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editorial

For a proper debate

The proponents of the Torrijos - Alemán Zubieta Plan to expand the canal have to date avoided real face-to-face debates with the plan’s critics. Torrijos is traveling around the Interior passing out cash and calling his critics liars, but has avoided saying that, and explaining what he means, to their faces. Alemán Zubieta hasn’t made any public defense of the project before the Panamanian people at all. Their strategy is to depend on a massive public-financed ad blitz and coast to an easy referendum victory without ever answering the many reasonable doubts that have been raised from several directions.

It’s unlikely that Torrijos and Alemán Zubieta will be able to afford this luxury through the October 22 referendum. The “yes” campaign is hemorrhaging support, and the best evidence of that is the pro-government daily newspapers’ failure to publish any genuine national poll of voters since those taken in early May, shortly after the “yes” campaign’s April 24 kickoff at ATLAPA. The vote buying in poverty-stricken rural communities, the flagrantly discriminatory campaign regulations, the shakeups in the Torrijos public relations operations, the ACP’s reticence to debate after their representatives and imported cheering section made fools of themselves before ILDEA and the current "the 'no' advocates are irrational" mudslinging tactic are yet more symptoms of the “yes” campaign’s very serious plight. The momentum is against them and they will probably get to the point where they need a debate as a roll of the dice to turn their drop in support around, because whether or not the “no” side has yet gained the upper hand, the Torrijos - Alemán Zubieta Plan is on a course toward defeat.

Knowing the arrogance that the “yes” campaign has shown, when that time comes it’s to be expected that they will offer demeaning terms, starting with an attempt to select who will speak for the “no” side. An eagerness to get on TV on the part of those who are currently blacked out could lead them to walk into various traps of this sort, especially since there are different factions in the “no” campaign whose differences Torrijos and Alemán Zubieta will try to exploit.

There ought to be a series of debates, about various aspects of the issue, between a series of opponents of roughly equal stature. Canal administrator Alberto Alemán Zubieta ought to debate former canal administrator Fernando Manfredo. President Torrijos ought to debate former President Guillermo Endara. ACP finance director José Barrios Ng ought to debate the head of the nation’s CPAs’ professional group, Luis Chen González. Former environmental director Stanley Heckadon ought to debate former environmental director Gonzálo Menéndez. One of the ACP’s top engineers ought to debate SPIA president Humberto Reynolds. A representative of the PRD-aligned CONATO labor confederation ought to debate someone from the militant CONUSI labor unions.

The most important thing, however, is for Torrijos and Alemán Zubieta to defend their proposal in face-to-face televised confrontations with the “no” campaign, and not in a contrived format in which they in effect speak for their opponents as well. The Panamanian people, at long last, deserve a real explanation from the plan’s proponents and not just more corny propaganda.

Bear in mind...

An ignorant public is a blind instrument of its own destruction.

Simón Bolívar

It is simple, really. Human health and the health of ecosystems are inseparable.

Gro Harlem Brundtland

There is no safety in unlimited technological hubris.

McGeorge Bundy