At about 4:30
p.m. on December 14 along the new branch of the Corredor Norte,
where the elevated roadway under construction cuts through the
San Miguelito neighborhood of Cerro Batea, at the place where it
crosses a stream and Calle Las Palmitas, a tropical cloudburst
was in progress. Just above the creek and the culvert through
which it flows under the road is also a low point in the coming
toll road's surface, from which the rainwater runs and cascades
into the neighborhood below. (The road near there comes as close
as 22 feet to people’s houses.) Félix Córdova
(14), Michael González (10), Eduardo Moreno (8) and at
least two other boys were playing under the cascade when the
rampart on the side of the raised highway collapsed, causing a
landslide that buried and killed Córdova, González
and Moreno.
The deaths and
their aftermath have played prominently in most of the local
media since the accident, with various political spins. In
addition to the facts and contexts that this report will touch,
the story has been even more prominent because young
Félix Córdova was a gifted young athlete who had
been on the 2002 national Little League team.
There are court
cases coming and political controversies underway in which all
things will be denied, and government documents that should be
part of the public discussion are being withheld, but
nevertheless the basic facts behind the incident have come out.
The stretch of the road in question was built some five months
before, with the work apparently accepted by inspectors from the
Ministry of Public Works (MOP). It seems that the job featured a
time-honored corner-cutting practice that is the bane of
Panamanian highways: the contractor cut back on the drainage
system. The plans called for a concrete gutter along the top of
the retaining wall, something that probably would have made the
cascade in which the boys had been playing more attractive to
youngsters due to a bigger and faster water flow, but from the
designer’s perspective was intended to keep water from
filtering into the elevated road’s subsoil. That gutter was
never installed, the water did filter into the fill dirt, the
soil on the roadway expanded and loosened and the brick wall
that was holding it back gave way.
The roadway also
fell below specifications by the substitution of materials
specified for the connectors to keep each row of the retaining
wall bricks rigid. This may or may not have played a role in the
accident.
Most flagrantly
of all the variances from the approved specifications, and by no
means an undiscussed issue beforehand, was the decision by MOP
and the Mexican-based PYCSA construction company, along with the
project’s public financiers, the Banco Nacional de Panama
and the Caja de Ahorros to skimp on the right-of way to avoid
paying off residents who would be affected by the project. The
original plan called for a 200-meter right-of way, but PYCSA and
the government cut that way back, to the point that they were
building within seven meters --- about 22 feet --- of some
houses, and nearly as close to a public school. The reduced
right of way, along with complaints about inadequate or delayed
compensation for those whose houses were included within the
narrower strip, became the grist of public disputes earlier this
year, including a September 1 roadblock protest for which 34
community and labor activists were jailed.
The protesters
said back then, and in pleas they made to the Legislative
Assembly last April and May, that the project was unsafe.
Minister of Public Works Eduardo Quirós repeatedly
assured that it was.
Immediately
after the landslide rescue crews from the SINAPROC disaster
relief unit moved in, working through the night in a vain effort
to uncover somebody alive. The area was cordoned off by police
for public safety and to assist rescue teams. Then the
politicians came around, and the area was cordoned off by
presidential guards, the said to prevent “outsiders”
from “taking advantage” of the situation. A crew from
the RCM news channel was hassled by PYCSA company employees.
However, that
strategy didn’t put a lid on the story, especially because
the same problems that caused the rampart to collapse on the
boys are clearly evident along other parts of the road, so area
residents and members of the SUNTRACS construction workers’
union took reporters and photojournalists who had been kept away
from the scene of the accident to show them other cracked and
out-of-plumb retaining walls.
Complicating the
matter from the time of the landslide were and are two more
political facts:
• Mireya
Moscoso has nominated Public Works Minister Quiróz to the
Panama Canal Authority board of directors; and
• The PYCSA
contract for the Corredor Norte was signed early in the
Pérez Balladares administration, with questions then
about their lack of experience with projects of the scaled
called for and their lack of financing.
The controversy
has delayed legislative approval of Quirós’s
nomination to the ACP board. On the assembly floor PRD deputies
argued that this latest tragedy is but another proof that
Quirós has been incompetent in his present post and
shouldn’t be promoted, while the Arnulfistas pointed out
that PYCSA got the contract from the PRD in the first place.
The double-edged
character of this tragedy as a partisan issue was highlighted on
RPC’s Debate Abierto morning talk show, in which the PRD-
Partido Popular alliance is pumped up, the Arnulfistas and their
allies are present in lesser numbers as the main foil and the
Endara campaign is almost entirely ignored. The show has become
the main forum for the increasingly unpopular Panamanian
political establishment, and true to form they closed ranks on
this matter. El Siglo publisher Ebrahim Asvat, a former National
Police chief who wants to be the Partido Popular vice-
presidential candidate on Martín Torrijos’s ticket,
suggested that fault might lie with the boys themselves rather
than PYCSA, because they shouldn’t have been playing where
they were. Aida de Batista, representing a Mireyista point of
view, suggested that the fault might not lie with PYCSA because
it was a problem with bad building materials.
However, Eduardo
Quirós and Mireya Moscoso were the ones who promoted the
affair into a full-fledged political controversy. Quirós
appointed five MOP engineers to conduct the official
investigation. Before that investigation began, Mireya Moscoso
declared that the Ministry of Public Works was not responsible
and that PYCSA would have to indemnify the families.
Mireyista
presidential candidate José Miguel Alemán
apparently had no problem with that --- he didn’t say
anything to the contrary, at least --- but front-runners
Martín Torrijos and Guillermo Endara, the latter more
bluntly, criticized the Moscoso administration’s
“conclusion first, then the investigation” pretense
and called for a truly independent probe. Dark horse candidate
Ricardo Martinelli also rejected the convoluted procedure. As
did a number of civic groups.
Within a couple
of days MOP issued its report via full-page newspaper ads, which
as expected blamed PYCSA and ignored the issue of MOP
inspections.
Meanwhile,
Quirós had ordered the suspension of work on the project,
the demolition of two more damaged retaining walls along its
route, and extension of the right of way within which all
buildings must be bought for fair compensation from 7 meters on
each side of the road to 15 meters. That change would mean the
buyout of more than 160 homeowners.
Despite
MOP’s quick and incomplete investigation, the Engineering
and Architecture Technical Council (Junta Técnica), which
has official status and includes representatives of the
designing and building professions, has called its own
investigation. The Junta Técnica has demanded copies of
all of MOP’s inspection documents.
Moreover, the
norm in Panamanian construction is that public inspection is not
really the front line in defending public safety, but rather the
inspectors for the banks that finance projects are the ones who
uphold the soundness of the structures in which their employers
are investing. In this case the banks were semi-autonomous
government institutions, and questions are being raised but as
yet without answers about Banco Nacional de Panama and Caja de
Ahorros inspections.
The public
financing issue may contain the seeds of a governmental share in
the legal responsibility to the families of the children who
died, apart from any consideration of MOP negligence. However,
in the first lawsuit on behalf of relatives only PYCSA was named
as a defendant.
PYCSA’s
dependence on the government to finance the completion of the
Corredor Norte also raises more fundamental questions about the
company itself and how it came to acquire and retain this
contract.
The Corredor
Norte has been behind schedule all along, with financing always
cited as the problem. The most crucial part of the project, a
toll road connecting the Corredor Norte with Colon, has been
abandoned by PYCSA and that has been a huge economic and
political issue in Colon. The Corredor Norte is only a few years
old, and the tolls and the ways and places in which they are
collected have had to be changed, which has left a number of
abandoned structures along the route. Commitments to the
Metropolitan Nature Park, though which the Corredor was built,
went unkept. At one point one of the existing Corredor’s
overpasses collapsed onto the road, apparently due to
PYCSA’s neglect to reinforce the foundations despite soil
conditions that called for such measures. There have been
multiple points during both the Pérez Balladares and
Moscoso administrations when the government could have
conveniently made reference to the terms of PYCSA’s
concession and declared the company in default, leaving the
Mexican company with what it had already built and taking the
rest of the project back for some other disposition.
So why the
public financing?
In the
Pérez Balladares administration before ground was broken,
private banks tended to look at PYCSA and its relatively small-
time experience back in Mexico and pass up the investment
opportunity. After part of the Corredor Norte was open, it
became apparent that many commuters whom PYCSA had presumed
would start using the road either could not or would not pay the
tolls. The bad market forecast gave the private banks another
reason not to bet on PYCSA.
And then the US
Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, dealing with the
scandalous collapse of Miami’s Hamilton Bank, raised some
questions about PYCSA’s owner, Máximo Haddad. In
January of 2002, American banking authorities stepped in to take
over that bank, which was headed by Eduardo Masferrer, a man of
Cuban-American origins who became a naturalized Panamanian
citizen in October of 2001. The OCC ordered the bank to cease
making loans to 33 persons or companies deemed to be suspect.
The ban that received the most attention here was about dealings
with Panama’s Consul General in Miami, Manuel Salerno
Cohen, who was a signer or owner of 26 different accounts at
Hamilton Bank. But also named in the OCC’s ban was
Máximo Haddad, who, through two companies called
Perpetual International Holdings and Alderly Management, had
obtained some $25.6 million in questioned loans and electronic
transfers from Hamilton Bank.
So with his and
PYCSA’s credit rating questioned not only by the private
banking sector but also the US Office of the Comptroller of the
Currency, Haddad could only turn to the Panamanian government
for financing of this eastern branch of the Corredor Norte. The
Moscoso administration had ample good excuses if it had wanted
to deny him, but it waived these, lent him the money, and went
along with a number of money-saving deviations from the
specifications, beginning with the narrowing of the right-of-
way.
At the moment,
the demand for an investigation that goes beyond PYCSA’s
acts and omissions is coming mainly from residents along the new
Corredor Norte route and the labor movement. However, the Junta
Técnica wants to look at the inspections, and general
elections to take place in four months’ time could make the
entire history of the Panamanian government’s relationship
with PYCSA a campaign issue.
Also in this
section:
Panama News
Briefs
Fatal Corredor Norte collapse
causes political consequences
On the Campaign
Trail
