even once in the intervening decade! Attorney General Ana Belfon dismissed my complaint, that such blatant non-compliance warranted prosecution.

Neither did the legislative branch ever attempt enforcement of the transparency clause it enacted.

Had this transparency been discharged as prescribed in extant law, much of this morass would have been avoided. One is minded of Jeremy Bentham (Poor Laws): “The more strictly we are watched, the better we behave.”

 

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