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Due to an exceptionally dry and long- lasting dry season, the IDAAN water and sewer utility has begun to shut off the water valves that serve the Panama City metro area late at night. Although the Panama Canal Authority has yet to order costly restrictions on the drafts that ships passing through the waterway may take, that and more severe rationing measures remain possibilities for the upcoming months. The water shortage is also being felt by people who like to work on their computers late at night --- brownouts caused by dwindling hydroelectric power make it impossible for many computer monitors to function.

According to the Comptroller General's figures, direct foreign investment in Panama fell from some $512 million in 2001 to $51 million in 2002. This country's experience follows regional and global trends, as jittery US investors have been keeping their money at home since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States and institutional investors are generally bearish on Latin America as a whole.

Telecarrier, a new telecommunications company founded on large part by investments by members of the Motta family, has bought Alianza Viva, a company that owns Net 2 Net, NeT Direct and Metro Call. That makes Telecarrier the largest telecom company based on Panamanian capital, and also, by terms of the stock swap that was part of the merger, brings Alberto Vallarino's Banistmo into Telecarrier. Other investment in Telecarrier comes from Multiholding Corporation, Banco General and the ASSA insurance group. Telecarrier wants to go into the fixed line telephone service business, but so far has been blocked by Cable & Wireless and the Panamanian government. Minister of the Presidency Ivonne Young, Minister of Economy and Finance Norberto Delgado and Deputy Minister of Economcy and Finance Domingo Latorraca are all members of the Cable & Wireless Panama board of directors. Although C&W's fixed line monopoly was supposed to end at the beginning of this year, they have set connection fees for competitors to interact with existing phones at prohibitive rates with Moscoso administration support. It is very likely that within a short time after the next administration takes office in September of 2004, policies will change and Telecarrier will run Cable & Wireless off the field in head- to-head competition.

The Panama Canal Authority has filed criminal charges against the Farmers' Coordinator Against the Reservoirs (CCCE, by its Spanish initials) and its members for what the authority claims is a campaign of violence against its installations and personnel. Hydrology monitoring stations in the area that may be flooded to expand the canal watershed have been trashed and the authority alleges that CCCE members have threatened to burn the houses of canal employees. Although the authority has attempted to promote a local residents' group with whom it can "negotiate," most of the people in the areas of Colon, Panama and Cocle provinces that would be flooded are against the watershed expansion.

Although parts of it are surely matters of issues being seized upon to press long-standing bureaucratic rivalries or labor-management issues, around the country there has been a wave of high school walkouts, sometime accompanied by street blockages, generally over the physical conditions in schools. In some cases the Education Ministry is alleging that moneys appropriated for school maintenance have been spent on other things by school principals, and in other cases it is alleged that money collected by school parents' associations has been stolen or wasted. The most noteworthy of all the walkouts was at the Colegio José Remón Cantera, at which money that the government says went to the school to fix broken bathroom fixtures and equip the language lab were not spent for those things, and as a result students and teachers went on strike for most of a week until the ministry sent the principal on vacation and undertook an audit.

Brothers Aquilino and Carlos De La Guardia, accused of fraud in the amount of at least $51 million in the collapse of the Grupo ADELAG business empire, have been granted bail in the amount of $5 million each. It's all theoretical --- they're openly living in the United States and it seems that neither the Bush nor Moscoso administrations are particularly concerned about it.

Presidential aide, Panama Canal Authority director and former Coca-Cola bottling franchise holder JJ Vallarino has been charged by prosecutors along with two other former directors of the failed Banco DISA in an $11 million fraud scheme. It is alleged by businessman Haralambos Tzanetatos, who was also a director at the bank, that $11 million of his was taken without his knowledge or consent to pay the bank's debts. Earlier this year Tzanetatos won a civil case about this same dispute. Banco DISA was founded on US government loan guarantees and Vallarino, once the moneybags behind the defunct Partido Laborista that was headed by ex- strongman Manuel Antonio Noriega's brother-in-law, switched allegiances just before the 1989 US invasion. Vallarino then founded the National Renovation Movement (MORENA), a right-wing party bearing the colors of Cerveza Soberana, which his brewery made. In 1999 MORENA lost its ballot status due to a poor showing at the polls. Last year Vallarino's brewing and bottling interests were sold to foreign investors. Banco DISA's collapse has resulted in prolonged and complicated legal wrangling, all while Vallarino complains that the institution was never insolvent and should not have been liquidated by the Banking Superintendent. It is now up to a magistrate to decide whether to bind Vallarino and former Banco DISA directors Rafael Endara Jiménez and Jorge Endara Paniza for trial.

Roberto Brenes, currently a member of the National Securities Commission, will once again be chief executive of Panama's stock and bond exchange, the Bolsa Nacional de Valores (BVP). He was chosen to replace Felipe Chapman, who had held the post since 1998. Brenes had held the post between 1991 and 1998. He has an MBA from Columbia University and has served in many corporate capacities, including as vice-president of the National Bank of Panama and advisor to the collapsed Banco DISA. The BVP, especially on the stock trading side of it, has a terrible reputation in the financial world because accurate information about its publicly traded securities is hard to come by and thus its stock prices bear little or no relation to the values of the companies whose shares are traded. Due to various tax incentives, the bond side of the BVP's business enjoys a somewhat better reputation as an institution to finance various corporate ventures.

The Interoceanic Regional Authority (ARI), has signed two contracts that would turn the former Fort Sherman into a college campus if anything comes of them. One of the deals is a $25 million project with a BACC Resources Inc. to install a cultural center with an amphitheater, a university campus and 18 villas. The other, with Colonial Tours, SA, is for a tourism school with a hotel at which students can learn their craft. Most of Sherman is already designated as an ecological and historical protected area, but despite that status it is again being used for war games, with US military advisors training Panamanian border police in jungle warfare techniques.

Because it has become embroiled in a land use dispute that has grown violent, the Los Quetzales hotel adjacent to Volcan Baru National Park has been closed by its owner, Carlos Alfaro. Alfaro, who opposes grazing and poaching within the park, blocked a gravel road that had been used for decades by people who have legally reside within the park since before its creation as well as more recent land invaders. The residents retaliated by poisoning the hotel's water supply, causing some 40 people, most of them North American tourists, to become ill. There have also been threats and other incidents of vandalism. The hotel's closure means the loss of 32 jobs.

A thousand pirate copies of Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez's fictionalized memoir "Vivir para contarla" and more than 4,000 copies of various other Latin American bestsellers were seized in an April 10 raid on a Panama City residence by police and prosecutors. Five Colombian men were arrested and face criminal copyright violation and illegal importation charges.

Arnulfista legislator and taxi syndicate leader Marcos González has proposed a law that would transfer control over RTVE, the unmbrella organization for the nation's public radio and TV networks, to an "autonomous" foundation whose directors would be appointed by President Moscoso before she leaves office next year. The move has been blasted by the University of Panama Academic Council and by many others who don't want to see the continuation of partisan Arnulfista-MOLIRENA control over the public educational media in the likely event that the current ruling coalition is ejected from power in next year's elections. González promises, however, that the same people who now run RTVE wouldn't necessarily be the ones that Mireya chooses to run Canal Once and Radio Nacional in the future.

The corporations that publish La Prensa on the one hand and La Critica and El Panama America on the other have moved to strengthen their domination of the print media by creating new tabloids. La Prensa's new publication, Mi Diario, is a graphically oriented "happy news" format. EPASA's offering is Dia al Dia, which has a similar graphic orientation but goes heavy on the explicit gore like its sister publication La Critica. The new papers are cheaper than the others (most dailies are 35¢, but Dia al Dia is 15¢ and Mi Diario a quarter), for the moment lack substantial advertising, and feature fluffy things about Latin American entertainment and sports figures but don't indulge in La Prensa's and El Panama America's adulation of Panama's white elite. Because television has largely priced itself out of the ad market, it seems that the new tabloids are mainly predicated on the notion that a lot of advertising money that went into TV ads in previous political campaigns will be spent on these new publications instead.

On April 4 police threw 10 families off of a seven-hectare plot of private land that they had invaded and upon which they built little shacks. The shanties were burned, but no arrests were made. This is the fourth time that this same plot of land has been taken over by would-be squatters.

On April 3 Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro called off the bidding process for a contract for private management of the Cerro Patacon landfill. The mayor's objection was that the companies that wanted the contract had not submitted sufficient technical data upon which the city could judge whether their proposals are reasonable. The privatization of solid waste management, in Panama but in other countries as well, often involves companies getting contracts with lowball bids and then cutting corners on services and sanitary standards. Navarro also noted that some of the proposals called for novel technologies that need to be studied in more detail before the city can decide whether they should be employed.

The Ministry of Public Works (MOP) is calling dibs on the right to grant permits to locate signs on public right-of-ways. A few years ago the Supreme Court held that the regulation and collection of fees for billboards is a strictly municipal prerogative, but since then the Arnulfistas have taken over the court. In March President Moscoso issued a decree transferring the power to regulate signs in the right-of- ways to the ministry. Panama City's municipal government is challenging the administration's claim and looking into its legal options. Basically the right to grant permits is the power to deny them and thus the ability to shake people and businesses down for under-the-table payments. In an election year, the power to grant or deny permits can also be used to limit the opposition's ability to publicize its messages.


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