business

On January 15 the board of directors of the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) approved in principle a management proposal to raise the fees for tugboat and linehandling services for vessels transiting the Panama Canal. The new fee schedule will be published sometime about the middle of this year. The last increase in these fees was in July of 2003, to the tune of 4.5 percent, while in 2002 it was raised 8 percent.

Servicios de Monitoreo y Control de Inversion Publicitaria, SA (CIP) has filed a $20 million lawsuit against the ad agencies’ industry group, the Panamanian Association of Publicity Agencies (APAP). Basically APAP hired another company to measure the audiences that various ads reach. The suit alleges monopolistic practices, but APAP alleges that there is only room for one company that measures the number of people that an ad reaches. It is not a crime to lie about broadcast audiences or newspaper readerships, and it is the usual practice of Panama’s ad agencies to funnel advertising to specific media without regard to a client’s needs and without informing the client of conflicts of interest that the agency has. We have nothing like the Nielsen ratings or Arbitron, which measure North American television and radio audiences respectively and which are widely accepted as objective judges of the sizes of audiences that various broadcasters reach.

The Panamanian Society of Engineers and Architects (SPIA) has taken exception to the Ministry of Public Works (MOP) report that the collapse of a retaining wall on an elevated roadway that killed three boys in San Miguelito was the result of hydrostatic pressure. SPIA argued that the water accumulated at the base of the roadway, but that it was the top that collapsed, and opined that the 18 percent water saturation of the soil that MOP alleged would have been insufficient to cause the collapse. The MOP report, of course, “exonerated” the ministry inspectors who approved the retaining wall that collapsed.

People who drove to the Interior over the long Day of the Martyrs holiday weekend either ran a slalom race or were jolted --- or both --- because of the many potholes on the Pan-American Highway, this country’s principal road. The poor driving conditions became a favorite subject for editorial cartoonists and opposition politicians. One version of the spin is that the Moscoso administration is more interested in cutting ribbons on new road projects than maintaining the roads we already have. The opposite spin is that we had particularly heavy rains at the peak of rainy season in November and early December and that it was the responsible thing to do to wait until the holidays were over and dry season was underway in order to do proper repairs that will last.

On January 6 four leaders of Colon’s Reaccion Tres protest movement were hauled off to jail after they and their followers set up a burning tire road blockade on the Trans-Isthmian Highway near the Policlinica Hugo Spadafora (old Coco Solo Hospital). The group was demanding emergency measures to reduce the economically depressed province’s unemployment, better maintenance of the highway and the conversion of all Colon city into a duty-free port, a measure that was passed into law in the early 1990s but never put into effect.

On January 15 four protesters were arrested when residents of the Colon community of Gatuncillo blocked traffic on the Trans-Isthmian Highway to protest the poor state of repair of that road and to demand the paving of side streets in their community. The blockage lasted about a half-hour, until the riot police arrived and took two men and two women who were leading the protest away.

Eleven members of the Nueva Nacion unemployed organization were arrested on January 12 for pulling down a fence that the Panama Ports Company installed along the old Panama Railroad tracks across from the old site of the Cristobal train station. Colon Mayor Matilde Rosales de Ardines, meanwhile, said that the company, the local subsidiary of Hong Kong based Hutchison Whampoa, did not have a permit to erect the fence and would be fined for putting it up. Critics of the fence, which was not on Panama Ports property, said that it makes Colon look like a concentration camp and signals the exclusion of the poor from public streets, but Colon provincial governor Gassan Salama defended it as a security measure to protect the port and Cristobal’s shipping agencies.