Most ads are interactive -- click on them to visit the folks who make The Panama News possible

news

Also in this section:
Caribbean leaders meet here
The Association of Caribbean States Declaration of Panama
Panamanians recruited for Iraq War
Habeas data lawsuit over San Carlos dam
Vallarino, Toro make 2009 presidential moves
Around the Americas
Panama News Briefs

Dam under construction near Guayabito. Photo by Eric Jackson

Habeas data suit about dam that may affect surfing spot

by Eric Jackson

Grettel Villalaz de Allen, who served as vice minister of public works in the Moscoso administration, has sued the National Environmental Authority (ANAM) over its refusal to hand over the environmental impact statement and other documents related to a dam that’s being built on the Rio Teta, in the Guayabito corregimiento of Panama Oeste’s San Carlos district.

The project, well along in construction, is theoretically a hydroelectric project by a company called Hidroelectrica San Carlos, SA, whose legal representative is Noel Riande. However, The Panama News has learned that the main purpose of the project is to provide water to a golf course community under construction by the Shahani brothers, while the purported electric generating part of the facility is badly built out of used material to the extent that it’s questionable whether there is any serious intent to produce power.

In her lawsuit, Villalaz de Allen alleges that the project may deprive the area around the mouth of the Rio Teta, a surfing spot on Playa Esmeralda, of the sand that directs and shapes the waves that make the place suitable for the sport.  Villalaz de Allen and her husband, a Panama Canal pilot, own a cottage along the Rio Teta below the dam. The suit also alleges that the river and beaches between Punta Barco and Rio Mar have been declared a tourism area and are thus legally protected.

The former vice minister orally requested the documents this past May, and later in June formally submitted a written request on June 11, but received no reply within the stipulated 30 days that ANAM had to answer. In addition to the environmental impact statement, she requested the document or contract by which the government granted the dam concession and information about if and how any public hearings were held about the project.

The law under which the lawsuit has been brought was passed during the Moscoso administration, but was rendered effectively useless by a regulation that required that a person had to have a direct and uniquely personal economic stake in the subject matter of the information sought to be able to maintain a habeas data action. But one of the first things that Martín Torrijos did upon assuming the presidency was to repeal Mireya Moscoso's regulations limiting the Transparency Law. However, many of the PRD and Partido Popular activists who got jobs with the Torrijos administration were formed in a political culture to which transparency is alien and this administration is despite declared policies usually pretty tight in its controls over the dissemination of information about the government.