Upheavals over road project

The president’s road through the Volcan Baru National Park has run into some severe legal and political detours that have prevented construction work in the park. It seems from several indicators, however, that the unpopular Boquete - Cerro Punta road project is not definitively canceled just yet.

On January 19, with environmentalists criticizing the National Environmental Authority (ANAM) for too-casual perusal of the environmental impact study for the road, which was presented by DAF Consulting, SA, which was hired by the Constructora Urbana SA (CUSA) construction firm, it was leaked to the press that the authority had rejected the study because those who compiled it were judged unqualified.

ANAM director Ricardo Anguizola had been faced with a difficult set of options. Had he allowed the environmental permit process to proceed but played procedure by the book, he would have had to call for a public hearing on the plan and any such meeting held with proper public notice having been given would likely turn into the biggest public gathering of an election campaign season, one that would embarrass the president. Had he approved the study without having held the requisite public hearing, he might have pleased his boss but at the end of this soon-to-end administration he would have a lasting odious reputation among certain sectors of the public. He could have just done his job as best he saw fit.

For the reason he cited and maybe others, Anguizola rejected the study. A few days later the Ministry of Public Works (MOP) said it wouldn’t appeal. The matter was closed, the president said.

The National Association for the Conservation of Nature (ANCON) reacted cautiously at a January 28 press conference. Detailing the group’s work in opposition to the road, ANCON executive director Lider Sucre claimed that the environmental movement had mobilized overwhelming public opposition to the project. He called for the definitive end of plans to build a road along the North Route through the park and for an immediate commitment to a less destructive South Route from one side of the dormant volcano to the other, so as to take care of the area’s important transportation needs and remove future temptations to build a road through the park.

“Panamanians do believe that it’s important to protect the park,” Sucre opined, adding that “it’s not only a subject about which the people have an opinion, but about which they want their opinion heard.” Expressing hope that the Moscoso administration would call it quits on the road through the park, Sucre vowed to continue the group’s legal challenge to a cabinet resolution excepting the roadway from the park’s legal protections “so that it won’t be easy to attack the park in the future.”

Meanwhile, CUSA work crews were still at both the Boquete and Cerro Punta ends of the projected road. Activists complained that DAF Consulting had toppled trees within the park in order to do its study. And a few days after MOP seemingly threw in the towel, First Vice-President Arturo Vallarino said at the inauguration of the Candelaria Fair in Bugaba district that he didn’t think the road project was canceled, that the environmental impact statement would be amended.

Then the president’s friends on the Supreme Court weighed in, with Winston Spadafora and the high court’s Administrative Bench throwing out a suit brought by Environmental Prosecutor Giovani Olmos lacks standing to challenge a cabinet decree excepting the route of the proposed road through the park from the law creating the park. (ANCON’s lawsuit making the same argument is still pending before the courts, and the procedural grounds invoked against the prosecutor’s suit won’t apply to the environmental group.)

Meanwhile Mireya sent Anguizola on a six-month vacation. The ANAM director and several top aides cut most of the pretense by submitting their resignations on February 2.

That left ANAM sub-director Gonzalo Menéndez --- who at one time was a contributor to The Panama News --- in charge of the authority, and almost immediately members of the alliance against the road alleged that Menéndez was under pressure to get an environmental impact statement approved within 30 days.

But just as quickly the matter was taken off of Menéndez’s desk by the February 4 appointment of marine biologist Carlos Arrellano Lennox as ANAM’s new director. Arrellano Lennox is keeping a low public profile, avoiding contact with the press and having nothing to say in public about the road.

Lider Sucre, however, is making the argument that since the first environmental impact statement was rejected due to its makers’ lack of qualifications, none of the data upon which that document was based can be accepted as valid and the study process --- which would ordinarily take the better part of a year --- would have to start from scratch at once.

The next move is up to Mireya. If she decides to press ahead with the road project before the election, it will surely detract from José Miguel Alemán’s already forlorn election hopes. If she decides to jam the project through in the lame duck period between the election and the inauguration, she might not be able to get the road built before she leaves office and it almost certainly won’t be completed if she leaves office with it unfinished.

For more on this controversy over the Boquete - Cerro Punta road project, see our Outdoors section.

Also in this section:
Panama news briefs
ANAM director rejects environmental study for Mireya's road, steps down
Huge crowd for Alemán rally
Torrijos fires up the campaign workers
Otto Reich warns of corruption's consequences
On the campaign trail
All of the candidates have been nominated

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Environmental study for road rejected, Anguizola out as ANAM director

Environmental study for road rejected,
Anguizola out as ANAM director