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“Nobody’s going to leave their lands, nobody’s going to threaten and don’t be left confused, because there are people who live off of confusion,” President Torrijos told residents of the Panama Canal’s Western Watershed at a February 9 ceremony in which he handed out 300 land titles to Coclesito farmers who previously held their properties by squatters’ rights. “Nobody’s going to violate your rights.” Denouncing “those who live by the lie and the deception,” the president blasted the movement among watershed farmers who oppose the expansion of the Panama Canal principally because they fear that they will lose their land.

Those fears were created by a 1999 law that defines the canal’s Western Watershed, contemplating the condemnation of lands and other properties in northern Cocle and western Colon provinces so that they may be flooded to create a new lake to provide water for the Panama Canal. But although neither the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) nor the president have shown the plan to expand the canal, they say that the use of new water-saving retention tanks at the sides of a new, larger third set of locks will obviate the need for a new lake and thus Western Watershed farmers will not be run off their lands.

Meanwhile on February 14, a small but notable group of intellectuals led by constitutional scholar Humberto Ricord, CPA Luis Chen González, sociologist Marco A. Gandásegui hijo, Dídimo Sierra and economist Roberto N. Méndez summoned reporters to the Las Tinajas restaurant in Panama City to announce their opposition to the emerging canal expansion plan for an entirely different set of reasons.

“If people understood, they’d reject it,” Ricord said of the plan. Panama “should use the canal to become a First World country, not the last,” he argued.

The opponents’ central argument is that the Torrijos administration has no national development plan and that a canal expansion mega-project would be a costly boondoggle that would saddle the Panamanian taxpayers with an impossible debt and only serve the interests of a few narrow economic sectors, most of them foreign shipping and construction companies.

“They never studied the demand for and production of post-Panamax ships,” Sierra asserted. “They have never supported their project with figures.” Méndez predicted, mainly on the basis of the ACP’s own figures, he said, “a negative bottom line for the country.”

Criticizing the ACP for being “a world apart” from Panama and for “irregularities, above all financially,” Chen who leads the nation’s professional organization of Certified Public Accountants, stated his bottom line: “We insist that the canal expansion must be a national project,” and to the extent that foreign assistance of any sort is required, that be “multipolar” rather than “bipolar.”

Polls about public support for a canal expansion project have always shown most Panamanians in favor, but support has risen and fallen along with President Torrijos's popularity. The most unpopular thing about the president at the moment is his support for a free trade agreement with the United States and Gandásegui made a connection between US demands in ongoing free trade talks and the canal expansion: “The Canal Neutrality Treaty makes the canal open to contractors of all nations, and a treaty that gives the US priority violates this.”

(In a press conference two days later, however, the US ambassador to Panama, William A. Eaton, disputed this characterization of US free trade aims. “We don't want preferential treatment for the United States,” he said. “We want equal treatment.”)

“We are not here to say ‘no to expansion,’” Sierra explained, “but we do say that it must be done within the context of a national expansion plan.”

Meanwhile at the Panama Canal Authority’s popular dry season cultural events, held on the Administration Building steps, the crowds in attendance have been shown videos that make the argument that it’s unheard of for any industrial corporation in the world to go 100 years without modernizing its facilities. Whether that’s an accurate depiction of the canal’s business history, and whether that’s the spending of public funds for a propaganda campaign aimed at an upcoming canal expansion referendum, are matters about which reasonable people might differ.

The ACP has for some time now been going around to selected groups, mainly of businesspeople thought supportive of the idea of building a third, larger set of locks, and showing them drawings of a design for the new locks. These drawings have leaked into some of the daily newspapers. But no complete plan has been revealed to the public. The biggest unknown is the set of financial assumptions upon which the project would be based. The latest word is that a plan will be unveiled sometime in March.

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