After being forced by constitutional and nationalistic objections to withdraw a proposal to make English Panama's official second language in the previous Legislative Assembly session, deputy Arturo Araúz (Liberal Nacional-Panama Oeste) has proposed new legislation to promote the English language in Panama. Araúz, who does not himself speak English, explained his new proposal before an audience of English students and teachers at the Universidad Interamericana on October 23.

The basic point, according to Araúz, is to "teach English at all schools in the Republic of Panama."

"In Panama, there is this perception that we are a country that speaks English, but this is not so," Araúz explained. Thus, he argued, the government's attempt to promote international call centers has not been too successful. "This legislation has an indispensable element, workers who speak English."

The call centers are designed for companies and institutions in the developing countries to cut costs by paying Third World wages. For example, one project is designed to save US cities and counties the expense of hiring Spanish-speaking 911 operators by transferring emergency calls to people in Panama, who must be able to understand the Mexican or Puerto Rican or other Spanish dialect used by the emergency caller and then translate the information into English that an emergency dispatcher in the United States can understand. (That a person used to giving and understanding directions by the Panamanian system might be required to give directions in a city where he or she has never been and in a culture where urban navigation is done on a different basis seems to be a point that is ignored, a factor that ought to be alarming in North American cities that are outsourcing their 911 services to Panama, but the legislature here isn't concerned with that.)

Another proposed call center function is for banks to transfer their customer relations to phone banks in low-wage countries. HSBC considered Panama for this, but eventually decided to go to Malaysia, a former British colony that uses English as a common official language that unites its large Malay, Chinese and Tamil-speaking populations as a lingua franca. It was HSBC's complaint that Panama has too few English-speaking people for it to locate a call center here that led to Araúz's first proposal to promote English.

In the course of that debate and the present one, it was estimated that three to five percent of Panamanians speak English. Actually, more than 10 percent of Panamanians are West Indians who speak English as a first or second language, and these people were employed in large numbers at the former US military bases and by the former American canal administration. Moreover, a significant part of Panama's wealthy elite is educated in English. However, Panamanian banks don't hire blacks and rabiblancos don't take low-wage phone answering jobs.

Araúz also noted that English is the dominant language on the Internet and in computer science, saying that future trends are "hard to quantify" but likely to retain English as an important language in those high-tech fields. He called English "an economic resource" that Panama lacks, and argued that if Panama had adopted policies to promote English 10 or 15 years agon and were more English-speaking now, our present economic woes would not be so severe now.

"A person can't participate in the world economy without a second language," Araúz said, calling English "the universal language that lets us share ideas."

His proposal mandates things that cost money, but the way that the Panamanian political system works, the actual funding must originate in the budget submitted by the president.

Some of the provisions in the Araúz proposal are:

• An obligation to teach English in all public and private Panamanian schools;

• Financing for government workers to study English;

• An English competence requirement for many university majors, including tourism, computer science, maritime professions and aviation, to be phased in over five years;

• A second language requirement for all university majors in which English is not specifically required, also to be phased in over five years;

• An easing of immigration restrictions for English teachers, which will continue until there is no longer a shortage of qualified teachers;

• Subsidies for private businesses to teach their employees English; and

• A larger budget for the Ministry of Education to meet the English teaching mandates.

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