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Misses March deadline to reveal canal expansion plan, won't talk to skeptics

Torrijos begins canal expansion campaign without a proposal
by Eric Jackson, in part from other media

The referendum campaign on a canal expansion project has been underway for years, with millions already spent to promote a "yes" vote notwithstanding how the Electoral Tribunal may characterize it. Yet President Torrijos has missed the deadline he set for himself to unveil the plan in March.

True, the president met on March 29 with CONATO labor leaders (who are for the most part politically aligned with the PRD) and with the National Council of Private Enterprise (CoNEP) to, as his website put it, "reiterate and guarantee that the subjects that concern the canal and, in particular, the widening of the interoceanic waterway, will be treated as a state matter and with transparency." But he didn't publish the plan.

Two days later, Torrijos announced on his website that he had received the nation's Catholic bishops at the Palacio de las Garzas "to make a presentation related to the project of the widening of the Panama Canal." Again, no plan was revealed to the public.

March having thus come and gone without any specific public announcement, Torrijos met on April 3 with the board of directors of the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) "to know the final details about the widening of the canal," as the presidential website put it. "The Presidencia confirmed that a new meeting with the board of directors had been agreed upon with the aim of finishing the proposal to be presented so that the citizenry, after a wide publication, can make a decision in a national referendum."

Meanwhile in an April 4 story on the BBC website, the cost figure that the government and ACP have been so scrupulously avoiding was presented by way of the International Monetary Fund --- which could only have obtained its information from the ACP --- as around $7.5 billion. In that story Economy and Finance Minister Ricaurte Vásquez said that part of the cost will be raised by increased ship tolls, and then went on to implicitly admit that the rest of the money would have to be borrowed, pointing out that the ACP has a good credit rating. (That would be unlike the Panamanian government in general, which has an upwardly spiraling record debt that was estimated at some $10.5 billion, or around 67 percent of the nation's Gross Domestic Product, at the end of last year.)

Three days later, at the annual CADE business summit put on by the Panamanian Business Executives Association (APEDE), Torrijos, still not having revealed the specifics of what he proposes, went into political attack mode. He called on the nation's political parties, most of which are not part of the growing opposition to a canal expansion project and would moreover have a certain interest in seeing the Torrijos administration embarrassed by a referendum defeat, to serve as "interlocutors for society" in an a "debate" apparently restricted to various experts and members of a political class that's discredited in the eyes of most Panamanians. As to those with whom the president refuses to talk, he said that it's "important to lead the processes of transformation and avoid a sterile confrontation that wastes society's time and that permits some groups to advance agendas that delegitimize democratic institutionality."

One of those groups that he implicitly blasted, the National Front to Defend Economic and Social Rights (FRENADESO), meanwhile charged that it had obtained a copy of an August 12, 2004 "Confidential Document of the Panama Canal Authority" in which the plans that are still being withheld from the public were adopted. "Why hasn't the ACP let the citizens know of its canal widening plan, if it's a decision already made?" the coalition of militant labor unions and leftist groups asked.

Opposition from FRENADESO has long been expected, but the big problem for Torrijos will be trying to smear some of his and the ACP's other prominent critics with the same broad brush. Banker Jorge Illueca is, after all, a member in good standing of the PRD and served as president of Panama under the military regime that Martín Torrijos's father headed. In an April 3 column in El Panama America, Illueca taunted the ACP for missing its self-set deadline for publishing the plan, noted that last year the government was claiming that the project could be entirely financed through ship tolls but now admits otherwise, and raised the suspicion that the plan would finally be unveiled during Holy Week, when people tend to be at the beach and not paying attention to the news.

Another critic whom the administration would have difficulty characterizing as a radical is Kevin Harrington Arango, who served as a aide to the old Ministry of Canal Affairs and before that as a Panamanian diplomat in London. "It's regrettable that the Canal Authority allots millions for clearly partial objectives, which have nothing to do with objectively informing the Panamanian citizen," he wrote in a column that appears in the Spanish-language opinion section of this issue of The Panama News. Harrington dismissed the ACP's publicity maneuvers as crass propaganda that comes across "as if they were selling a mass consumption item like Coca-Cola."

So far in the Torrijos administration, every major economic policy initiative has been widely but shallowly publicized in advance, been released to the public well after the promised date, generated immediate public indignation when the details were announced, been withdrawn for changes when errors were pointed out and has ultimately resulted in a drop in the president's popularity. Since the beginning of the current administration polls have shown strong public support for the concept of expanding the canal by building a larger third set of locks, but this support has waxed or waned in tandem with Martín Torrijos's personal popularity.

These dynamics, and the usual tendency of Panamanian voters to take any referendum as a chance to show their satisfaction or more usually disappointment with the administration in office at the moment, are well known to the president and his entourage and are therefore likely to affect other matters.

For example, without any draft treaty to show the public because negotiations have so far not been concluded, the Panamanian people are fairly evenly divided on the question of a free trade agreement with the United States, with a small plurality favoring it in principle. But if farmers have already been alienated from the government by the terms that are known so far, other sectors will find causes for complaint if a comprehensive agreement based on the NAFTA and CAFTA model is announced. The president's popularity is likely to fall in the wake of any such treaty being signed. However, if a free trade deal with the United States is not closed almost immediately, it would get to a US Congress that's gearing up for a ferocious set of mid-term elections which current polls and the trajectories of several ongoing scandals suggest may go badly for the incumbent Republicans, and almost surely become a dead letter until after November. Thus it seems likely that either the free trade talks will become an at least temporary casualty of the canal expansion debate, or the proposal that the president and ACP want to see passed will become a casualty of an unpopular free trade deal.

Other obstacles to a referendum victory are posed by high energy prices that are rippling through the entire national economy and a growing public perception that Torrijos was never serious about his "zero corruption" campaign pledge. The controversy over the appointment of Liborio García as the national ombudsman, which has prompted even the first lady to protest, is also likely to shove the president down in the polls a few notches. These matters have little to do with the canal expansion question, but like a local school millage vote in the United States any Panamanian referendum offers disenchanted voters one of their few opportunities to voice their displeasure with "the government."

And therein may be the cause of the government missing its own deadline to unveil its canal expansion proposal. Torrijos and the ACP surely have their own polling and focus group data, and it seems that on the bases of these or other factors, despite their lead in the published opinion surveys they don't feel all that sure that they would win a referendum. The most recent Dichter & Neira poll published by La Prensa shows 56.2 percent of those responding supporting the idea of a canal expansion project, but at the outset of a ballot issue campaign where there will be organized opposition it's not a number that would be very reassuring to proponents.