The ACP board of directors. They are short-handed due to a resignation — which was NOT one of the four members who have been named in criminal investigations or unflattering audit reports. ACP Photo.

The qualifications for ACP board members

by Marco A. Gandásegui, hijo

The Panama Canal continues to be the centerpiece of any analysis of Panamanian reality. As a result of a negotiation – really an imposition — made at the beginning of the 20th century, the United States built the waterway that connects the two largest oceans on the planet. From 1914 to 1999, the canal was administered by the United States, based on the global geopolitical interests of that northern country. In 1999 the waterway, and all of the infrastructure that accompanied it, was transferred to the Panamanian government once the Torrijos-Carter Canal Treaty signed in 1977 was fulfilled.

Since 2000, the canal has been managed by the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), a public company whose sole shareholder is the Panamanian people. Canal revenues are almost entirely the product of tolls paid by more than 14,000 ships — of all sizes — that pass through their locks annually. In 2018 it had revenues that exceeded $3 billion. Nearly half went directly to the coffers of the Panamanian Treasury to be incorporated into the national budget.

Despite this enormous wealth that the treasury gets every year, little is known about how the canal is managed. The ACP is about to get its third administrator. It has a board of directors made up of 11 members. The board appoints the administrator. Of the members of the board, nine are appointed by the President of the Republic for a period of 10 years. Another is the Minister of Canal Affairs. There is also a deputy elected by the National Assembly. The board of directors should be accountable to the sole shareholder of the sanal: the Panamanian people. Every year in the National Assembly – which according to the Constitution represents the people — the president of the board of directors of the ACP delivers a check that leaves everyone astonished by the huge sum that it represents.

But who are the members of the board of directors? Are they prepared to fulfill their obligations? Are they at the service of the country or do they have other agendas?

It is up to the current president — Juan Carlos Varela — to appoint three new board members before he hands over his office to his successor on July 1, 2019. Like the last four presidents, everything indicates that he will select them under pressure from powerful economic interests. The members of the board of directors handle billions of dollars from canal revenues and related activities. Most do not have much knowledge about the waterway. Some do not know it at all. Many come to the ACP with another agenda.

What are the qualification that the members of the board of directors should have?

Let’s make a list of six basic areas with which the chosen one should be familiar. If she or he meets the six qualities mentioned below, that makes an excellent candidate for the position of director. If five traits are found, that’s very good. Those who can handle four are good or acceptable. Those who only have three or less they are unacceptable.

• The first quality is that to know the details of world maritime trade. This incudes the projections of world production and maritime technologies. It includes knowing the importance of commercial routes.
• The second quality is to have knowledge the security of the 9,000 ACP employees. Not just workplace safety, but their levels of education, health, pay scales and prospects for the future
• Third, a director should know the details of how that complex structure that is the canal is maintained.
• Fourth is a good knowledge of the watersheds that feed the canal the water that ships need to travel from one ocean to the other. In addition, urban growth and its impact on the waterway.
• Fifth, knowledge of how to guarantee expeditious access to financial resources so as to be ever more autonomous.
• Finally, the director should have a working knowledge of geopolitics and of the interests of the great powers, in order to maintain the neutrality of the canal and the country in a conflictive world.

Obviously, the board of directors should have naval engineers, environmentalists, economists and financiers, labor lawyers, international relations specialists and sociologists to be in a position to supervise the entire operation of the canal. At present, these are conspicuous by their absence. President Varela can fill that void. He can choose new directors from among his school friends or his fellow party members, as Panamanian presidents usually do. Provided that they master at least four or more of the qualities mentioned above.

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In reality, a Panameñista campaign ad. But because it’s posted on the president’s Twitter feed instead of on billboards, the Electoral Tribunal will see it otherwise.

At long last, it comes to this

President Varela took farms and homes from people and gave them to the subsidiary of US-owned Dole. The people evicted were offered irrisory compensation, nothing all close to replacement value.

Ancient petroglyphs considered holy to many of the Ngäbe people were flooded over and destroyed, as a gift to Honduran hustlers, European investors and a rabiblanco law firm who got a dam concession with a fraudulent environmental impact  statement. Varela said that foreign interests trump those of Panamanians.

Panamanian neutrality as our main defense of the Panama Canal? Varela takes orders from the Pentagon, takes sides with the most atrocious human rights abusers in the Middle East and has given an excuse to a wide variety of fanatics in many places to see Panama as an enemy power. So of course his administration ends with the overt return of US forces to the isthmus.

Look and listen carefully to the candidates. Is there someone who will lead Panama back toward independence?

This raucous, squabbling party will have a crowded 2020 presidential primary field. That’s not a bad thing. Those who are busy trying to “clear the field” by defaming candidates do neither America nor the Democratic Party any service.

The “killer” Bs…

Enough of the dangerous fiend imagery.

There is all the time in the world for things to change but polls suggest that the GOP base is sticking with Donald Trump and that any of the many candidates of possible candidates for the 2020 Democratic nomination would beat Trump. Alarmist stuff about how the Democrats die if they go to the left, or go to the right, or try someone new, or get stuck on someone old – that’s just nonsense.

Are there foreign voices in the crowd? Perhaps, but surely this is mainly homespun by operatives and pundits, or wannabe operative or pundits, looking for advantage in what will be a large crowd of candidates.

Speculation about the so-far undeclared ones is more interesting than the vilification of those already announced. Will Biden run? Will Beto jump in? Will Bernie take the plunge?

Could be that we get these three men in the race, in a year when Democrats are looking for a woman. Could be that anyone with any sort of record in public life gets it cherry picked for that one obscure datum that can bludgeon a campaign to death. Perhaps….

If any or all of these guys decide to run for president, they should be welcomed and respectfully heard. If anyone runs a “Stop B…” or stop anybody else campaign, the purveyors of that are the ones who ought to be outed and stopped. This time Democrats should get to vote for whom they want without threat or stigma.

The mortal threat to Democrats this time around is the possibility of would-be power brokers rigging or appearing to rig the primaries. That could leave people whose votes the eventual Democratic nominee needs unenthusiastic about voting in the fall.

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The biggest regime change disaster that’s too politically incorrect to discuss

by Eric Jackson

Well, yeah. The lies are always annoying, and those who tell them should be run out of public life forever. Now we see convicted liar Elliott Abrams in charge of ginning up “regime change” in Venezuela and that appointment ought to be one more count in articles of impeachment against Donald Trump.

But let’s step back from the partisan and “safe” takes on regime change operations and recognize how central the 2014 US-promoted coup in Kiev is to today’s US politics. Let’s take a sober look at what a disaster it has been.

Yeah, yeah. It’s a betrayal for a Democrat to say these things because it happened on Obama’s shift. Maybe it’s even a sellout to Putin, as some will surely allege. But understand the Russian predicament. Understand the US predicament. Understand the Ukrainian predicament.

Is the truth to be told? In the chain of events set off by US-promoted “regime change,” Ukraine has lost much of its territory and and much of its population. How much is hard to determine.

Certainly the government in Kiev lost Crimea, a known geographical quantity which had more than three million people at the time. But some of those folks fled to what’s left of Ukraine, while other ethnic Russians fled from Ukraine to a Crimea newly and democratically annexed to Russia.

In the Donbass region, the secessionist warfare and population movements are not over. There, it was difficult to describe who was ethnic Russian and who was ethnic Ukrainian in the first place, with an awful lot of people with Ukrainian surnames who speak Russian as their first language, for example.

The census figures for the Ukrainian population are down, and were going down before the coup due to a low birth rate and increased death rate in the wake of the former Soviet Union’s collapse. But millions of citizens were lost in the breakup of what was Ukraine before the coup. When a huge minority – upwards of 40 percent – of the country was ethnic Russian and the coup was specifically anti-Russian, what could anyone expect?

But the regime change wonks believe in magic wands, which are waved in some situation room in Washington and produce neat and desired results in far corners of the world. That it never ends up that way is of course, blamed on the ignorant savages who live in these places.

The 2014 Ukrainian coup deeply affected two sleazy mobbed-up politicians.

One was Vladimir Putin, who rose to power in Russia on the shoulders of the “oligarchs” – glorified mobsters whose fortunes derive from the looting, or politely described as “privatization” – of the public assets of the former Soviet Union. He could not stay on as leader of Russia without taking a hard line about the coup in Kiev. He also needed to politically cover his ass by showing up the Americans after that.

Imagine the Chinese People’s Liberation Army setting up a base in Mexico, within sight of the US border, and he possibilities of political survival for the American politician who gets blamed for letting that happen and you begin to see Putin’s dilemma.

The other was Donald Trump, then and now and for a long time before deeply engaged in business relations – if the truth is to be told, money laundering transactions – with the Russian or otherwise former Soviet oligarchs who are Putin’s power base. Many parts of that story are being doled out in paragraphs of Mr. Mueller’s indictments and we have not heard the whole story. The Trump Ocean Club in Panama was largely marketed to Russian oligarchs, in part via mafia lawyers with US or Canadian passports.

Increasingly corrupt, increasingly plutocratic US politics gave Trump the opportunity he needed — and foreign interlopers, not just the Russians, to play the Trump card to put their man in the White House. It’s a malady that has been brewing through Republican and Democratic administrations alike for decades.

(By the way, do you want to look at the opioids epidemic and increasing death rates in many areas of the United States? THOSE are chillingly like what happened to Russia and the other former Soviet republics in the wake of that empire’s dissolution.)

A Russian leader talking and acting tough as a matter of survival in his post? Is it that hard to understand? Isn’t a cornered Donald Trump playing many similar cards?

But pity the poor Ukraine — all of the people there, whether loyal to Moscow or to Kiev.

The shooting is not all over in the Donbass. Photo by Marco Fieber.

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Sobre Venezuela

Nos dominan más por la ignorancia que por la fuerza.
Simón Bolívar

Los abajo firmantes rechazamos el involucramiento de Panamá en el Grupo de Lima, no representativo de la OEA, que abanica los planes intervencionistas de Estados Unidos en los asuntos internos y externos de Venezuela.

Exigimos que Panamá se retire de dicho Grupo y abjure de ese indigno compromiso que rechazamos porque está de espaldas a nuestros intereses nacionales, al Derecho Internacional, a la Historia y al rol que nos toca jugar más allá del Tratado de Neutralidad.

La legitimidad del gobierno de Venezuela es asunto que compete exclusivamente a su pueblo según su Constitución Nacional y conforme a la Carta de la OEA, la Carta de la ONU y el Derecho Internacional.

Citemos el Artículo 19 de la Carta de la OEA:

‘Artículo 19: Ningún Estado o grupo de Estados tiene derecho de intervenir, directa o indirectamente, y sea cual fuere el motivo, en los asuntos internos o externos de cualquier otro. El principio anterior excluye no solamente la fuerza armada, sino también cualquier otra forma de injerencia o de tendencia atentatoria de la personalidad del Estado, de los elementos políticos, económicos y culturales que lo constituyen’.

El gobierno de Panamá ha tomado una decisión inconsulta e inconstitucional porque el Órgano Legislativo es el único competente para decidir si nuestro pueblo desea participar o no en conflictos bélicos internacionales. El Órgano Ejecutivo solamente está facultado para declarar la paz. El Artículo 4 de nuestra Carta Magna obliga a Panamá a acatar las normas del Derecho Internacional, la más importante de las cuales es la NO INTERVENCION en los asuntos internos de cada Estado.

La participación de Panamá (país sin ejército) en acciones bélicas, salvo en legítima defensa o protección del Canal, no está permitida a nuestro país por el régimen jurídico de la neutralidad al margen del Tratado perpetuo de 1977.

Los panameños no olvidamos que fue precisamente la intervención de la OEA en asuntos internos y externos de Panamá en mayo de 1989 la que abrió el camino de las sanciones, la desestabilización, la intervención y la invasión de EE.UU. a nuestro país el 20 de Diciembre de 1989, que nos dejó decenas de miles de muertos y heridos además de incalculables perjuicios materiales y económicos. Dicha invasión nos concita a rechazar toda agresión armada en la región.

El gobierno de Panamá nos aparta de nuestro rol como país neutral, cuyo deber es apoyar la paz y la seguridad internacionales y no ser cómplices del régimen más violento y agresivo del mundo, dado que la intervención en Venezuela puede ocasionar una guerra mundial o nuclear que destruiría al planeta.
El Consejo de Seguridad de la ONU ratificó por mayoría que la no intervención, el diálogo, la concertación y la paz entre venezolanos — sin descartar mediaciones internacionales – es el único camino para abordar legítimamente los problemas de Venezuela.

Estados Unidos interviene en asuntos del país bolivariano y la bloquea por múltiples canales comerciales, económicos, financieros, monetarios y diplomáticos y, en forma por demás ilegal, expropia y se apropia de miles de millones de dólares de PDVSA, ordenando a otros países (la Unión Europea) a cautelar el oro y activos venezolanos bajo un régimen ilegal de sanciones que el Consejo de Seguridad de la ONU no aprueba.

En esas condiciones de asfixia económica, artificialmente producida, ¿cómo no habría una “crisis humanitaria”? Frente a la escasez inducida, los poderes de Washington pretenden invocar otra falsa “responsabilidad internacional de proteger” al pueblo de Venezuela para edulcorar una inadmisible agresión.

Exhortamos respetuosamente al gobierno de Venezuela a solicitar una Opinión Consultiva a la Corte Internacional de Justicia de La Haya — conciencia jurídica del planeta — para que responda si las intervenciones de Estados Unidos y el Grupo de Lima violan o no el Derecho Internacional.

Estados Unidos pretende dividir al mundo en dos campos: uno, liderado por dicha superpotencia; y el otro, sometido al primero, cuyos países deben ser saqueados y destruidos, sin soberanía ni posibilidades de salvación nacional. Nuestro país, incluido el Canal, está condenado al segundo grupo.
Los regímenes beneficiarios de la invasión a Panamá (1989-2019) han suscrito diversos acuerdos con Estados Unidos (Salas-Becker) que la Asamblea Nacional jamás aprobó y que nuestro pueblo desconoce. Dichos acuerdos nos mantienen atados a la carreta del imperialismo, nos convierten permanentemente en país ocupado y nos hacen cómplices de sus fechorías. En consecuencia, reiteramos nuestra convicción de que los acuerdos post invasión son inconstitucionales, jurídicamente nulos y los rechazamos.

A estos acuerdos se suman los vergonzosos e ilegales manejos entre el Comando Sur y el Órgano Ejecutivo Nacional para operaciones militares en nuestro territorio (Darién) de cara a Venezuela que violan nuestra soberanía y el Tratado de Neutralidad.

Repudiamos la reciente orden de Washington para que Panamá expulse a Irán de nuestra Marina Mercante y tome acciones contra dicho país, lo cual revela la ninguna neutralidad de Panamá y el Canal y nuestra total falta de independencia.

Rechazamos tajantemente la violación rampante de la Convención de Viena sobre Relaciones Diplomáticas en virtud de la bienvenida del gobierno nacional a la ilegítima representante del autodesignado presidente (títere) repudiado por el Consejo de Seguridad de la ONU, así como la participación ilegal de la embajada de Estados Unidos y ciudadanos extranjeros en manifestaciones públicas contra el pueblo de Venezuela.

Afirmamos que el actual gobierno de Panamá no nos representa y que ha perdido toda legitimidad; que debe adoptar una política exterior independiente y participar en la solución pacífica y negociada que respete la soberanía de Venezuela.

Abogamos porque se le abra paso a un gobierno independiente que defienda los derechos históricos y soberanos de nuestro pueblo y consagre nuestro rol universal como Zona de Paz y libre de armas nucleares.

¡POR UN PANAMA NEUTRAL, INSUMISO Y SOBERANO!

FIRMAS:
1. Julio Yao, Analista Internacional, ex Agente de Panamá ante la Corte Internacional de Justicia de La Haya, Universidad de Panamá (UP).
2. Juan Carlos Mas, médico, CONADESOPAZ, UP.
3. Marco A. Gandásegui, sociólogo, CELA, UP.
4. Anayansi Turner, docente, Facultad de Derecho, UP.
5. Leopoldo Santamaría, médico patólogo.
6. Guillermo Pérez Silva, médico.
7. Nils Castro, analista político.
8. Olmedo Beluche, sociólogo, UP.
9. Alma Montenegro de Fletcher, Comité Panameño “Salida de Bolivia al Mar”, ex Procuradora General de la Administración, UP.
10. Walid Zayed, Coordinadora Palestina para Latinoamérica y el Caribe (COPLAC).
11. Rebeca Yanis Orobio, Socióloga, Docente y Dirigente de ASSEUP, UP.
12. Jorge González, Movimiento Patria, UP.
13. Roberto Montañez, Analista Internacional, UP.
14. Julio Bermúdez Valdés, periodista.
15. Gisela Pérez Polo, Administradora de Empresas, ex Coordinadora de Alianza Estratégica Nacional.
16. Franklin Ledezma Candanedo, periodista y escritor, Asociación Americana de Periodistas Bolivarianos, Red Bolivariana “Victoriano Lorenzo”, Comisión Anti Bélica de Panamá.
17. Manuel F. Zarate P., Ambientalista y analista político.
18. Juan Carlos Calzadilla, ingeniero.
19. Gilberto Solís, Movimiento de la Juventud Popular, Facultad de Derecho, UP.
20. Moisés Carrasquilla, Coordinador del Partido del Pueblo.
21. César Barsallo, activista ambiental y comunal.
22. Miguel Ramos, economista.
23. César Del Vasto, historiador.
24. Trinidad Ayola, Ingeniera Civil, AFAC 20 de diciembre.
25. Amparo Testa, Profesora de Relaciones Internacionales, UP.
26. Otto Ríos, abogado.
27. Cecilio Simons, Bayano Digital, docente universitario, UP.
28. José De la Rosa Castillo, Bayano Digital, profesor de Relaciones Internacionales, UP.
29. Celia Sanjur, socióloga y periodista.
30. María Muñoz, Coordinadora Campesina por la Vida
31. Roberto Bruneau, pastor, Defensor de Derechos Humanos.
32. Francisco Herrera, docente universitario de Historia y Antropología.
33. Moravia Ochoa, poeta.
34. Consuelo Thomas, escritora.

ADHESIONES INTERNACIONALES:
Stella Calloni – periodista, escritora, presidenta del Frente de Comunicadores Sociales por la libre Expresión de los Pueblos y otros organismos humanitarios, Argentina.
Olga Benário De Sousa Pinheiro – Liga Latinoamericana Los Irredentos.
Pablo Ruiz Espinoza – periodista, School of the America’s Watch (SOAW), Chile.
Robert Austin – Profesor, Departamento de Historia, Universidad de Sidney Australia.
Winston Worrillo – poeta, Premio Nacional de Cultura, Perú.

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