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The Panama Canal Authority, which has been losing a few customers due to its high tolls, met recently and decided to postpone scheduled toll increases until the beginning of next year. In their press hype they styled it as a "freeze" on tolls, which is a little bit of a stretch.

The world economy has made a mess of the canal usage and revenue projections that were sold to the Panamanian people in the state-financed campaign for the "yes" side in the canal expansion referendum. Construction is well underway, but now we hear that the ACP just discovered an earthquake fault going right through the new Pacific side locks site, which will thus require further reinforcement. Actually, that fault was well known for decades and the "no" side mentioned it in the campaign, but only the "yes" side got public funding and this was spent on a scurrilous information control strategy in favor of the Torrijos - Alemán Zubieta Plan.

Yes, there are going to be about 7,000 canal expansion jobs, and this public works project is rippling through the economy with a "multiplier effect." No, this multiplier effect will not create more than a quarter-million jobs as the ACP so dishonestly claimed back then. (And notice, all of their claims made during the canal expansion referendum campaign have been erased from the ACP website.)

The 2006 referendum may be water under the bridge. I thought, and think, that the canal needed to be expanded but that the Torrijos - Alemán Zubieta Plan was dishonestly presented and probably not the best way to proceed. But they got about one-third of the electorate --- the disciplined PRD rank-and-file and hardly anybody else --- to vote for the thing and slightly more than 10 percent of the electorate showed up to vote "no," which added up to passage in a landslide --- in an election where the great majority of Panamanians chose not to vote.

We need to keep this history in mind because the architect of the ACP's information control game, Ricardo Martinelli when he was Minister of Canal Affairs in the kleptocratic Mireya Moscoso administration, is gearing up for some sort of "non-binding plebiscite" later this year. Do not count on anything affecting the important issues of how Panama governs itself to go before the voters. Do expect demagoguery of various sorts, and state-financed campaigns that with very little subtlety will be about boosting the political standing of Mr. Martinelli and his coalition partners.

So, don't we have an Electoral Tribunal to put a damper on such abuses?

Theoretically, maybe we do. However, that last bastion of PRD control in the national government has a pretty ugly track record and its partisan balance is about to shift in Martinelli's favor.

Recall the former treasurer of Mr. Martinelli's Cambio Democratico Party, the president's cousin Ramón. Under the Moscoso administration he was both a Central American Parliament (PARLACEN) deputy and head of the IDAAN water and sewer utility, which was given as a fiefdom to Ricardo Martinelli's party. Ramón Martinelli promptly enacted a payroll deduction wherein IDAAN workers would pay Cambio Democratico party dues. That sort of scam was par for the course in the Moscoso years, but highly illegal. The principal beneficiary of the arrangement was Cambio Democratico's owner, one Ricardo Martinelli. Legal troubles ensued. First, it was noted that the statute that created PARLACEN bars its deputies from holding any other government job. So was Ramón Martinelli going to quit PARLACEN to run IDAAN? No way. The Electoral Prosecutor was looking into the dues checkoff, and being a PARLACEN deputy gave Ramón immunity that being head of IDAAN did not. So Ramón stepped down from IDAAN, kept his immunity from criminal investigation, and the dues checkoff was dismissed as a dumb but innocent mistake.

Not completely dismissed, however. Charges were filed but quickly put on hold because of Ramón Martinelli's immunity. But the charges were not just filed against the erstwhile IDAAN director who's now in a Mexican slammer for laundering money for one of the most vicious of the drug cartels. They also named the principal beneficiary of the illegal party dues payroll deduction, Ricardo Martinelli.

Out went Mireya and in came Martín, and there was a widely rumored and circumstantially more or less proven "Pacto MaMi," wherein the PRD and the Panameñistas tacitly agreed not to investigate or prosecute one another. The IDAAN dues checkoff case was not dismissed, but allowed to hang in limbo. It's still pending.

Martinelli made no agreement like the Pacto MaMi with the PRD, and he and the courts and Public Ministry that he now controls are on many fronts pursing the PRD. In most cases, it's about corruption that actually happened and ought to be prosecuted. But Martinelli came to the presidency with two of three Electoral Tribunal magistrates coming from the PRD, and with an Electoral Prosecutor, Boris Barrios, who was also PRD and flagrantly partisan about it.

But Barrios also appears to have been a flagrant crook, who in a previous post as a notary was allegedly involved in the falsification of documents and embezzlement. Barrios resigned under pressure in February and Martinelli replaced him with Fernando Alemán.

With Martinelli's man now in charge of the case against the Martinellis, it can be reasonably presumed that the case will not see the light of day. It could go on in limbo forever, but what I would suspect is that some crucial documents in the rather straightforward case will somehow go missing. See, "the dog ate it" is considered a proper excuse in Panamanian politics.

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