Truckers blockade causes headaches, yields no lasting settlement

High fuel prices make it harder to smooth free trade's rough edges, but truce declared to write new regulations

Truce in Paso Canoa truck blockade
by Eric Jackson

About 200 Panamanian cargo truckers blocked the border crossing with Costa Rica at Paso Canao for four days starting on July 6, prompting a smaller group of Tico truckers to stage a similar protest on the other side of the frontier. Eventually the blockade was lifted when the Panamanian government promised to write new rules that incorporate reciprocity with other Central American countries, after an estimated half-million-dollar combined loss to truckers who were stalled a the border.

Costa Rica is off of the world's major shipping routes and has no ports of the size and sophistication that we have here. Thus the hauling of merchandise from canal-area ports and in particular the Colon Free Zone into Costa Rica, and through Costa Rica to Nicaragua and beyond, is an activity that dwarfs road traffic in the other direction. Increasing regional economic integration may narrow that gap a bit, but there is an established division of labor that in many cases would make reciprocity a mostly inapplicable concept.

Costa Rican truckers routinely pick up containers at the Colon Free Zone or Panama's canal-area ports in order to haul them to Central American countries. However, Panamanian truckers are not allowed to hitch up or pick up loads in Costa Rica.

Panamanian truckers can, however, carry freight from this country into Costa Rica. However, they have been charged $70 to take a load from the border to San Jose, and $140 to take a load through Costa Rica and into Nicaragua.

Under a 2001 agreement, Panama and the Central American countries passed laws to restrict the loading of cargoes to the truckers of the nation where the cargo is loaded. Under a nine-month-old Panamanian - Costa Rican free trade agreements, the truckers of each country are supposed to be able to freely travel with loads hitched in their own countries onto each other's roads.

But meanwhile, Costa Rica subsidizes diesel fuel for commercial trucking to a greater extent than Panama does, which leads many Panamanian truckers to fill up their tanks in Costa Rica. This leads to allegations that Panamanians are behind fuel shortages in Costa Rica, or that they are unfairly reaping the benefits of Costa Rican energy policies and should have to pay special tolls to offset this advantage.

Panamanian port and free zone interests conflict with those of the truckers. Our status as a warehousing and cargo handling center is growing with the ports and will grow from the development of the former Howard Air Force Base as an air freight hub and the expansion of the Panama Canal. A limited number of Panamanian truckers creating a monopolistic bottleneck over the trucking of containers between these facilities and the Central American countries is an expense and inconvenience that these interests would rather not see, which is why Panama has never passed implementing regulations to enforce the 2001 agreement.

Were worldwide fuel prices not at very high levels, the grievances of truckers on both sides of the border would not be so pressing. However, all transportation sectors everywhere are being squeezed by record high costs, so there's a trend toward less tolerance. In Panama these same trends manifest themselves in their own ways in the bus and taxi sectors as well.

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