Martín appoints his first three cabinet members

President-elect Martín Torrijos has named the first three members of his cabinet. Ubaldino Real Solís has been tapped for the Ministry of the Presidency, while Alejandro Ferrer will head the Ministry of Commerce and Industry and current legislator Laurentino Cortizo will take over the Ministry of Agricultural Development.

Real, like Torrijos, is an Aggie. In fact, three times over. The incoming minister of the presidency has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in industrial engineering from Texas A&M, and also an MBA from the same school. His work experience has been in the private sector, most notably heading mineral prospecting efforts in Colon province for Perforaciones Tecnicas y Desarrollo Minero, SA. He has also worked at KPMG Peat Marwick and IBM. He worked on Torrijos’s unsuccessful 1999 presidential campaign and was the 2004 Torrijos campaign treasurer.

Laurentino Cortizo Cohen, a legislator elected on the Solidaridad slate who did not seek re-election this year, has represented Colon’s coastal circuit 3-2 for the past decade and was one of Torrijos’s running mates in 1999. A cattle rancher, he also is one of the owners of the Panablock building materials company. He has a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Norwich University and a doctorate from the University of Texas. In 1985 he served as the Noriega regime’s delegate on the international commission that studied alternatives for modernizing the Panama Canal. He was the president of the Legislative Assembly for the 2000-2001 term.

Ferrer is an attorney in the law firm of Alemán, Galindo, Cordero & Lee. He has his bachelor’s degree in political science and law from Panama’s Universidad Santa Maria la Antigua, and his doctorate in law from the University of Michigan. Starting his political life as a member of MOLIRENA’s youth group, he served in both the Endara and Pérez Balladares administrations, variously as Panama’s representative in the GATT talks and before the World Trade Organization, as the commercial attache in the Panamanian Embassy in Washington, a member of a presidential commission that studied money laundering, the vice-minister of foreign relations and as an alternate judge. He is Torrijos’s observer at the free trade talks with the United States.

Real is something of an unknown, and Cortizo’s name came up in the CEMIS controversy because he headed the legislative committee through which the disputed contract passed. (There were never any specific, let alone corroborated, allegations of wrongdoing on Cortizo’s part in that affair, but on the other hand the Public Ministry, Legislative Assembly and Supreme Court combined to effectively block any meaningful investigation of the matter.)

However, the general public reaction to the next administration’s first batch of appointees has been generally positive as to the men’s qualifications to do their jobs.

Beyond that, it is expected that they will carry out business-oriented pro-globalization policies and Panamanians have their ideological differences about whether that’s a good or bad thing.

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Torrijos names three cabinet ministers