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Also in this section:
San Carlos city council hears arguments about dams
University scandal deepens, rector lashes out at Bernal
Gas price protests
The city and the cigarette lobby
Panama News Briefs
 

Protests over gas prices

photos and story by Eric Jackson

Panama City has been the scene of many protests about the high prices of gasoline of late. Although the market price of gas has come down a bit from the highs of $3.40 or more per gallon of a few weeks ago, a temporary lifting of at the pump fuel taxes that the government had earlier decreed to stave off bus and taxi strikes is expiring. With taxes back on, a gallon of gas may cost $4 or more and the bus and taxi drivers haven't had any fare increases.

Thus we have seen a number of protests, most of them peaceful. As in bumper to bumper protest motorcades of metro area bus drivers, who have the extra added grievance of the Torrijos administration's plan to take most of them off of the road within a couple of years. As in blockages of key Panama City thoroughfares by taxi drivers, which have prompted quick arrests.

And on October 6, in support of taxi drivers blocking the streets, the University of Panama radicals predictably sallied forth to block the Transistmica and other streets adjacent to the central campus. But this was the first test for the new National Police director, Rolando Mirones (himself a University of Panama grad) to demonstrate his intolerance for this sort of activity. The masked students were quickly chased back onto campus with tear gas and rubber shotgun pellets and there followed several hours of stones and at least one molotov cocktails being thrown from inside the university fence and various projectiles being fired back from outside the fence.

The following day there were some more cabbie protests and the high school students at the Instituto Nacional took their turn doing battle with riot police, over the same grievance. The photos on this page are all from the confrontations around the University of Panama on October 6.