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Astroturf movement: Boquete residents mostly opposed Mireya's idea of
a road through the park,  but here we had a caravan of road construction
contractors and their employees, and people who worked for President
Moscoso on her coffee farm or otherwise, showing their support for  it.
Archive photo by Eric Jackson

Martinelli's road projects attract critics and defenders
by Eric Jackson

In a series of announcements by various officials in various contexts, the Martinelli administration has laid out a rough sketch of an ambitious road building program over the next five years. Part of the plan is the paving of many existing dirt and gravel rural roads, something that draws few objections. More noteworthy are projects for new roads. These include:

• An Atlantic side highway, running from where the road along Colon's Costa Abajo ends at Miguel de la Borda along the Caribbean seashore to where Bocas del Toro's main road ends at Chiriqui Grande;

• A new road connecting Boquete with Bocas del Toro, which would run over the Talamanca range through or on the eastern boundary of La Amistad International Park; and

• An extension of the road along Colon's Costa Arriba from where it ends in Cuango (or if one wants to count a four-wheeler track with river fords, a bit beyond), to and through Kuna Yala all the way to Colombia.

Each of these projects has identifiable constituencies that would tend to support it, and also identifiable interest groups likely to oppose it. In general, companies whose business it is to build roads like projects such as these. There are usually landowners who would like to sell and welcome the property value increase that a new road where none existed before usually brings. There are also farmers who like the idea of a road that makes it easier to get their produce to the market.

However, where new roads cut through the wilderness or other relatively untouched or ecologically sensitive areas, one can generally count on environmentalists to oppose them. The cattle ranchers are traditionally leery of any road that pierces the Darien Gap between our roads and Colombia's, because they have hoof-and-mouth disease and other cattle contagions on their side of the jungle and we don't have these problems on our side. Indigenous people tend to fear roads going through or by their collectively owned lands, because historically these have brought landless farmers from elsewhere in Panama, and more recently Colombian and American real estate speculators, resort developers and foreign-led drug smuggling gangs, who seek to incorporate indigenous land into their portfolios.

Smuggling, mostly but not entirely related to drugs, adds a law enforcement dimension to roads that run along coasts. Panama doesn't have the resources to guard its two long coastlines and wherever there is a road near a shoreline, boats or low-flying planes bring contraband or illegal migrants to be forwarded to farther destinations by land transport. Thus there are cops and anti-corruption activists who are wary of coastal roads to the extent that proper policing is not part of the plan from the start.

The Colon-Bocas road

The first of the road projects to be announced, the one connecting Colon and Bocas del Toro provinces by way of the north shore of Veraguas, has at the moment drawn the least public criticism. However, as this would run through the Meso-American Biological Corridor, expect some environmentalist scrutiny to come. This road would tend to serve the illegal gold mining operation run by former Cocle governor Richard Fifer and as such might cause environmentalists, residents of the communities that Fifer's security guards have cordoned off from visits by people of whom he doesn't approve, and anti-corruption activists to look askance.

When the boundaries of the Ngobe-Bugle Comarca were drawn during the Pérez Balladares administration, most of the indigenous communities along the coast were excluded from the comarca in favor of would-be tourist resort developers. In Veraguas and Bocas, that leaves unprotected indigenous groups, mainly Ngobe and also the Bokota (who are lumped in with the Ngobe but consider themselves a people apart) athwart the probable route, and in any case it would be necessary for the road to go through parts of the Ngobe-Bugle Comarca, whose people generally take a dim view of any activity in the comarca that the national government mandates but which doesn't have the blessing of local indigenous authorities.

There are also non-indigenous fishing villages along the way between Colon and Bocas, which might be evicted on the one hand, or enhanced by a road connection. Add to this dimension hundreds of claims by would-be tourist resort developers, many given concessions by the outgoing Torrijos administration despite communities that have existed for decades on some of those lands, and further evictions and possible job opportunities are added to the calculation.

The one strong public advocate for this project at the moment has been César Tribaldos, who served as director of the Panamanian Tourism Institute (IPAT, since superseded by the Panama Tourism Authority) during the Pérez Balladares administration. Tribalbos notes that nearly half of Panama's beaches are inaccessible by road and that the road would open them up for public recreation and tourism development.

So why so little response about this project? Some of the reasons include that a map of a proposed route has yet to be published, the area's population is dispersed in small settlements, contact with the rest of Panama is limited, and illiteracy runs high in these areas (where Spanish is often a second language behind Ngabere in any case). Any local resident who wants to personally protest to the Martinelli administration --- or register his or her support for the project --- has to take a boat ride to Colon or Chiriqui Grande, then proceed by road to the capital.

As plans progress on this project, listen for that silence to end. What the caciques and the Ngobe-Bugle General Congress eventually have to say will be an important factor in this matter.

The Colon to Colombia road

At a regional summit meeting in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, President Martinelli said what the presidents of Colombia and Mexico have long wanted to hear. Colombia has for many decades asked Panama to close the gap in the Pan-American Highway, so that rich Colombians might drive to their shopping trips in New York, Canadians might get in their cars to head for winter digs in Tierra del Fuego and so on. The closure of this gap is also part of the grand Mexican vision contained in the Plan Puebla-Panama. So Martinelli said that Panama would finally be connected to Colombia by road, not by piercing the Darien Gap but by extending the road from eastern Colon province through Kuna Yala.

Rather immediately a probable 2014 presidential candidate, former Panama City mayor Juan Carlos Navarro, rejected the idea. Navarro, who first became a public figure as an environmentalist leader, said on RPC radio that the proposal "would do away with indigenous culture and with nature," and would only "open the door to drug trafficking and gangsterism" in return.

In a TVN interview environmentalist leader Raisa Banfield, an architect who rose to public prominence criticizing Panama City development decisions made without taking infrastructure issues into consideration, called the announcement about the road through Kuna Yala "hasty" because it was made without taking either environmental or social factors into consideration.

Probably of much greater consequence, the Kuna General Congress blasted the Martinelli proposal as "irresponsible" and complained that the Kunas were never consulted about this.

The uproar prompted Martinelli to backtrack and claim that his remarks at the Guanacaste summit were misinterpreted by the Colombian press and that Panamanian media picked up the mistake. In a clarification he said that he told Colombian President Álvaro Uribe that a road through the Darien Gap is out of the question and that his government prefers a coastal route, but denied that there is a specific project on the table for such a coastal road.

The Boquete-Bocas road

Alarm bells went off when Minister of Public Works Federico Suárez announced that the Martinelli administration is "analyzing" a proposal for a "dry canal" linking Puerto Armuelles in Chiriqui province with Bocas del Toro, passing through Boquete.

Boquete was the epicenter of a monumental environmental battle over a proposed road during the course of the Moscoso administration. That plan, mostly a sordid little scam to raise the value of some land that Moscoso owned along the way, would have cut a road from Boquete to Cerro Punta through Volcan Baru National Park, which is part of the La Amistad International Park system. The battle over the road, which finally did not get built, featured three Moscoso-appointed National Environmental Authority (ANAM) directors in a row telling the president that they wouldn't approve her project, the formation of a pro-road goon squad and the building of a broad and militant local anti-road coalition with national and international support.

This "dry canal" would more or less pass over existing roads from Puerto Armuelles to the Pan-American Highway, along the latter to David, then north along the existing road to Boquete. The existing road and its bridge and drainage infrastructures might in places have to be widened or strengthened for more and heavier vehicles. Then the road would cut through or by parts of Volcan Baru and La Amistad parks, crossing the Talamanca range and descending to Bocas. Depending on the route taken, indigenous communities of the Bri Bri, Naso or Ngobe ethnic groups would probably be affected.

The locals who opposed Mireya's road immediately erupted in protest, backed by most of the national environmental organizations. One of the more radical Boquete activists, Carmencita Tedman, tied the whole idea of a "dry canal" to other hot-button issues around proposals for oil pipelines, strip mines and hydroelectric dams and argued that nobody who actually lives in Boquete would be well served by it. Ezequiel Miranda of the Association for the Conservation of the Biosphere alleged that the Martinelli administration was showing off "mindless ignorance and a total lack of knowledge of environmental matters," and added that it would threaten not only the parks but the Caldera River, from which much of Chiriqui gets its drinking water.

But Suárez argued that the project has been well thought out, with all of the measures needed to mitigate environmental effects to be taken. He argued that the present road that connects Bocas to the rest of Panama, which runs from Chiriqui through Fortuna to Chiriqui Grande, has drainage problems that leads to its being washed away in landslides from time to time. He said that the road is also necessary because Bocas doesn't have a good airport.

However, Raisa Banfield dismissed Suárez's assurances: "Any public work has an effect on the environment," she said. Tedman and others noted that there is already a road that goes from Boquete to Bocas, through Caldera, Chiriquicito and Hornito and then linking up with the Chiriqui - Chiriqui Grande road, but that this was rustic to begin with and has been left nearly impassable by lack of maintenance. She suggests that it would be far more economical and friendlier to the environment to fix and upgrade this road, and properly maintain the main road between Chiriqui and Bocas, than to build a new road. And if Bocas has no good airport, road critics say, the thing to do is to build a better airport, not a new road.

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