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Business leaders start to fall out with the PRD

by Eric Jackson, largely from other media

Martín Torrijos seemed to have the business community eating out of his hand this time last year. He had taken on the left and the militant labor unions over Seguro Social and won, and mobilized most business groups behind the "yes" side in the canal expansion referendum.

Yes, there were still some hard feelings from the earlier tax reforms, but when the regulations came out lawyers and CPAs found their way around a lot of that and to the extent they didn't extra costs were mostly passed on to customers.

And yes, there are a bunch of capitalists in this country who have never accepted the PRD, either because they are from families who were the traditional elite that saw their power diminished during the dictatorship, because they are committed to Arnulfismo or laissez faire liberalism and are thus partisan opponents of the party that Omar Torrijos founded, because they don't like dictators or political patronage machines or certain high profile personalities, or for whatever reason. Presidential politics here is largely a contest for business funding and since the fraud that brought Nicky Barletta to office in 1984  the PRD has never gone without a serious challenge in that field.

In recent weeks, however, Martín and the PRD have been on the receiving end of more criticism and outright scorn from the business than at any other time in this presidency, and it's hard to be sure of what to make of it.

The National Council of Private Enterprise, CoNEP, is "big business" by Panamanian standards and, though it has people in all the parties, tends to at least on the surface support those who in power at the moment. And yet CoNEP issued a rare criticism of the government for not releasing the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) report on the state of Panama.

These reports are released every few years, and this year's version was more significant than usual because it was to be the starting point for the "national concertation" talks called for by Torrijos at a time when people were criticizing the canal expansion proposal for not being set in a context of a national development strategy. Most of the people who made that criticism were not invited to participate, a bunch of the labor unions, professional organizations and political parties that were invited declined to do so, and now the process is primarily the PRD and its allies, the Panamenista Party as a dissident voice, some of the more docile labor unions and many business leaders sitting around a table with people from the PNUD. Then it became known that the PNUD study had, among other things, found that poverty is going up rather than down as claimed by the Torrijos administration and that there is a well nigh universal perception that all branches of the current government is highly corrupt. Under pressure from the government the PNUD suppressed the report, declaring it a preliminary draft, but not before La Estrella got ahold of it and published the essential details.

So are business leaders who participated in a process that most of the opposition has boycotted now to be embarrassed by serving as stage props in a "dialogue" where the such information as is on the table is discredited PRD propaganda? That seems to be the heart of CoNEP's complaint, that they were polite and supportive and played Martín's game, and now they are being jerked around in public as a reward and feel the need to say something in order not to be taken as pendejos.

During the Panamanian Business Executives Association (APEDE) annual CADE business summit, the PNUD report issue came up again, this time during a presentation by Social Development Minister María Roquebert, when former APEDE president Enrique De Obarrio provoked an angry reacion and early exit when he asked her about the UNDP report. (Roquebert, apparently incorrectly, dismissed the PNUD report as being based on Moscoso administration statistics that should not be applied to the present government.)

Later, National Assembly deputy Leandro Ávila, PRD member from San Miguelito who rose to his current position as a leader of the FENASEP government workers union and was the Torrijos administration's point man on the Seguro Social reformsm, made a presentation to CADE about all the important and pro-business things that the legislature is doing. But immediately following Ávila as a panelist was attorney Miguel Antonio Bernal, who began his presentation by staring at the deputy and declaring that the current legislature is a disaster. That brought on an ovation.

Meanwhile, the Chamber of Commerce is neither the definitive voice of big business like CoNEP nor the preferred place to go to hear serious capitalists talk intelligently among themselves like APEDE. However, it does represent a broad segment of business opinion and usually has nice things to say about the people in power at a given time. But the Chamber, too, has been criticizing the Torrijos administration of late. It's grip is that the police are not taking a heavy hand with people who block traffic, which is a traditional Panamanian way of expressing discontent with any offensive government policy, action or inaction. From the issue du jour for campus radicals to road contractors tearing down guide rails for the blind to the toilets being out of order in a public school, people block the roads and even if there's no violence it causes economic disruptions. Chamber president Domingo Latorraca called for the government to take stronger actions to suppress "economic terrorists" who block roads.

So what does it all mean? It's hard to see all possible implications, but one of them is probably that a subtantial section of the business community is fed up with the PRD and looking to find a viable pro-business alternative to the current ruling party in the 2009 elections.The Union Patriotica party created by the merger of the Liberals and Solidaridad and augmented by a lot of prominent former MOLIRENA members, Ricardo Martinelli's Cambio Democratico and Guillermo Endara's Vanguardia Moral de la Patria are the principal contenders of the moment to offer such an alternative, with factions within the Panameñista Party seeking to assert its role as the main choice other than the PRD.

President's uncle's and cousin's responses deepen land sale scandals
Company that produces most Panamanian beer accused of death squad funding

Business sector increasingly alienated from government
Panama News Briefs