economy

Canal workers' request for a spot on the board ignored

President Martinelli's “democratic change” administration represents a certain change --- but only a little bit --- when one looks at the people whom he has appointed to important posts. Although he has appointed some former PRD folks, people who still belong to the opposition party generally need not apply, so that's a change from the Torrijos administration's partisan lineup. The family fiefdoms of the Moscoso administration, wherein a small clique of in-crowders were given the prerogative of putting all their relatives on the public payroll, have not reappeared.

However, to the extent that the Panamanian government has been for the most part a white minority regime, Martinelli has reinforced that tradition with his appointments. This is not to say that nobody black or brown or indigenous has been appointed by Martinelli. However, his team is overwhelmingly chosen from Panama's less than 10 percent white minority, and largely comes from three small groups of people:

• Panama's Italian community, of which dual Italian-Panamanian citizen Martinelli is a member;

• Martinelli's private company employees, business partners, and major customers and suppliers of his businesses; and

• Prominent members of the political parties in his ruling coalition.

In the last category, we see familiar faces from previous governments. With only a few exceptions, the Italian-Panamanians and business associates come to government with little public sector experience.

The great promise that successive Panamanian governments have made is not to politicize the canal. At the top level, it has been routinely broken, even if down in the ranks we don't see a big turnover after every election. People may occasionally get in the door at the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) on the basis of political ties, and once inside the office politics can be ferocious, but the authority is unlike most Panamanian government ministries and quasi-public foundations and authorities in that its labor and professional force is not stuffed full of party activists who may or may not be willing or able to do their jobs. The ACP board of directors, however, is and has been exclusively recruited from the oligarchy and the political class, with most appointees being members of both.

The Panama Canal labor unions had requested a seat on the board, but Martinelli is opposed to labor unions and never seriously considered such a thing.

Instead, the president chose:

• Nicolás Corcione Pérez Balladares, a nephew of the former president who is now under house arrest and a construction company owner. He's a member of the board of directors for the government's nascent Metrobus public bus company. Corcione is yet another member of the Italian community serving this administration, whose brother Carlos Corcione is on the board of directors of the Registro Publico.  Corcione is a business partner with President Martinelli in the Plaza Pacifica, Courtyard View and Ocean Park developments in the Punta Pacifica area.
  
  Nicolás Corcione is much disliked by the SUNTRACS construction workers union because his Grupo Corcione construction company uses a company union, and it is alleged, thumbs its nose at building site safety regulations. At the company's Torre 7400 luxury condo project in San Francisco, the failure to take the basic safety measure of shoring up an excavation led to three workers' deaths and another employee died there in a fall. Those deaths led to a wave of strikes and protests about building safety and company unionism, in which thousands of union members were arrested and three SUNTRACS members were shot by cops or company goons.

• Marco Ameglio Samudio, another Italian-Panamanian and an unsuccessful presidential primary candidate in the 2008 Panameñista contest. He served in the legislature for two terms, the first time winning election as a Liberal and then switching to the Arnulfistas (who became the Panameñistas). He was the unsuccessful 2004 Arnulfista candidate for mayor of Panama City. He is one of the scions of the Bonlac dairy processing fortune. Bonlac has long-standing business ties with Martinelli, as its products are sold through the president's Super 99 supermarkets.
  
  (The new Panama Canal Authority director's brother, Francisco Ameglio, also served in the legislature and has been named in the scandals about the diversion of Social Investment Fund (FIS) resources through the name of a Catholic convent which did not receive or know about the money transferred through its accounts. But after a private auditor noted the irregularities  in the FIS, President Martinelli denounced its report as unauthorized and the investigation was handed over to Comptroller General Gioconda de Bianchini, who came to her position with the government from her previous job as the top accountant for Ricardo Martinelli's private businesses.)

• José Antonio Sosa Arango, an engineer by training, a banker (Banvivienda), construction executive (Empresas Residencial SA - Brisas del Golf) and former president of the Panamanian Chamber of Construction (CAPAC). He is related to many of the oligarchic families and in particular his cousin, Aníbal Galindo, is leader of the Liberal faction that is part of the Martinelli coalition.

  (The new ACP director should not be confused with an infamous former Attorney General with a somewhat similar name.)

  (This appointee is also not to be confused with his father of a similar name, who during the dictatorship was a partner in the Van Dam, Sosa y Barbero consortium that was hired in a no-bid process to build a bridge across the canal. The bridge was never built, but the consortium was paid at least $24.3 million and many more millions of the money appropriated for the project disappeared. The Van Dam Bridge Scandal has been the source of rumor and speculation for many years and to the extent that some of the published allegations or insinuations have pointed at the dictatorship's financial guru at the time, Ernesto "Toro" Pérez Balladares, it has been the stuff of criminal defamation charges and civil libel suits brought by Toro. The Van Dam project was a 1980 deal between Panama's military strongman at the time, Omar Torrijos, and Venezuela's corrupt President Carlos Andrés Pérez. The essential racket of it, on both the Panamanian and Venezuelan sides, was about tacit agreements to steer the subcontracts to political favorites.)

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