Protesters await canal expansion plan

For many weeks now, a group of protesters from the Coordinador Campesino en Contra de los Embalses (CCCE, or Farmers Coodinator Against the Dams) have been camped out near the back entrance to the legislature's Palacio Justo Arosemena. An alliance of residents who stand to be flooded out of their homes and farms if the Western Watershed is dammed to create a new lake to provide the water needed to operate a third set of locks that would accomodate ships that are too large to fit through the present locks, the CCCE has been waging an often bitter campaign against the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) management, whose honesty they impugn.

The CCCE has become something of a cause celebre for the Panamanian left and has attracted the support of some important religious leaders and environmentalists. But the ACP has fought back with a persistent and pervasive public relations campaign, by a not very successful attempt to create a rival Western Watershed residents' organization, and by hiring former National Association for the Conservation of Nature (ANCON) leader Oscar Vallarino as part of the team to study the environmental impacts of a canal expansion. The dispute has occasionally become violent, with ACP weather and hydrology stations being vandalized and some tense standoffs between canal personnel and protesting farmers.

The ACP and Canal Affairs Minister Jerry Salazar have been making various statements to the Legislative Assembly and to the foreign press that would imply that a canal expansion plan has been formulated, but for the record the authority says that no such plan has been adopted. Most recently, Salazar told legislators that the plan will likely not involve a new lake to the west of the canal, but rather a system of reservoirs that would recycle water for re-use in the contemplated third locks.

The recycling idea raises a new question and adds urgency to the concerns of a different, but probably more powerful, group of canal expansion skeptics. Would water recycling bring salt water into Gatun Lake, making it brackish and creating a chain of ecological effects? And for those already concerned with the possibility that a canal expansion project would be too expensive to be worthwhile, there would be the additional question of the energy costs involved in pumping water from the reservoirs back into the locks.

Any canal expansion project would have to be approved in a referendum, and President-elect Martín Torrijos has expressed his reluctance to support any plan that displaces the 20,000 or so residents of the Western Watershed.

So far, however, the CCCE has not been reassured.

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Protest campers await Panama Canal modernization plan announcement