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US Trade Rep's summary of US-RP free trade agreement
Bus confrontation looms
Roster of broadcast "journalists" who took money to slant toward the government
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Archive photo by Eric Jackson

CANATRA delays strike, some bus drivers may go out anyway

Bus strike in limbo

by Eric Jackson, mainly from other media

In a heated last-minute meeting of the National Chamber of Transportation (CANATRA), the umbrella organization of bus owner/drivers and their syndicates split on the issue of a December 18 strike, with some leaders willing to talk with the government one more time and others vowing to pull their buses off the road despite the organization's failure to pass a strike vote. The strongest support for strike action is in the metro Panama City - San Miguelito area, whose "diablo rojo" buses the Torrijos administration wants to displace by giving a contract to one of more large companies to run lines of "articulated" buses.

The government seems intent on provoking a strike, but on the other hand may not be holding the cards it wants. Most immediately, in its plans to recruit strikebreakers in event of a bus stoppage, the Torrijos administration was only able to procure 10 private buses and about twice that many sedans. Its legislation to replace the Law 14 that regulates bus service and replace it with a system in which bus owners and drivers are not represented was, as this story was written, still off the legislature's special subcommittee agenda.

It also seems that the Torrijos administration is physically and legally not ready to implement its preferred alternative. The articulated buses require wider streets along some of the planned routes, and companies that had been involved in the formulation of the plan and which many expected would win the concessions have so far been excluded by the courts from participating in any bidding process due to the apparent conflict of interest.

However, the drivers are notoriously fractious and some of their syndicates are popularly considered to be little better than mafia families.

Some of those families, however, are headed by politicians, a few of them PRD legislators.

The heart of the metro area public transportation system is a collection of former US schoolbuses that are fixed and painted up and known here as "red devils." Most are driver or family owned, although a few politically connected people have amassed fleets of as many as three dozen buses. During the military dictatorship headed by the president's father, the former municipal bus concessionaire was put out of business and the people who worked for that company were given their individual cupos to go into the bus transportation business for themselves. The system that emerged has its flaws, especially in some instances when the pathologies of corruption become involved, but nevertheless it has functioned for its purpose of getting great numbers of people around the city and the country on a reasonable schedule.

US Trade Rep's summary of US-RP free trade agreement
Bus confrontation looms
Roster of broadcast "journalists" who took money to slant toward the government
Business & Economy Briefs