business & economy

National Assembly holds 2007 budget hearings in secret

The other shoe drops, and the attempt to conceal it goes badly

by Eric Jackson

The Torrijos administration just spent many millions of dollars to promise every unemployed Panamanian a job related to the canal expansion --- the figures that the Panama Canal Authority's apparatchiki used on their public-funded Powerpoint display toward the end of the campaign put the promise at 297,400 jobs, many more than the Comptroller General's office currently counts as unemployed. (Oh, but there was the fine print --- those don't happen for another 25 years! they may protest. But the TV ads the ACP ran never mentioned that caveat, and even so less than a handful of economists --- the  the most disreputable in the profession --- staked their already tarnished reputations on such an extravagant estimate of the multiplier effect of the canal project.)

Having made such promises, after the referendum it was revealed that the government has told the World Bank that it will be sharply reducing, not increasing, the public payroll. A part of this is the Torrijos cabinet's proposed 2007 budget that would lay off some 16,000 public employees.

So what does a political party whose most privileged members don't care to be accused of betrayal in heated public sessions do? They close the doors to the National Assembly's committee meetings.

Secret committee hearings on the national budget are something that Panama had not seen in recent years. Amendments surreptitiously inserted into the budget have been known, but closed door budget sessions have not been part of the post-invasion political culture here.

Since almost all of the opposition legislators also participated in the extravagant promise-making of the referendum campaign, Budget Committee president Pedro Miguel González (PRD-Veraguas) has heard hardly a peep of protest from his colleagues. However, anti-corruption groups (with the noteworthy exception of the local chapter of Transparency International) have denounced the secret hearings, as have most of the newspapers, even those politically aligned with the PRD-Partido Popular governing coalition.

President Torrijos, who campaigned on a "zero corruption" pledge and specifically promised a transparent government, defended the closed door budget sessions in El Panama America by pointing out that after the secret sessions are over the budget that results from them will be published on the Internet.