news

Will this public park be replaced by a private restaurant and surrounding parking lots? Archive photo of Cerro Ancon National Park, overlooking Panama City, by Eric Jackson

Privatization of Cerro Ancon National Park challenged in court

by Eric Jackson

The project to grant a private concession to Inversiones Gaurare Telefericos SA over nearly eight hectares of Cerro Ancon National Park, for the purpose of building a tourist cable car to connect the top of Ancon Hill with the Amador Causeway and to build a restaurant at the hill's summit is now being challenged by two lawsuits, and by a rising chorus of criticism coming from two distinct directions. An environmentalist alliance calling itself the Committee for the Defense of Urban Forests and Public National Parks is challenging the project under the claim that the environmental impact statement approved by the National Environmental Authority (ANAM) was improperly allowed. A group of Ancon Hill residents is suing pursuant to a legal theory that because the area to be privatized is a national park and because a 2003 decree declared Ancon Hill to be a national heritage site, it would be unconstitutional to pass control over it to private hands.

As neither the environmentalists nor the neighbors have legal status, their complaints were filed with the national ombudsman's office (Defensor del Pueblo), which in turn has the juridical standing to bring the matters before the Supreme Court, before the administrative and constitutional benches respectively. There is uncertainty about this procedure, however, because the National Assembly is about to pick a new ombudsman or ombudswoman and that person may or may not be sympathetic with those who are challenging the project.

Ancon Hill is an important feature of one of the world's main bird migration flyways, home to several bands of monkeys and the habitat of two different species of deer. The cable car developers promise to plant 10 trees in some other place for every one that they cut down for their project, but ecologists note that this can in no way replace a destroyed or disrupted forest habitat. Among the environmentalist opponents of the project is Panama's wealthiest green organization, the National Association for the Conservation of Nature (ANCON), whose offices are in an old military building at Quarry Heights on Ancon Hill.

Ancon Hill has also been since the abolition of the old Canal Zone in October of 1979 a symbol of Panamanian sovereignty over the entire isthmus, a status celebrated in the poems of Amelia Denis de Icaza, who was instrumental in converting the wild areas of the hill into a national park, and physically symbolized by a huge Panamanian flag that flies over the summit.

The lawsuits filed by opponents of the project may not turn out to be the main legal challenges to the cable car project. Panama City Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro, a former director of ANCON, has expressed his opposition to the cable car concession over the national park. In order to build their project, Inversiones Gaurare Telefericos would need a number of city permits which the mayor could block. That, in turn, would force the developers to go to court and could stall construction for years.