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Garbage woes, aggravated by an incompetent mayor

During his mayoral campaign, Bosco Vallarino accused the mayor at the time, Juan Carlos Navarro, of corruption in a refuse recycling contract with a Spanish company, and of corruption with respect to the purchase of a fleet of garbage trucks. Bosco promised 100 new garbage trucks on the streets. He said he wanted an energy-generating garbage incinerator for the city.

Bosco has never produced a shred of evidence of the corruption he alleged. His idea of coating the city in toxic incinerator ash has, mercifully, been blocked for the time being. There are just 55 garbage trucks on the streets of the capital now, only three of them compactors.

The mayor and the city council agreed on a no-bid contract to buy 51 new garbage trucks, and since absolutely nobody expects Bosco the Clown to use the mayor's office as a springboard to the presidency, they ought to be here in four months or so. Contrast that with the three years of litigation, then paperwork and border hassles created by PRD rivals in the national government, between when the Navarro administration ordered and received the last batch of garbage trucks.

So, with that $8.6 million purchase order accomplished, what does Bosco do? He asks each national government ministry to provide him with a garbage truck and driver, something that's not going to happen. He declares that privatization of garbage collection is the best way to deal with the garbage problem, even though that has proven to be a failure everywhere that it has been tried in Panama.

The best way to deal with Panama City's garbage problem is first of all to get rid of Bosco the Clown. He's poorly educated --- rather than just self-educated or informally educated --- and the problem is too complex for the man's small mind to understand. Then we need to move on several different levels, under the leadership of a competent mayor, to address the problem. The juggling of assets and personnel to get the garbage collected is just one part of it.

The cultural change of ending a throw-away mentality and culture of littering is a longer-term job, one that Navarro began with one of the few worthwhile government publicity campaigns we have seen. The messages that littering is unacceptable should be resumed.

Recycling is another important city effort, which must be accompanied by a public education campaign to be effective.

We need to reduce the input of solid wastes, which is a job for the national government but should be a cause led by the mayors, who should be demanding deposits on bottles and cans, charges per bag at grocery stores to encourage people to bring their own bags or baskets, incentives or edicts to reduce extra packaging materials that go with retail products. We need to look at regulations that reduce the volume of packaging materials that can neither be reused nor recycled.

Bosco Vallarino is and has been the subject of a number of criminal investigations, several of which are pending and some of which have been blocked by dubious court decisions. Removing him would be just a matter of lifting the shield of political interference in the judicial system and allowing him, for example, to face the ordinary consequences of his extraordinary warrantless raid on a San Francisco brothel.

Then we could see whether Roxana Méndez can pass the tests that Bosco has so dismally flunked. It's not a sure bet, but for the next few years it's our only option.

 
Institutionalized corruption

In recent days the National Assembly has made a couple of moves that build corruption into the structures of the way that public business is done.

The recent tax reforms levy a sales tax on luxury cars equivalent to 25 percent of the amount of the price in excess of the first $30,000. For cars under that price, the tax is five percent. An earlier legislative reform package that originally would have ended the legislators' car import duty exemption altogether was amended to give them an exemption up to the value of $100,000. The tax reform, however, did away with the import duties in favor of a sales tax. Now the legislators have given themselves a sales tax discount on cars --- they will pay five percent, regardless of value.

What it means is a continuation of a racket, whereby legislators buy luxury cars with a huge tax savings over what other people pay, and then lease or otherwise transfer those cars and tax savings to very wealthy private individuals. These tax break transfers are technically illegal, but the courts, prosecutors and legislatures have consistently refused to intervene. Thus we saw racketeer David Murcia Guzmán, serving a Colombian prison sentence as he awaits trial for drug money laundering in the United States, tooling around town in Lamborghinis that were in legislators' names.

National Assembly president José Luis Varela has made lame efforts to defend the practice, and both government and opposition deputies have supported it. But what the nation has to deal with is a built-in business tie between government and organized crime.

Now the legislature --- just the Martinelli coalition parties this time --- is moving to gut what's left of the right of parties to expel and remove elected officials who go against the policies of their parties. It's promoted as a freedom of conscience and independence of action move.

But let us recall the origins of the party discipline provisions in Panama's constitution: they were a concession by the dictatorship, which agreed to allow limited elections and as part of the offer granted this assurance that officials elected on opposition party slates would not be bribed into deserting to the dictatorship's side. And let us take notice of what's going on now: Ricardo Martinelli's Cambio Democratico party is moving the country toward a one-party regime, among other ways by using various means to convince elected officials of other parties to jump ship to Cambio Democratico.

While we might truthfully say nasty things about the parties that these elected officials are leaving in favor of Cambio Democratico, the mercenary attitudes of those who are switching parties are one of the great ethical problems of Panamanian political life.

Thus the Martinelli caucus's move against party discipline is at the same time both another attack on the constitutional rule of law and another institutionalized encouragement for bribery.

 
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