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Panama Canal expansion update

Photo by Eric Jackson

The latest dance craze?

Hmmmm --- the Funky Ostrich? Or is it a new religion?

Actually, this is artist Gustavo Araujo's work that was unveiled in Parque Urraca on April 22 --- Earth Day --- with a small crowd in attendance. It's one of several installations by several artists that will be on display at the park through May 22, and is meant to symbolize the ostrich-like attitude that so many people assume in the face of all the evidence of the natural order deteriorating around us.

I could have taken a picture of a real ostrich, as I traveled to El Valle to do a travel feature and spent much of my time there at El Nispero, a little private park with a zoo, aviary, gardens and orchid house, which also offers landscaping plants and barnyard fowl for sale. They have an ostrich there, and it came right up to the edge of its fenced enclosure to greet me. I stepped back. Those things can give you a nasty bite, and even if there was no "Avestruz Bravo" sign, I wasn't taking any chances. It's one of the photos I didn't get that day.

This is not a good time to play ostrich. Panama is headed into a high-stakes political process over the Panama Canal Authority's (ACP's) and Torrijos administration's plan to expand the canal, which is this country's principal industrial asset and the main reason why we have so much commercial and financial activity in our economy. But Torrijos has in his short time in office rolled up a huge national debt and a lot of people, including some former presidents, former canal administrators and pillars of our business and academic sectors, have doubts about whether this project is financially viable.

It does not help the administration's case when the number two man at the ACP declares that with an investment of under $8 billion Panama is going to create 240,000 new jobs. I'd call the claim cheap demagoguery, except that it's not cheap. It's part of a very expensive propaganda campaign that has been underway for years. We were promised that the government would let us see the plan in March, but that turned out to be, like the "zero corruption" campaign pledge, another broken Torrijos promise. Now the date for the unveiling of what is said to be a 555-page report on a plan said to be supported by more than 50,000 pages of studies is set for April 24, and now we have some politicians talking about how it will be necessary to have a referendum on it within 90 days. The constitution really doesn't say anything about a canal expansion referendum, but the clause that the administration and the ACP are citing does provide that in certain canal referenda the vote must be no earlier than 90 days after the legislature approves the question to be submitted to voters.

(Of course, we have a National Assembly mainly populated by lazy grasping charlatans, and I predict that by the time that body has submitted the referendum question to voters, not a single deputy will have read the entire file on this matter. I would expect that a lot of the parliamentarians will not have even read the report before voting. The big "if" to me is whether anybody in the legislature will object to a procedure that doesn't give its members time to read what they are to vote for or against.)

So the question will enter the realm of slick public relations, and here I think that the Torrijos administration and the ACP may very well find that what they count upon as their greatest strength will turn out to be their biggest liability. The son-in-law of the founder of Panama's ad cartel apparently thinks that slick ad campaigns will carry the day. That's what one of the co-owners of one of Panama's main broadcast empires thought too, when he planned a referendum to change the constitution to allow him to run for another consecutive term as this country's president. But of course all the ads, and even the sage counsel of "The Ragin' Cajun" when it became clear that Plan A wasn't working, were insufficient to rescue the dreams of the president with the fake doctorate, Ernesto Pérez Balladares.

Advertising can be very effective. That's in part why The Panama News is able to exist --- people with goods and services to sell realize that there are choice customers whom they want to reach who read this publication, and so they buy ads. However, the legend of the boy who cried "wolf" applies to modern media as well. If some person or organization does enough to make people distrustful, people will tune out his, her or its publicity campaign, no matter how massive it may be.

For example, the ACP bought ads in the daily newspapers to deny allegations that its people had met with lobbyists concerning the canal expansion project.

A rather lurid report published in the United States had it that an odd little Republican clique exerts a lot of influence on US relations with Latin America, and cited several examples of its pressures on Panama. In one example, it was alleged that the Wachovia financial services company wants a piece of the canal expansion project's financing and that Wachovia flew Treasury and Finance Minister and chairman of the ACP board of directors Ricaurte Vásquez to North Carolina for a golf outing. (The ACP ads, by the way, did not deny or mention the allegation about this corporate gift to Vásquez.)

Then there is the Tongsun Park affair. This notorious South Korean lobbyist, who counted among his clients one Manuel Antonio Noriega and one Saddam Hussein, is in a US jail awaiting trial for allegedly offering bribes to United Nations officials to steer the former Iraq oil for food business toward people he was representing. Park was arrested in Mexico, on a stopover while flying from Canada to Panama. Park's associates said that he was coming here on business related to the canal expansion project, and that elicited indignant denials of any connection with Park from the ACP --- until the authority was finally forced to admit that ACP administrator Alberto Alemán Zubieta and Panama's Vice President and Foreign Minister Samuel Lewis Navarro had in fact met with Tongsun Park in South Korea.

Meanwhile President Torrijos was very open about his meeting on the canal expansion project with his predecessor, Mireya Moscoso, who stole an average of about $1,000 per day from public funds to buy herself clothing and jewelry over the course of her five years in office. That Mireya gets to hide behind her immunity from prosecution as a non-working deputy in the Central American Parliament is disgusting enough. That Torrijos will have anything to do with her is but another breach of his "zero corruption" pledge. But after all, it probably isn't the worst offense. The president's use of the Palacio de las Garzas and his own image and the public office he holds as stage props to plug the stock of former Cocle governor Richard Fifer's mining company --- even as Fifer was facing charges of embezzling public funds --- was surely a more gratuitious rubbing of our faces in political slime. But as tawdry as Torrijos's posed photo with Fifer and the latter's publicity flack Octavio Choy was, that doesn't match the president's refusal to extert any leadership when the PRD caucus of the legislature has repeatedly upheld corruption with impunity.

So while a lot of money will be spent posing the question to voters as a choice between the modernization of the Panama Canal or a slide into obsolescence and irrelevance that will take the rest of the Panamanian economy down with it, there will be another question upon which the referendum may turn: Can we trust Martín Torrijos and the current ACP administration with a project of this magnitude?

I haven't made up my mind on the latter question, I think that the former question is a false dichotomy and I haven't decided how I will vote in a referendum. I want to see the proposal first. The Panama News will, however I personally decide to vote, present both sides of this question so that readers can form their own opinions. This job is complicated by the Torrijos administration's usual pretense that The Panama News doesn't exist, which means among other things that we get fewer letters and columns supporting its side of this and other issues that we do from people who disagree with the PRD. Despite this annoyance, you will find that this website has been the source of more English-language versions of what Torrijos has had to say for himself and his policies than any other news medium, and I do take the task of providing a public service during a crucial national debate quite seriously.

Anyway, as elements of this story will be breaking before all of this issue is completed, I will be running some special updates on the canal expansion in this issue over the next two weeks.

Finally, let me point out a couple of things about this website and make note of one of the places I have been lately.

In the last issue I asked for suggestions about Internet radio stations to replace a pop station that now restricts access to those outside the UK. I got a few suggestions and came up with an Irish replacement, but I am still open to suggestions. I may even add another row of Internet radio station to the bottom of the front page, because it seems that the addition of musical options to which you can listen while you are reading has been a popular innovation.

I received a fair amount of email about a racist letter that appeared in the last issue. Some of these communications are excerpted in this issue. The letters section is not reserved solely for opinions with which I agree or which are inoffensive to most of our readers. I don't publish every hateful screed that comes my way, but when it comes from the author of one of the corporate travel guides for Panama, that makes it newsworthy to print.

I am overweight and these production weekends when I seem to live on caffeine and sugar don't help matters. I should eat healthier. Now that becomes just a bit more possible with the opening of a new Indian restaurant in Panama City, the Masala. Alas, the healthy stuff they serve there is so good that I am tempted to eat too much of it. I guess there's no adequate substitute for self-control after all.

Enjoy.

Eric Jackson
the editor