Fresh start in the free trade talks?

In what may have been a convenient intervention by Mother Nature, the fourth round of free trade trade talks between the United States and Panama, scheduled to last several days in Tampa, were cut short by a hurricane. That saved both sides the potential embarrassment of an agreement linked in the public mind with the discredited persona of one Mireya Moscoso Rodríguez.

Mireya didn't get a deal to jam through before she left, and though she left only $300 in the account to finance Panama's participation in the talks for the rest of this year, rest assured that the negotiatios will proceed more or less on schedule under the new government. For one thing, if they don't the "fast track" authorization granted by the US Congress to the Bush administration will expire in January and the talks may go back to square one for that reason. It's not particularly safe to predict the results of the American elections, and Bush would like to have his ducks in a row to reach an agreement and push it through a lame duck legislative process before whatever changes may be coming down next January 21 in Washington.

As these talks started earlier this year, the Panamanian elections were much more predictable. Torrijos had a big lead, Endara seemed to have an outside chance, but everyone knew that the Mireyistas would be humiliated at the polls. Once the elections were over, the Torrijistas had observers at the talks and the Americans well knew that it was with them, rather than with Mireya's people, that an acceptable bargain must be struck.

But these talks have all along been held in secret, with various leaks, nuances and vague public declarations taking the place of genuine information. Panama's economic future may be on the line, but the rules of this game prohibit transparency. Economic integration on the US model is not like the European Union --- there are no democratic features to it, so the need for sufficient information to hold a proper public debate is superfluous. Trying to follow the free trade negotiating process is thus a lot like it was for the old China Watchers, who between 1949 and Chairman Mao's opening to the west in the 1970s tried to fathom what was happening in the Middle Kingdom from scraps of information that reached their Hong Kong listening post, or for outsiders to figure out the dynamics of a papal election before the cardinals send up a white smoke signal.

Still, there is some information out there, and there are moves outside the talks which on their faces would seem to inherently affect the negotiation process.

One of these, as The Panama News has noted before, is Martín Torrijos's stated desire for a closer relationship with MERCOSUR, the South American free trade area dominated by Brazil and Argentina. The governments of those countries have a far different concept of a Free Trade Area of the Americas than what Washington has in mind, and that will be the case whichever party wins the US elections in November. With the probability of a shift to the left in the upcoming Uruguayan elections, the differences between the NAFTA and MERCOSUR notions of economic integration are likely to widen.

Then there is a special trip to Washington, set for September 7 through 9, by the new government's free trade negotiating team for a meeting with the US Trade Representative. The fifth round of talks is set to take place here in October, and the Americans knew all along that administrations would change. So why the need for this interim mini-round of talks?

It would be most reasonable to surmise that the government of Panama has something new to say to the United States, or possibly vice-versa. But of course, the Torrijos team has been present at all the discussions since May 2, so its inclinations upon assumption of power shouldn't be any big mystery to the Americans.

Whether it's a deal breaker to put off the process until the US elections are decided or an attempt to surmount a few specific obstacles in order to reach an agreement before Americans go to the polls, we shall see. However, it does seem that the change of government here is making a difference in the free trade negotiations.

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