Call them too lax or too strict on environmental issues if you please, but either way the governors of Bocas del Toro and Chiriqui are in trouble about it.

On the Atlantic side, Bocas del Toro Governor Edgar Benavides has been ordered ousted from his post and jailed for one year for exceeding his authority. The details of his crime were that he ordered a halt to the cutting of some mangroves around the Play Bluff tourist development project on Isla Colon. Benavides says that not only were his accusers devastating the local environment, but they didn’t even have proper title to the land they were clearing. The court found otherwise, but Benavides has appealed the conviction and President Moscoso, who appoints and can remove governors, has left him on his job.

Who has truth and justice on their side? Possibly we shall see. In the wide universe of Panamanian government corruption, there sometimes exist environmental permits that are corruptly or foolishly granted to developers who shouldn’t get them, and then there are some public officials who cite or create whatever reason that’s handy to thwart developers until they make the explicitly or tacitly demanded payoffs. Then, with or without corrupt underlying motives, there are turf battles between officials from different parts of the government. Sometimes the courts that mediate such disputes have been corrupted by bribery, and sometimes they give in to political pressures or just make mistakes. If he loses at the end of the legal process, Governor Benavides could still end up a political winner --- going to jail to protect the mangroves is not necessarily a sin in the eyes of many voters.

On the other side of the Continental Divide, Chiriqui Governor Miguel Fanovich, already portrayed by environmentalists as Public Enemy Number Two (behind Mireya Moscoso) of the national park system for supporting a road through the Volcan Baru National Park, is caught up in a poaching scandal.

It began when the National Environmental Authority apprehended a group of men who were hunting in La Amistad International Park, which straddles the Panama-Costa Rica border. They showed ANAM a permit bearing Fanovich’s signature, purporting to allow them to hunt in the park. Hunting is strictly forbidden in the park, which is home to a lot of deer, game birds, wild pigs and tasty jungle rodents.

All but one of the eight men who had Fanovich’s blessing to hunt in the protected wilderness area were foreigners. The governor had declared them “honored guests” of the province, in order to promote closer ties between Panama and Spain.

The story broke in La Prensa, which these days has a ideological propensity to say unflattering things about Arnulfista public officials like Fanovich. Low blow, cried the governor. “I didn’t give them any permit to hunt. The document was altered,” he pleaded.

Hmmm --- the governor officially honors the sort of people who alter public documents and poach in national parks? That would seem to be both a political embarrassment and a matter for the police.

Fanovich, however, did not file a complaint with the police. He took off for a vacation in Cuba with the obvious questions unanswered.

When he gets back, environmentalists who were already after his scalp over the Boquete to Cerro Punta road project are unlikely to let Fanovich put the matter behind him.





Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
Chiriqui, Bocas governors in trouble
Tougher US immigration laws

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