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Most of the canal expansion studies are in a language that most Panamanians don't understand

Canal data restricted to those who read English
by Eric Jackson

In his speech to the nation on April 24, President Torrijos said "I want to guarantee to Panamanians that, starting today, all the information that sustains the Panama Canal Expansion Project will be public and will be available without any restriction."

However, it soon turned out that there were restrictions, the biggest being that 79 of the 104 studies that are said to support the project are in English only.

The great majority of Panamanians do not fluently speak or read English. During the Moscoso administration the public schools adopted a foreign language requirement that for all practical purposes means the study of English, but many of this nation's English teachers are themselves hardly conversant or literate in that idiom.

A proposal to make English an official second language of Panama was defeated during the Moscoso years, precisely due to fears that consumers would be cheated by giving them important documents and contracts to sign that are in a language they do not understand. Under Panama's constitution and several laws, only Spanish may be used in our courts and legal documents.

Although there are probably some tracking polls at the disposal of the government, the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) and some of the larger corporate media, no figures from such surveys have yet been published, with the exception of a Dichter & Neira telephone survey of some 429 Panamanians the day after the president's speech. This survey, which found 70.4 percent of Panamanians in favor of the proposal to build a third set of locks, was published in La Prensa, whose management is PRD-aligned, on April 26.

The survey, conducted only in the metro area, was far from random. You need about 600 people to begin to get statistically random polling results. Many of the nation's farmers are angry at the Torrijos administration because they see their way of life threatened by a possible free trade deal with the United States, but by limiting the survey to the metro area this element of society was mostly eliminated. So were the poor, who tend either not to have telephones or who use cell phones with numbers that pollsters can't gather from directories. So were a disproportionate number of the women and the very wealthy, who are more likely to have unpublished phone numbers.

But as unscientific or even rigged as the poll that La Prensa published may have been, it would be expected that the "yes" side of the canal expansion debate would get an immediate rise in support as the result of the Torrijos speech, much as American presidential candidates almost always get a bounce in their poll numbers right after their parties' conventions. Previous, more scientifically sound polls had place the "yes" side at a little over 56 percent, and a 14-point rise on the heels of the big announcement wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility.

But how have things bounced since it was revealed that most of the 55,000 pages of  studies are in a form that most people can't use? Those numbers haven't been published.

We can, however, take notice of what the expansion proposal's opponents have said and done about this fact, and the ACP's and government's changing reactions to the criticism. These would suggest that the "yes" side ran into an immediate and serious political problem and has early in the debate been forced to do damage control.

On April 27, reporters from El Panama America visited the ACP's information center in Balboa's Building 714 (on El Prado)  and found that the English-language studies had not been translated into Spanish. Unspecified ACP functionaries reportedly told the reporters that the documents weren't translated because they were too complex to render into Spanish. The story appeared on the next day's edition above the fold on the front page. On Sunday, April 30, El Panama America ran a page 2 story about the language issue, and this time cited ACP administrator Alberto Alemán Zubieta as the source of an argument that it would be too complex to translate the documents.

After the long holiday weekend, the issue began to take on a life of its own. On May 2 attorney Miguel Antonio Bernal asked Electoral Prosecutor Gerardo Solís to order the ACP to translate the English-language documents. Later that day, the authority released a communique saying that "the great majority" of the documents would be translated. Speaking for the government, Panama Maritime Authority secretary general Carlos Ernesto González de la Lastra blew off the critics, arguing in El Panama America that "you can't deny that [English] is currently the commercial language." Meanwhile in La Prensa, which previously hadn't touched the story, it was reported that only abstracts and conclusions of the studies would be translated.

The following day El Panama America added that the whole studies wouldn't be translated, and published deputy canal administrator Manuel Benítez's explanation that the ACP didn't ask for versions of the studies in both English and Spanish because the government issues international bid specifications in English.

By this time two things were happening. First, canal expansion skeptics were sending out mass cell phone text messages denouncing the failure to publish the studies in Spanish. Second, critics such as Fernando Manfredo broke their silence and argued that certain things in the proposal and studies were incomplete, specifically that the true costs of dredging were not stated in the documentation; and the ACP was reduced to denials, as it had no Spanish-language versions of the documents in question to which journalists could be referred.

The latter phenomenon became more acute when former President Jorge Ilueca charged that the experts that the ACP hired actually recommended against the use of the water-saving retaining pond system because it would make Gatun Lake and Miraflores Lake, the sources of most of the water supplies for Colon and the Panama City metro area respectively, brackish through the introduction of salt water. Again, the ACP was left without a reference to a Spanish-language document to refute Illueca's assertion.

Meanwhile El Panama America, which is owned by descendents of the late President Harmodio Arias and takes a generally right-wing editorial stance even though it tends to have the nation's best left-wing columnists, leveled an editorial blast at those criticizing the government and ACP for failing to publish the documents in English. "It is inevitable that the opportunists take advantage of any formality, defect or imprecision that's found in the canal expansion proposal," the daily editorialized.

And however one might want to characterize the skeptics, they did take advantage of the government's decision to break its full transparency pledge to put the expansion proponents on the defensive. The president's bump in public support would appear to be over, although it's likely that the "yes" forces are still ahead by a substantial margin. However, the ACP's shimmering aura of infallable expertise has been short-circuited, and from now until the referendum look for some ferocious political trench warfare.