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editorial

Demagoguery in the disclosure of canal expansion plans

The Panama Canal Authority has a modus operandi when it comes to public relations, one that has very little to do with the forgotten mandate of a "freedom of information policy" found within the organic law that created said authority.

We saw a bit of that MO in the regulations implementing that law, which specified nothing about the public's right to know but had copious provisions about disciplinary measures to be taken in cases of unauthorized release of information.

We saw it when concerned farmers scratching out their livings within the boundaries of the "Western Watershed" that was outlined by a lame duck legislature on a map of places to be flooded for a canal expansion project banded together to oppose their possible displacement. Instead of dealing seriously with the farmers' organization, which ultimately attracted the support of most Western Watershed residents, the ACP set up a little puppet group of residents who agreed with their plans so that they'd have someone with whom to "negotiate."

We have seen it over many years, when the ACP leaked stories about canal expansion plans to foreign media but refused to answer questions from Panamanian reporters. That way, what the authority said would be discussed only with the most obsequious elements of our national news media.

We have seen it in the expensive ad campaigns in most of the corporate mainstream media, setting up a conflict of interest that would tend to move TV news directors and newspaper publishers to slant things in favor of the source of ad revenues.

We saw it when the ACP stonewalled public demands to see its plans for all these many months, pleading the need for more time to study, but then took just one day to "study" and categorically dismiss a proposal for an alternative development proposed by, among others, former President Jorge Illueca and former deputy canal administrator Fernando Manfredo.

Then we saw the ACP method in full bloom on April 19, when the authority's deputy director, Manuel Benítez, told an international reporter that the canal expansion project is expected to create 240,000 new jobs. That extraordinary claim got into the international press and onto Google News, and thence back to Panama, carefully sidestepping those Panamanian journalists with a sense of skepticism and editors who will allow them to ask questions based upon this hesitance to believe.

Benítez also said that the canal project would be self-financed without costing the national government anything, and this part of his day's work was what made the front pages here.

Let us talk reality here.

Whether bonds floated to pay for a canal expansion are in the name of the Panamanian government or the ACP, they will have to be paid off. If they are amortized through canal toll revenues, it means that the ACP will have less money from that source to turn over to the government's general fund.

Thus the economic multiplier effect of a canal expansion project is likely to work two ways: more economic activity and jobs as the money spent on canal construction circulates through the Panamanian economy, but less economic activity and fewer jobs to the extent that canal contributions to the national government are cut.

All the estimates we have heard so far are about some 7,000 - 8,000 jobs being directly created for the canal expansion project, and some of these will surely go to foreigners with skills not found among Panama's work force or to foreign managers and technocrats of multinational companies that are likely to win some of the contracts. There would still be a multiplier effect, which economists measure as one if a dollar spent on the canal project circulates again through the economy just once. For a large public works project to have a multiplier effect of three would be within the realm of expectations based on many experiences around the world. The prediction of a multiplier effect on the order of 20 or more is palpably false, totally obnoxious and ample reason not to take anything else that Mr. Benítez (or the ACP, for that matter) might say at face value.

The maintenance and modernization of this country's principal industrial asset is serious business. For Panamanian voters to act as so many US electors do in school millage elections --- taking their only opportunity to protest against the government in general by doing grave harm to civilization's basic intellectual infrastructure --- would be irresponsible. The canal is too important to this nation for it to be caught up in petty little political games. Any expansion plan deserves to be considered on its full merits, with all of the benefits, risks and tradeoffs included in the balance.

However, a vote of no confidence in a Torrijos administration and an ACP managment that repeatedly make public pronouncements that are not to be trusted would not mean an end to all prospects of canal modernization. It would just mean that this project would go back to the drawing board until Mr. Torrijos and probably Mr. Alemán Zubieta and Mr. Benítez are out of the picture.

There is still time for the government and the ACP to level with the Panamanian people. But with each insult to the intelligence of thinking men and women, the information control people make it less likely that anyone will pay attention if and when they drop the demagoguery and get serious.

Bear in mind...

Every day, people are straying away from the church and going back to God.

Lenny Bruce

It will, I believe, be everywhere found, that as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation.

Jane Austen

Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.

Albert Einstein