High court throws out Transmovil project

archive photo by Eric Jackson

Martín's move to replace the diablo rojo buses thrown out by the Supreme Court

Transmovil shut down
by Eric Jackson

The technical hook was that it's unconstitutional for a president to just declare a state of emergency in order to jam through a major purchase order before his term in office ends. The practical effect is that President Torrijos's highly unpopular Transmovil project is shut down, because there's no time to restart the clock and order buses again before the next administration takes office, and because both leading candidates to replace him have declared their opposition to his transportation plan.

The 23rd of October Movement, the bus rider's consumer organization which brought the constitutional challenge to the decree declaring a state of emergency and subsequent resolution authorizing the purchase of 420 Mercedes Benz 0500 buses. The purchse order that the court overturned was placed with Grupo Q --- a business established by Vice President Samuel Lewis Navarro's relatives that was sold to Salvadoran investors in 2005 --- after all competing bidders had been in one way or another eliminated. In an earlier process this year, a lowball bid by the Chinese Higer bus company was thrown out after it was revealed that it had falsified its performance bond and other certifications.

Higer was challenging its elimination in court and Consorcio Volvo, which dropped out of the bidding process at the last moment, was asking that the Grupo Q contract be set aside. Grupo Q is likely to sue the Panamanian government for damages, because after being awarded the contract it put in an order for the first 50 buses with a Mercedes factory in Brazil and those vehicles are under construction and will have to be paid for.

Bus owner / drivers who didn't agree with the Torrijos administration's attempt to force them to sell out to the government on its terms --- up to $25,000 per bus with permit, to be paid in monthly installments of $400, for the most part by a future administration --- had also sued to block the Transmovil plan. The government has already taken about one-third of the Panama City metro area's buses off the road, and paid out some $700,000 to bus owners. By doing this, the president has made the remaining buses in circulation uncomfortably overcrowded and eliminated most bus service at night.

The president's transportation plan had also contemplated the creation of Transmovil, a state-owned transportation company. The government also allegedly spent $1.4 million to train bus drivers for Transmovil and $220,000 on advertising. Mostly, though, Transmovil's presence in society was by way of PRD activists hired to harrass diablo rojo bus drivers and enforce "we'll hail you a cab" rackets at the national bus terminal in Albrook. These circumstances conspired to create a widespread public impression that Transmovil was actually just a multi-faceted end-of-administration looting binge.

The favorite to win the May 3 presidential election, Ricardo Martinelli, says that if elected he will within three years build a subway from 24 de Diciembre --- northeast of Tocumen --- to the bus terminal at Albrook, leaving the rest of urban mass transit to a yet-undefined mixture of public and private operators. The PRD candidate, Balbina Herrera, promises a monorail whose route has yet to be defined.

In any case, for several years some 150,000 metro area residents will be depending on public transportation to get to and from work with the present bus system largely destroyed and no replacement in place. Some of the emerging new bus syndicates --- the old PRD-aligned ones were shattered by their inability to negotiate in good faith on behalf of the members with a PRD administration --- are floating plans to rebuild the owner-operated fleet. Independent mayoral candidate Miguel Antonio Bernal is calling for a municipal bus company.

The Torrijos administration, largely a creature of the advertising cartel that was founded by the president's father-in-law, is actively hostile to that part of Panamanian culture identified with the diablo rojos, bus art. That cultural genre has been declining for years due to the economic marginalization of the bus owners, who are ever less able to pay to have their vehicles --- used school buses imported from North America --- painted by artists. However, there are advocates of the purchase of new bus fleets who would keep the culture alive by hiring artists to decorate them in the national tradition.

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