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editorial

Torrijos starts the canal referendum campaign with deceit

Suppose that somebody wanted to convince you to invest your savings in a mutual fund, first appealing to you with a common sense argument that it's better to put your money to work so that it grows rather than to hold onto it such in a way that it does not generate any income and thus shrinks over time with inflation. And suppose that the would-be broker then leads you on with colorful charts and flowery words about how this investment fund is a sure winner, and promises full information on request.

Suppose that then, when you ask for the prospectus, you are given a document with some pictures, but mostly the backwards squiggles of an alphabet and language you don't understand. You find out that the "full disclosure" is in Urdu, which you don't speak or read, and which wasn't translated into your native tongue because, the broker tells you, it would be too complex to do so.

Would you still want to bet on that mutual fund?

People bet even longer odds in the lottery and in the casinos all the time, but if your savings mean anything to you and you have even a half-measure of common sense, you'd walk out on this investment hustler's pitch. You would rightly judge that the tactic used to persuade you to part with your money was beyond the pale of acceptable conduct. Promising full disclosure and then providing the information in a form in which the person promised it is unlikely to be able to understand it is a deceptive business practice if there ever was such a thing.

Martín Torrijos has used precisely this tactic in the conduct of public affairs. He promised the Panamanian people complete access to the studies backing up the Panama Canal Authority's proposal to expand the Panama Canal --- and didn't say that the great majority of the documents --- 79 of 104 studies --- are not in the official Spanish language of Panama, but in English. These include most of the technical studies and all of the studies of the market trends upon which the project's financial viability is predicated.

After a wave of criticism about this, the ACP promised to translate the conclusions of the studies and create abstracts in Spanish, but still refuses to translate the studies themselves. Moreover, by limiting access to the studies to their own controlled information centers instead of just publishing all the material online, Panamanian individuals and organizations are effectively prevented from downloading the material and sending it to someone else to translate.

Sure, you can read English. Most Panamanian voters can't. Most Panamanian journalists, whom the voters would ordinarily expect to read and abstract the 55,000-odd pages of studies in order to inform them of the proposition upon which they will asked to vote, can't read English either.

So it's all a lie. President Torrijos promised transparency and full disclosure, and gave the people something far less than that.

That's just one deception at the outset of the campaign. In what other ways will he deceive us between now and referendum day? Will anybody with his or her wits intact be able to trust the slick ads to come?

This corny trick that the president and the ACP are pulling surely ought to change the dynamics of the decision making process in the minds of thinking men and women. Every voter should now realize that the most important question is not a "yes" or "no" on some generic "modernization" concept, but rather whether we can trust this government and this canal administration with this project.

We already know we can't trust them to do their homework, because they decided to spend a ton of money on propaganda rather than pay to have the English-language studies translated like they should have done. What other important things have they ignored?

The question of trust actually goes well beyond the matter of these studies, and even beyond the question of this particular plan's viability. We need to look at what has happened with Martín's "zero corruption" pledge. We need to consider the way that the president has used his office as a stage prop to promote one business headed by a former politician currently facing charges for embezzling public funds, and another company that has been banned abroad for fraudulent sales practices and ties to the Genovese mafia family. We need to consider the histories of members of Torrijos's party, some of whom are now going around as semi-official spokespeople for the canal expansion plan, with regard to the claims that they have made about the jobs that would be created by past grandiose projects.

Can we really trust Martín Torrijos and the political entourage around him with a project of this magnitude? If he thinks that the theft of public funds and bogus teak investment schemes are OK, should we trust him with $5 billion and more worth of public works contracts? If former President Nicolás Ardito Barletta is going around promising an unusually huge multiplier effect for the project, shouldn't we consider the claims he made as head of the Interoceanic Regional Authority about jobs at the Fort Davis industrial park, which never materialized?

These are rude, disrespectful questions. Consider, however, the context in which they are asked. Promising full disclosure and later revealing that it will be in a foreign language was a rude and disrespectful thing for the president to do. Asking hard questions that ought to be asked isn't nearly as impolite.

It's President Torrijos himself who has put the question of trust front and center in any worthy Panama Canal expansion debate.

Bear in mind...

The elimination of any nation's middle class is outrageous, but the disdain by which the top few began to view the bottom many was unforgivable

J. Edward Lord

Reconciliation is more beautiful than victory.

Violeta Barrios de Chamorro

If anything can justify an insurrection in a constitutional and free country, it would inevitably be the capriciousness of legislators in not making reforms after great defects in the constitution have been proven.

Justo Arosemena