A long-simmering battle between the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) and the Panama Primate Refuge and Sanctuary, which has operated on 17 islands in Gatun Lake for more than 20 years, has come to a head with a series of evictions and orders. The authority insists that the program, in which some 150 monkeys that have been held in captivity are when possible taught to survive in the wild and in other cases kept in a more humane, closer-to-natural environment, is “incompatible with canal operations.”
The argument about compatibility, in turn, has sparked debates about the ACP’s role in Panama and how well it performs it. Moreover, when one looks at the reasons that the ACP gives for incompatibility and eliminates the bureaucratic and frivolous ones, there remains a strong suggestion that the man behind the sanctuary’s demise is one Osama bin Laden.
The ACP had served Dr. Dennis Rasmussen, who runs the sanctuary, a 30-day notice to quit on June 21, and at the beginning of August began removing equipment from Isla Tigre and Isla Brujas. The authority also brought in the National Environmental Authority to move a group of spider monkeys from Isla Puma to Isla Adviento.
It is probable that a number of the monkeys in the sanctuary, those which have not fully adjusted to life in the wild, will die because of the ACP’s action, either of hunger now that human feeding has been eliminated or because they will be killed by other monkeys competing for food and territory.
Rasmussen’s work is sometimes controversial within the scientific community, first because primate research on animals that are in semi-captivity tends to be skewed by the interaction between people and monkeys, and second because some of the monkeys at the refuge are not native to the area and some of the islands where the sanctuary has operated --- former hilltops that became isolated when Gatun Lake was flooded in 1914 --- are too small for a natural monkey range. But Rasmussen argues that the research that has been conducted at the sanctuary has mostly not been about studying primates in the wild but about rehabilitating animals that have been stunted or otherwise harmed by captivity and studying how to to that. A lot of the sanctuary’s work is not scientific at all, but rather a humane response to the problem of people abandoning unwanted pet monkeys into wild areas in which they cannot survive.
The ACP cited potential pollution problems from latrines on the islands, possible erosion that could add to canal silting and various plans and papers that were not produced to their satisfaction. It has also in a back-handed way asserted complaints about the quality of Rasmussen’s work, for example by citing a Duke University professor to point out that Gatun Lake’s islands are not natural habitats for certain species of monkeys. These concerns appear to be contrived for mass consumption.
However, a source at the ACP also notes that the islands are close to the south entrance to the Gatun Locks and this is seen as a security problem. Seen in that light, the authority’s move against the sanctuary is consonant with a number of other measures taken to restrict recreational and other non-transit uses of the lake in the wake of the September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on the United States.
Many of the enhanced security measures taken by the ACP (under the advice of US military and industrial security experts) have not been publicized, but it is known that part of the canal’s defenses is an array of hundreds of video monitors coupled with rapid response teams to move in whenever anomalous activities are detected. That defense is far more effective when activities to be watched are kept to a minimum. From that perspective, the sanctuary is but one more potential cover for a terrorist attack on canal installations or transiting ships.
That doesn’t stop the criticism, however.
Rasmussen and his colleagues, of course, have pride and and a vested interest to defend. An institution does not trash more than two decades of work that has received international recognition without an argument, especially when the reasons asserted in the press appear to be specious.
However, the ACP’s inability to get along with the sanctuary is to others who have no connection with the program a sign of problems in the canal’s Panamanian administration. Former Panama Defense Forces General Rubén Darío Paredes, for example, in his weekly El Panama America column called the authority’s decision “indolent and drastic,” the reasons they gave for their action “puerile and inconsistent,” and the whole controversy an example of how the ACP has become a state within a state to the detriment of the Panamanian people. Paredes alleged that the authority is evicting the sanctuary because, although it denies having adopted a canal expansion plan, the islands used for the monkeys are slated to be dynamited and dredged into oblivion to widen the channel for post-Panamax ships. “After the monkeys, the farmers,” Paredes warned.
The sanctuary’s elimination is also one more incidence of the canal narrowing its focus to shipping alone. Once run by a many-headed US-government-owned conglomerate known as the Panama Canal Company, the canal no longer carries with it such assets as the commissaries, clubhouses, ports, schools, dairy and ice cream plant that its predecessor had. However, the ACP still retains some substantial housing, recreational facilities, valuable electric generating capacity and other assets. It is under pressure from competing private sector interests to divest itself of all profitable activities and assets other than those directly related to running the canal.
That narrowing of focus may come front and center in a national debate over canal expansion, because there’s a growing consensus among economic observers that the construction costs of a larger third set of locks and the facilities needed to provide the water to operate it probably can not be amortized by ship tolls alone. That, in turn, likely means that profits from the authority’s ancillary activities --- which the current administration is trying to eliminate --- would be necessary to the canal’s successful modernization.
Also in this section:
Panama Canal Authority evicts monkey sanctuary
South American bird count
