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Opponents seek presidential veto

Deputies open canal watershed's protected areas to developers

by Eric Jackson

In the wee hours as the clocked ticked away toward the end of the 2006 legislative session --- when nobody was looking --- the deputies put some 40 percent of formerly protected areas of the Panama Canal Watershed up for sale. They passed Law 259 of 2006, which repeals major sections of the 1997 canal area land use law and the dictatorship-era legislation creating national parks and protected areas in the former Canal Zone. Under the legislation, which as this story was written was pending before President Torrijos for his signature or veto, about 40 percent of formerly protected lands in the Panama Canal Watershed would be opened for development into subdivisions, hotels and tourist facilities, burger strips and other commercial ventures.

Environmentalists spearheaded by retired Panama Canal engineer Rafael Spaulding and architect Raisa Banfield called meetings among activists and residents of canal area neighborhoods, issued an appeal to the president to veto the legislation, filled the daily newspapers with letters and columns opposing the measure and spread their appeal through cyberspace with a series of widely distributed email protests.

Under the Torrijos administration real estate developers have repeatedly received the government's support against coalitions of canal area residents, environmentalists, historic preservationists and advocates of more orderly urban development policies. Two of the more prominent confrontations, one over a proposal to turn the top of Ancon Hill, part of a national park, into a tourist complex that features a cable car connecting to the Amador Causeway and the other over a plan to build a housing subdivision in a forested area that's part of a national park and includes the best preserved remnant of the colonial-era Camino de Cruces, are now the subjects of litigation before the Supreme Court.

The president's father, the late military strongman General Omar Torrijos, resisted developers' pressures to turn the banks of the Panama Canal into waterfront condos and other such structures be turning much of the reverted area into a national park system. At the time the move was justified as an effort to conserve the water resources that are essential to the canal's operation.

For that same reason in 1997 the Interoceanic Regional Authority (ARI) land use plan that was adopted into law banned most construction in many other large areas of the canal watershed.

In more recent years many houses and other buildings along the canal were demolished by the Panama Canal Authority, some allegedly to make way for the canal's expansion and some allegedly to prevent their use by terrorists who might want to attack the canal or ships using it. In effect, however, much of the area cleared in recent years would now be opened up for commercial development.

Not all of the people in Panama's real estate and construction industry are enthusiastic, and it's not just because only a select few have the political connections and money to call dibs on the lands that would be opened up. There are also those who believe that the upper end of the metro area's real estate market is already overbuilt and that if the construction boom continues it will only result in the burst of a speculative bubble.

Many of the residents who paid for homes in the former Canal Zone, for their part, say that ARI sold to them on the promise that they were buying into "garden communities" with extensive green areas but now the woods, parks and lawns are being swallowed up and the urban congestion that they had paid to avoid is now pursuing them to their new neighborhoods.

The proponents and intended beneficiaries of Law 259 have yet to identify themselves and defend the proposal in public.