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Panama News Briefs
 

San Carlos city council hears concerns about dam project

by Eric Jackson

On September 30 the mayor and representantes of San Carlos heard a small group of local citizens and property owners express their concerns about a dam project now under construction on the Rio Teta in the corregimiento of Guayabito, and about phase two of the dam developer’s plan, which would divert the water from the Rio Mata Ahogado.

Theoretically, the dam is for a small hydroelectric project that would generate less than 1.5 megawatts of power, and thus under a law passed during the Pérez Balladares administration would be exempt from most environmental regulations, including the need for an environmental impact study and public hearings. However, the construction site covers some four kilometers and the dam would be much larger than what’s needed to generate such a relatively small amount of power. Also, the pipe that theoretically leads to what is said to be the site of a generating station is made of used materials and literally falling apart at the seams.

Meanwhile The Panama News has learned that the dam concessionaire, Hidroelectrica San Carlos SA, has an arrangement by which the dam would supply water for a golf course around which the Vista Mar residential development is being built just east of the town of San Carlos. Under the law, a dam built for the purpose of watering a golf course would be subject to the regulations of the National Environmental Authority (ANAM), which mean that an environmental impact study would have to be done, public hearings would have to be held and ANAM could reject the project if it found the dam’s effects too destructive.

Two of the first people to question the project are Panama Canal pilot Douglas Allen and his wife, former Vice-Minister of Public Works Grettel Villalaz de Allen. The couple owns land along the Rio Teta well below the dam, and Captain Allen has been surfing on the point near the mouth of the river since he was a teenager. After having been stonewalled when requesting information from ANAM, attorney Villalaz de Allen filed a habeas data lawsuit and began to dislodge information from the government. One of the documents that she has obtained outlines a phase two of the project, which would divert the water from another river, the Rio Mata Ahogado, for Hidroelectrica San Carlos’s private use.

That latter detail adds a new dimension to the controversy, because the town of San Carlos takes its drinking water from the Rio Mata Ahogado.

Law student and San Carlos resident Roy Navarro addressed the city council, charging that a project of transcendental importance to the community was being carried out without the public being informed about it. “If, in the dry season, we already have a shortage of water,” Navarro argued, the project is “going to harm tourism.” He asked the city to appoint a committee to investigate the situation. “These rivers are this community’s legacy,” he maintained.

Grettel Villalaz de Allen told the council of the problems that she encountered obtaining information about the dam project, and maintained that because it turns out that the project is not located where the public filings indicated that it would be and because the construction site encompasses such a large area, the exceptions to environmental laws for small hydroelectric projects don’t apply.

The local politicians’ public reactions were mixed and generally cautious.

Mayor Aníbal López noted that “this project is not new” and that its construction is already some 25 percent complete. Benjamín Herrera, the aide to the city council, argued that the project is in the community interest and that hydrologists and biologists can’t show that it will cause any damage. “The can sue if they will be prejudiced,” he concluded.

But El Espino representante Antonio Pope found the prospect of water being diverted from the Rio Mata Ahogado particularly worrisome because it’s the town’s water supply, and complained that “we, as a municipality, were never taken into account. He and several of his colleagues claimed that they had not been informed about the full scope and implications of the project.

In a possibly related development, several representantes and sources in the community told The Panama News that the project that needs water from the project has recently undergone a change in ownership. Vista Mar had been under construction for quite some time by a consortium that included the Shahani brothers. However, we are told that the Shahanis have recently sold their interest in the project to an American investor. The withdrawal of the politically connected developers is fuel for speculations of various sorts.

This controversial project is also fuel for gossip about 2009 presidential politics. One common supposition is that there will be a contest for that year’s PRD presidential nomination between Panama City’s Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro and Housing Minister Balbina Herrera. According to various versions, Herrera is quietly building a power base among wealthy developers. Meanwhile, Navarro, who came to public prominence as an environmental activist, has questioned the way that ANAM’s jurisdiction has been circumvented in this instance. In a previous dispute, the Torrijos administration supported the construction of a residential subdivision on a forested part of the former Fort Clayton through which the historic Las Cruces Trail passes, while Navarro opposed the project. That development has been at least temporarily halted by order of the Supreme Court. Navarro comes from a wealthy family --- the Tropigas people --- but although she has done well for herself in a succession of public offices Herrera isn’t independently wealthy and would need rich backers to wage a viable presidential campaign. Thus, so it is said, the money politics behind an emerging environmentalists versus developers showdown within the PRD.