business & economy

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Business & Economy Briefs

Eeeeew! Dirty Mother Nature! Concrete, glass and plastic would be much cleaner!

photos by Guido Berguido

The Panamanians have a usage for the word "limpiar." Your Spanish-English dictionary will say the word means "to clean."

Here the term is also used to describe what happens when a developer scrapes all visibly living things off of the land, as if nature is something dirty.

Like here, for example. Developer Mayor "Mello" Alemán is turning a wooded area of the former Fort Clayton into "Embassy Gardens," hoping to attract those American diplomats and such who have plasticine tastes.

Alemán, whose first name is his name and not a title, has a colorful past. He was former President Ernesto Pérez Balladares's campaign treasurer, who gladly accepted contributions from Colombian drug lords and European expat swindlers in that 1994 campaign.

Later he headed the board of directors at BANAICO, a bank that collapsed at the end of a series of events that began with the failure of one of his companies, an aircraft rental business financed by the bank, after one of its planes was caught landing in the USA with a load of cocaine aboard. The US government seized the plane, the insurance company cancelled the company's policy and thus grounded the rest of the aircraft, people inside the bank leaked word to selected depositors that the collateral for a big insider loan was lost, there was a run on the bank and the Banking Superintendent intervened. Alemán wasn't charged but several bank officials got prison sentences for the affair.

Still later, Alemán got the Pérez Balladares administration to pass a law requiring most of the nation's bus routes to use the National Terminal in Albrook --- of which Alemán was the developer.

Now he as well as other developers have prevailed upon another PRD administration to sell them forested areas of the former Canal Zone, which are being scraped away in the hope that people with money, and American Embassy personnel in particular, will want to live in the new housing developments. Gringos, the developers are betting, don't want any scruffy tree sloths in their neighborhoods. They certainly don't allow anyone of that sort at Disney World, do they?

So let's see who wants to buy from Mr. Alemán.