These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information. Estos anuncios son interactivos. Toque en ellos para seguir a las páginas de web.
Forest protectors from an Afro-Colombian community set out on patrol on horseback in the far northwest of Colombia. Photo by Bart Crezee.
Successful Colombian rainforest project exposes
problems with carbon emissions trading
by Bart Crezee — De Correspondent / Mongabay
Ferney Caicedo, a trained forest ranger, is slipping and sliding over the forest path while he leads a horse and a group of four other people up a hill. Rain from the night before has made the wooded slopes almost impossible to ascend. The humidity is high. Sweat drips constantly from underneath Caicedo’s cap. This is the tropical rainforest in the extreme northwest of Colombia.
This is familiar terrain to Caicedo. On a clear day, he says that you can see the Caribbean Sea from atop the peak he is now climbing. In the other direction lies the border with Panama, somewhere in the impenetrable jungle of the isthmus connecting North and South America. Known as the Darién Gap, it runs between Colombia and Panama and is made up of marshland, mountains, and tropical rainforest. It’s the only still-unfinished part of the famous Pan-American Highway, which will someday connect North and South America. Although there have been plans to complete the road for years, so far the impenetrable jungle, as well as several rebel groups hiding out in it, have made it impossible.
Caicedo and his team of colleagues work to protect the forests for COCOMASUR, short for “Consejo Comunitario Mayor de la Cuenca del Rio Tolo y la Zona Costera Sur de Acandí,”the community council of the Tolo River basin and the coastal zone south of Acandí. The organization represents 2,600 Afro-Colombians, or about half of the total population of the municipality of Acandí. These Colombians are descended from African slaves. In Colombia, Afro-Colombians are seen as a separate ethnic group, along with the many native communities in the country. About 80 percent of the population of the northwestern region of Chocó is Afro-Colombian.
Wearing fluorescent orange safety vests and armed with machetes and GPS equipment, they trek through the forest every day to stop deforestation.
Some of the trees Caicedo works to protect can reach over 100 feet high.
“The wood from one of these trees will fetch a lot of money on the market,”he said. But the community is too remote for logging to be profitable for them. Acandí, the closest village, is an hour away from the community by motorcycle taxi. From there, it’s another two hours by boat over the Caribbean Sea to Turbo, the nearest major city. The dense forests make overland travel impossible.
Consequently, since before anyone can remember, the rainforest has been burned down to create new land for agriculture, on average about 200 hectares (nearly 500 acres) per year. In particular, large landowners from outside the community have tried to get their hands on more and more valuable land this way.
Meanwhile, COCOMASUR has found a way for the community to earn money from their own forests. By stopping illegal logging, the community has been able to prevent a lot of CO2 emissions. And that’s worth money these days, in the form of carbon credits. Under an international trading mechanism called REDD+, (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation), these credits can be bought by banks, energy companies, and other corporations such as airlines wanting to reduce their ecological footprint.
The Chocó-Darién Conservation Corridor, as the community’s REDD+ project is called, is the first REDD+ project to be certified in Colombia. In 2012 it was the first REDD+ project operating on community land in the world. The Chocó-Darién project was awarded a Gold Level certification from the Climate, Community & Biodiversity Alliance for its outstanding contribution to biodiversity. Over 500 different bird species have been recorded within the project boundaries. The area is also home to 42 endangered animal species (including a Central American tapir and the Colombian spider monkey) and 15 endangered plant species.
The fact that this is collectively-owned land is important, said Brodie Ferguson in a Skype interview. An American anthropologist who helped the village set up the REDD+ project, Ferguson explains that under the Colombian constitution, Afro-Colombian communities have the right to collective ownership of the land they have traditionally lived on.
“This made it possible for COCOMASUR to decide together about the use of their land,”Ferguson said. “Their culture and identity as a community are directly connected with the land on which they live.”
This sentiment is underlined by the text on the white T-shirts that Caicedo and his team are wearing under their vests: “Por el rescata de nuestra identidad cultural, y el manejo ordenado del territorio“(For the rescue of our cultural identity, and the orderly management of the land).
Taking matters into their own hands
From the late 1980s until the beginning of this century, this area was plagued by heavy violence. The Afro-Colombians were driven apart and thrown off their land by extreme-right-wing paramilitary groups paid by large landowners from Medellín, Bogotá or other cities. For next to nothing, these landowners could buy up enormous parcels of land and destroy the rainforest to create pastureland for grazing their livestock. You still have to pass their vast livestock ranches on the way to this far corner of Colombia.
You still have to pass these landowners’ vast livestock ranches on the way to this far corner of Colombia.
Everildys Córdoba was one of those who fled the violence with her children. Since returning to the village in 2010, she has devoted herself to healing the divided community of COCOMASUR. With her jet-black hair and sparkling dark eyes, the charismatic Córdoba is a natural leader who everyone calls out hello to when she walks down the street.
Córdoba’s family has always been the heart of the community. Her uncle was the village leader in 2009, when he first put forth the idea of REDD+. Following in his footsteps, Córdoba has taken on the project’s day-to-day operations.
Starting up something new in this part of Colombia is a nearly impossible task. There are only three ways for the local population to earn money: logging, working as a day laborer on one of the big cattle ranches, or emigrating to the city.
“None of the three are long-term options,”Córdoba said. “Saving the forest through the REDD+ program was the best way to invest in the community.”
A successful project
But convincing everyone of the idea wasn’t easy. The community of 2,600 is spread out over nine hamlets and was still extremely divided in the aftermath of the violence. It took Córdoba over two years to get all the residents to back the plan.
“But the people who had objected the most then are the most enthusiastic now,”she said with a grin.
After a lengthy information campaign, the whole community decided to approve the project. From that day on, cutting down forests for agriculture was prohibited. Timber for constructing houses may only be cut in specially designated zones now. In the meantime, nearly 13,500 hectares (some 33,000 acres) of tropical rainforest have been protected.
The logistical challenges of the project were legion. To begin with, the forest boundaries and its carbon content had to be determined. Ranger team leader Caicedo spent six months in the forest measuring the thickness and height of the trees. Then it was another six months, using satellite data, before this information could be translated into actual carbon credits. But now that it’s done, everyone knows precisely how much carbon is stored in the forest.
In 2012 these credits were among the first 100,000 carbon credits to be put on the market.
Over the next 30 years, this land is expected to generate a reduction of 2.8 million metric tons of CO2 — that’s like taking 25,000 cars off the road every year. The Chocó-Darién Conservation Corridor has an initial duration of 30 years, during which new CO2 credits are issued every other year by external certification bodies.
The project has Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) and the Climate, Community & Biodiversity Standard (CCB) certification. These are the two most widely used standards for REDD+ projects worldwide.
On patrol against illegal logging
Out on patrol with Caicedo, we come to a flat clearing. Two years ago, a large landowner from outside the community clear-cut the land even though it was illegal, and soon will be grazing his cows here. Tree trunks still lay strewn about, rotting away in the grass.
“These forests have to be protected,”Caicedo said. “Not only for the carbon credits, but also to retain the water and prevent erosion. In the long term, that benefits the cattle ranchers too.”
In addition, the project helps maintain the region’s astonishing biodiversity. Recently, some villagers even spotted a rare wild tiger, a sign of a thriving ecosystem.
Caicedo explains that when they run into illegal loggers, they simply start the conversation by “telling them that logging is prohibited in this area.”That can be dangerous, since some of the loggers are armed. Until now, no one dared to try to stop them.
But Caicedo knows he has the support of the entire community.
“Our goal is mainly prevention,”he said. “Just by being in the forest every day.”
The challenge of marketing
However, selling the CO2 certificates makes protecting the forest look easy by comparison. COCOMASUR sells the CO2 saved by the project on the international carbon-credit market. But that’s more complicated than it sounds.
The problems started in 2012, according to Ferguson.
“We went to the market to sell the first CO2 credits,”he said. “But it turned out that the demand that we anticipated in 2009 didn’t exist anymore.”
Worldwide, there are eleven obligatory (“compliance”) compensation markets, of which the European ETS (emissions trading system) is the best known. But these markets were only intended for specific industrial sectors. International trade in REDD+ certificates is often not even an element of these trading systems, and thus takes place on a voluntary basis.
Ferguson therefore had to very actively approach buyers himself, and ran into roadblocks.
“Nobody is obliged to buy CO2 compensation,”he said. “That means that projects like ours are not financially sustainable in the long term.”
In total, 27.3 million metric tons of CO2 were traded on the voluntary offset market in 2015. At the same time, 39.7 million metric tons went unsold. In other words, for every CO2 credit sold, 1.6 credits stayed on the shelf.
In the meantime, REDD+ projects are putting new CO2 credits on to the market every year. An additional 40 million metric tons is expected for 2016 alone. This brings the total surplus to nearly 80 million metric tons of CO2, according to a report by environmental NGO Forest Trends. This surplus has substantially lowered the price of CO2 credits from REDD+ projects for the last few years. In 2012 the average price was still almost $8 per metric ton. In 2013 it dropped to about $5, in 2014 to $4 and last year the price was fluctuating around just over $3 a metric ton.
“The market has completely bottomed out,”Ferguson said.
In 2016, the price for a metric ton of CO2 rose slightly, to $4.25 a ton in September, notes the 2016 REDD Price Report by Thomson Reuters, following the Paris climate accord and agreements about emissions reductions in the aviation sector. Ferguson hopes that the aviation sector will use REDD+ to compensate its emissions, which would at least partly offset the low demand.
Investing more doesn’t work anymore
Since 2013, it’s been very hard for COCOMASUR to make ends meet. The income they make from selling CO2 credits goes to two things: paying off the debts incurred by setting up the project, and the ongoing operational expenses, such as bookkeeping, forest patrols and new certification rounds.
All other income from sales of offsets must go to a “development fund,”for solar panels, a health clinic or other priorities set by COCOMASUR. The problem is that income from sales of CO2 credits is not enough to even cover the operational expenses now.
“A minimum price of something like $10 per ton of CO2 would be an enormous help to REDD+ projects worldwide,”Ferguson said.
“When we started this project, the expectation was that the carbon price would be $10-$20 a ton,”he added. “But the prices are much lower now. That’s a fundamental problem. The idea is to use the carbon income to create other forms of employment for the community, the way microfinancing helps small businesses. We can’t make those investments now.”
Ferguson says that solution should include a “minimum price”of about $10 per ton of CO2 to help REDD+ projects globally.
“That would be a real incentive for sectors like aviation to reduce emissions,”he added. “But that means that someone has to pay the difference, so ticket prices will go up.”
Thus, companies will have to be forced into it after all. It’s ultimately another form of taxation, a carbon tax, and Ferguson said that it will “require political will.”
In spite of its financial problems, according to community leader Córdoba, the project is still quite a success — largely because of the sense of community it created.
“The project was jointly implemented. It gave structure to a torn community,”she said.
More than thirty jobs, including Caicedo’s, have been created, and have kept the project going. Investments were also made in an office and computers. “This gives COCOMASUR the ability to organize similar projects for the community in the future. It’s made us much stronger,”said Córdoba.
Córdoba is also proud of the fact that everything was set up without government support. Recently, COCOMASUR began to help set up REDD+ projects in other parts of the country. The government sees the project as a model of what REDD+ can do for the country.
For Ferguson, ultimately the most important aspect of REDD+ is the increased awareness.
“Nobody likes polluting; nobody’s smiling while they write a check to pay for offsets,”he said. Though REDD+ is ultimately a temporary solution, he thinks that providing direct compensation is making organizations and consumers more aware of their impact on the climate. “The indigenous communities in Colombia are reconnecting with the opportunities their land presents for them.”
Caicedo agrees: “Thanks to REDD+, we’ve been able to claim another future for ourselves.”
The Chocó-Darién Conservation Corridor, as the community’s REDD+ project is called, is the first REDD+ project to be certified in Colombia. In 2012 it was the first REDD+ project operating on community land in the world.
COCOMASUR, an organization representing 2,600 Afro-Colombians, utilizes a team of forest rangers to monitor the tropical rainforest.
Despite their success, now the community is struggling to get compensated due to a carbon trading market that has “bottomed out.”
Bart Crezee is a contributing correspondent on carbon offsets for De Correspondent. This article originally appeared in Dutch on www.decorrespondent.nl. You can find him on Twitter at @bartcrezee.
~ ~ ~
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information.
That’s the big question the mass media is asking about the sudden failure of the Republican leaders’ relentless push to demonize and kill Obamacare.
After all, the GOP bragged that they now control the legislative game and would quickly knock Obama’s trademark reform out of the park. And their star slugger was on deck — Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed dealmaker extraordinaire!
Trump assured his fawning political cronies that selling his “repeal and replace” plan to Congress was no different from selling memberships in his luxury golf resorts. “It’s the same thing,” he insisted. “Really, it is.”
So, why did he fail?
Most media speculation has focused on the real estate mogul’s inability to grasp the nuances of legislating. True, but the fundamental cause of the embarrassing public collapse of the Trumpcare plan wasn’t about process, but substance.
As a master huckster, Trump could probably sell BS to a feedlot — but this bill was far more repugnant than the stinkiest load of BS. It gutted health care coverage for millions, while also sneaking in nearly a trillion-dollar tax cut for huge corporations and Wall Street speculators.
Even some Republican lawmakers gagged on the stench. But the real story is that the American people themselves — including many working-class voters who believed Trump was actually going to help them — got a whiff of the nasty stuff he was peddling.
Alerted by grassroots groups like Our Revolution and Indivisible, a mass rebellion erupted in the home districts of Republican congress critters who were selling out the health of America’s workaday majority.
As the protests spread and dozens of GOP lawmakers washed their hands of his bill, Trump was exposed as a clueless dealmaker, repeatedly asking his staff: “Is this really a good bill?”
Maybe Trump didn’t know what he was selling, but it’s a good thing the rest of us did.
~ ~ ~
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information.
Ahora las investigaciones van más allá de Mossack Fonseca. Las leyes de la India dicen que es un delito tener cualquier tipo de empresa o cuenta bancaria offshore con secretismo y por la mayoría los que ya están bajo investigación no fueron encontrados a través de los Papeles de Panamá.
Papeles robados en Panamá
por Kevin Harrington-Shelton
Como sería de esperar, la riposta del gobierno al primer aniversario de estos NO ha sido para educar a la población sobre la complejidad del problema. ¡Que es mucho más que un nombre!
Ni de su solución: nivelar el campo de competencia entre los centros offshore.
Por lo contrario, repitió el idéntico enfoque de hace un año: un trasnochado chauvinismo, que objeta sólo a que a la información robada aquí lleva el nombre de nuestro país.
Pero el tiempo pareciera haberse detenido solamente para las avestruces de Palacio. Porque en el interim èsta bola de nieve sigue creciendo en el resto del mundo. Aunque el Presidente Varela reitere que “yá se acabó”.
¡En Narnia, será!
Uno de los elementos de la historia-oficial la repitió hoy nuestro Vicecanciller: “El 80% de esas compañías no eran siquiera panameñas”.
Eso podría ser cierto, pero NO es la esencia del problema. A las que sí lo son, se les tolera de todo –dependiendo de quién sea su agente residente. EL problema es la impunidad imperante una sociedad esencialmente tribal.
Y los medios panameños son parte del problema, no de su solución. Especialmente el diario de referencia La Prensa, quien manipula la información disponible sobre el problema.
Ejemplo. Ni su afiliada Transparencia Internacional ha divulgado aquí, que su capítulo en Londres completó un estudio que sí llega al meollo del problema fuera de Panamá.
El mercado inmobiliario de Londres es uno de los caletos preferidos por kleptócratas del mundo (irónicamente, por su seguridad jurídica…..).
De 45 mil propiedades adquiridas allá por sociedades offshore, utilizando datos de “los papeles robados en Panamá”, se pudo ubicar (por ahora…) fincas pertenecientes a 986 “personas políticamente expuestas” (PEPs) –que aparecen en el directorio Thomson Reuters– con un valor de $1,500 millones.
El 50% de esas sociedades propietarias eran panameñas; sólo un 25% originaban en las Islas Vírgenes Británicas.
Ciertamente no TODAS estas serían (necesariamente) clientes de Mossack & Fonseca, sus franquiciados, similares y afines. Y varios sin duda lo serían, via bancos re-vendedores en la propia City. Pero el denominador común es el casi-intractable “secreto de oficina” que subyace el derecho corporativo panameño.
Lo cual dificulta el cobro de impuestos a otros países. El Parlamento inglés descubrió entre los documentos robados, que 3 mil sociedades “organizadas por Mossack Fonseca” poseían 6 mil inmuebles en el Reino Unido –valoradas en al menos $100 mil millones.
Ayer, en la Cámara de los Lores, el obispo de Peterborough destiló otra perspectiva moral. Las Naciones Unidas estima en $100 mil millones ANUALES, el costo a los países del Tercer Mundo de tales kleptócratas –tres veces el monto global de asistencia para su desarrollo. ¿Quién dijo “lavado”?
Esta corrupción es un cuchillo de doble-filo, que afecta a diario al propio Tesoro panameño, en la triangulación internacional.
Y de otras formas. Se desconoce si la residencia hacia donde mudó (innecesariamente…) la embajada de Panamá en Londres el gobierno Varela, estuviera arrendada de una offshore. Ni quién es el verdadero propietario de este inmueble contratado con fondos públicos.
Pero sería de suponer que, la Canciller sí “conoce a tu cliente”… lo cual es el meollo del problema.
~ ~ ~
Estos anuncios son interactivos. Toque en ellos para seguir a las páginas de web
US Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Thomas D. Waldhauser, to whom Donald Trump appears to have transferred war powers reserved for Congress by the US Constitution. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Kayla V. McTaw.
Has a three-star US general
declared war on Somalia?
Within expanded authority President Trump granted him last Wednesday, General Thomas David Waldhauser appears to have declared war on or in Somalia in the name of the United States by designating part of that African nation a war zone.
With our country now committing military attacks in many nations with which we are not constitutionally at war, Lt. Gen. Waldhauser’s declaring now that a certain area in southern Somalia is a war zone apparently both exposes and represents a new authority that Trump may have in effect passed on to the Pentagon and military officers.
A graduate of Bemidji State University in Northern Minnesota and a much-decorated combat veteran of three US wars, Waldhauser’s three-star ranking in the Marines is roughly equivalent to a vice-admiral’s in the Navy. He is now the commander of the US Africa Command, one of the nation’s six regional commands around the world.
The recent notable increase in civilian casualties (“collateral damage”) in US raids in several conflicts, including about 150 civilian dead in Mosul on March 17, has caused some critical alarm that Trump’s presidency is to blame. The Trump White House and the US military are contending there has been no change in the military’s “rules of engagement.” But Trump’s announced order giving the Pentagon and the military more autonomy in how they wage military attacks without his OK now raises the even larger question, has Trump given the military the power to declare wars on or in other nations in the name of the United States?
Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution says “Congress shall have power … to declare war,” but Congress, many of its members politically ducking highly challengeable “yes” or “no” votes on starting wars, often, in flaring military situations, in fact cedes its constitutional war-declaring power to the president. Beginning in the 1930s, proposals to require a citizens’ referendum to declare war were proposed and failed. In 1973 Congress enacted the War Powers Resolution limiting the president’s war-making powers in literal US self-defense to 60 days, after which he must go to Congress for approval.
The military’s expanded power in Somalia was revealed, not by Congress, but by Trump and then Lt. Gen. Waldhauser in an Associated Press story posted Friday in which the new war zone in Somalia and the topic of civilian casualties were all but buried. In defending his need for the new latitude, the general may have implied that he could if he wished declare “free fire zones” (zones where everybody can be killed, as in Vietnam) by explaining that he would not do that in Somalia.
In her story Lolita C. Baldor leads with the news that “Trump has granted the US military more authority to go after al-Qaida-linked militants in Somalia, approving a Pentagon request to allow more aggressive airstrikes, officials said Thursday…. Trump’s decision … allows US special operations forces to accompany Somali National Army troops and other African allies as they move closer to the fight, enabling them to call in offensive airstrikes quicker.”
“Portions of southern Somalia, excluding the capital Mogadishu, will be considered a warzone, officials said. That designation gives US forces on the ground the authority to call in offensive airstrikes, rather than waiting for approval by higher level commanders.”
The Pentagon had asked for the greater authority last month. In Somalia, the story continued, “Al-Shabab has carried out deadly attacks in Mogadishu and elsewhere…. Attacks on military bases in the past two years have slowed joint African Union-Somali offensives against the group….”
“Waldhauser … told members of Congress last week he wouldn’t turn Somalia into a ‘free fire zone.’ He dismissed suggestions the change could cause more civilian casualties.
“The new guidelines pertain to US assistance of Somali and African Union troops, not unilateral American missions in the Horn of Africa country. About 50 US commandos have been rotating in and out of Somalia to advise and assist local troops. That number could now increase slightly at certain times, said officials….”
The current population of Mogadishu is about 1,400,000. What are the military’s “rules of engagement” in a war zone, as compared with not in a war zone? If a three-star general can declare a part of Somalia a war zone for the purposes of US bombing, under Trump what rank must a US military officer have to in effect declare war under its war zone rules on or in a country?
Ronnie Dugger won the 2011 George Polk career award in journalism. He founded The Texas Observer, has written biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, a book on Hiroshima and one on universities, many articles in The New Yorker, The Nation, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and other publications, and is now writing a book on new thinking about nuclear war. Email: ronniedugger@gmail.com
~ ~ ~
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information.
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information. Estos anuncios son interactivos. Toque en ellos para seguir a las páginas de web.
So, should I run for chair of Democrats Abroad Panama? / ¿Entonces, debería buscar a ser presidente de las Demócratas en el Extranjero de Panamá?
Music by which to think about running
On April 8 the Panama chapter of Democrats Abroad elects a new board and officers. I am currently not on the board, but I have been. I worked awfully hard to deliver a 71% victory for Bernie Sanders last year, then also put in a lot of effort in the losing general election campaign for Hillary Clinton. The latter I did not because I love Hillary and the policies for which she stands all that much, but because I knew the alternative, which we see unfolding today. And I see what has to be done — not vain and ultimately idle talk of impeachment or treason trials, but a relentless campaign between now and November of 2018 to cripple Donald Trump by throwing the Republicans out of power in one or both houses of Congress. And at the same time, laying the foundation for a fair and democratic process of choosing a Democratic nominee in 2020 — something we were in large part denied in 2016, and something that involves some battles with some entrenched peope who intend to rig things again. I surely want to be a part of this — but in what sort of a role?
And I think, with some of my favorite music playing, about what an imperfect character I am. Who am I, with all of the nasty things that people can truthfully say about me? One thing is, a kid who went to Sunday School at the Margarita Union Church, and liked the tales of the Old Testament prophets and heroes, all of whom had feet of clay. Who am I? I served the Ypsilanti, Michigan city council when I was young, then as an appointed member of that city’s building code appeals board. I worked my precint in Ypsilanti — for which I was the elected Democratic precinct delegate — for Jesse Jackson both times, and he won the primaries in that mostly white neighborhood both times. He famously said, and advised everybody to remind herself or himself, “I am somebody.” But me? I like the way that the 1980s British two-tone band, The Specials, put it: “Just because you’re nobody, it doesn’t mean that you’re no good.”
And so I think and write. The music that I like, and that inspires me, also says something about me. With this stuff playing in the headphones — or with my ears turned and eyes upon and entire attention directed at something else — should I run for chair?
Meet on Saturday, April 8, with a tour of the historic church and light refreshments part of the deal. See the Democrats Abroad Panama Facebook pages for details about online voting if you can’t make it. By its side entrance the church and the meeting room downstairs have barrier-free access.
~ ~ ~
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information. Estos anuncios son interactivos. Toque en ellos para seguir a las páginas de web.
TheViolet Sabrewing/ El Alasable Violáceo. Foto por Kermit Nourse.
The Violet Sabrewing / El Alasable Violáceo
Kermit Nourse’s Birds of Panama
Today’s hummingbird from Panama is the Violet Sabrewing. This bird can be found at Cerro Punta, a small agricultural town located at 6500 feet close to the border of Costa Rica. For me its one of the nicest places on the planet with the one of the greatest shows on earth –- the hummingbirds which whiz past your ear or perch in front of you just long enough so as not to be photographed. I’ve seen at least seven species there.
El colibrí de hoy de Panamá es Alasable Violáceo. Esta ave puede ser encontrada en Cerro Punta, una pequeña ciudad agrícola localizada en 6500 pies cerca de la frontera de Costa Rica. Para mí su de los sitios más agradables en el planeta con el que de los mayores espectáculos en la tierra –-los colibríes que zumban por delante de su oído o percha delante de usted sólo el bastante mucho tiempo para no ser fotografiados. He visto al menos 7 especies allí.
~ ~ ~
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information. Estos anuncios son interactivos. Toque en ellos para seguir a las páginas de web.
The new Atlantic Side bridge over the Panama Canal under construction, as shown on the National Assembly’s website in mid-October 2016, with the enthusiastic report that it was 52 percent done and there weren’t any cracks in it. Photo by the Asamblea Nacional.
What the ACP says, doesn’t say, and ignores
by Eric Jackson
The Panama Canal Authority’s (ACP’s) information control game was set up during the Panama Canal’s transition from US to Panamanian administration, under the direction of one Ricardo Martinelli Berrocal, then Minister of Canal Affairs, later President of the Republic of Panama, now a criminal fugitive being harbored by the United States government in Miami. It has not changed very much over the years. Its main features include:
Ferocious attacks on Panama Canal employees’ unions and a relentless if not so effective effort find or better yet prevent any whistle blowers;
A cozy relationship with the corporate mainstream media based primarily on family and business ties with their owners and managers, and also on the exchange of access for obedient reporting;
The breaking of major, controversial or dubious stories through foreign media, whose reporters will neither bring up questions of importance to Panamanians that would not occur to people who have not followed Panamanian realities nor question assertions that any self-respecting Panamanian journalist would not let pass unchallenged;
A presumption that Panamanians have no history and no memory;
The principle that conflicts of interest are not news, and moreover that because of the lack of any comprehensive Panamanian law on the subject, don’t exist and can’t exist; and
A fraud artist’s calculation that suckers — including a whole nation or even the whole world — can’t figure out basic incongruities in a business pitch.
Panama has seen all of that in recent days.
On March 28 La Prensa ran a gushy little ACP press release story about how construction of the new bridge over the Atlantic entrance to the canal is 56.5 percent complete, and that the project will cost $570 million.
Back when the canal expansion project was first announced in 2006, two things jumped out from the ACP’s first charts that called their financial projections sharply into question, although the mainstream media had been bought off with huge “Yes” campaign advertising buys so did not see fit to mention those.
On the revenue side, there was the projection that the growth in US imports from China would grow at the rate of increase that was seen between 2000 and 2005 through at least 2025. Not a series of straight ascending lines as in growth from month-to-month or year-to-year, but an ever-steeper upward curve based on how fast the increase was progressing at the start of this century. But those numbers would, when compared to economic reality, mean that the United States would export all of its industrial production to China and still have money to buy things on the world economy as if no economic disaster struck. So it was immediately apparent that the ACP’s revenue projections were spurious. Those projections failed even before the 2008 worldwide financial crash.
The second dead giveaway was on the project’s expenditure side. The new locks would cut off Colon’s Costa Abajo — that part of the province west of the canal, from Piña to Miguel de La Borda and beyond — from road access to the rest of the country. So where was the bridge or tunnel connection that would necessarily be a part of the canal expansion project? It wasn’t there. As in, an expenditure that would run into hundreds of millions of dollars not included in the price tag advertised by the ACP. And who did that schematic anyway? It was Parsons Brinckerhoff of Boston Big Dig notoriety, a road tunnel project that cost much more than had been advertised to the general public and to state and federal agencies, in which the main trick that was played was putting major necessary components of the job “off the project” and thus out of the calculations.
Add more than half a billion dollars to the canal expansion price with this bridge. That’s about 40 percent more than the bridge project cost had been placed at a few years ago, but set that aside ad a minor frill. The ACP compartmentalized the canal expansion project so as to understate its cost.
But then there are non-financial costs as well. Like the death of a straw man.
On October 16 the National Assembly published an article on their website, wherein they proclaimed the “Third Bridge over the Canal, without cracks and 52 percent done.” As in, two legislative committees visiting the construction site as a part of their oversight role. The lead paragraph concluded that the committees “found no cracks in the structures, as reported.” But WHO reported that? WHERE was it reported? The source of said alleged allegation is unspecified by the legislature’s website, no such claim is recalled by this reporter and none of that information can be found online by a Google search. Maybe someone said something somewhere, but by every appearance politicians seeking to curry favor with the ACP set up and killed a straw man.
But look at the number the legislators’ report cited, and the date. The project was 52 percent done in the middle of last October. Five months later, as the dry season approaches its end, La Prensa, with its unspecified but obviously ACP source, reports that the bridge is 56.5 percent done. There could be some interesting questions based on those two numbers, but ever since 2006 when this reporter declined to be an unpaid acolyte during the referendum campaign the ACP does not answer questions from this direction.
Fallout from the failed Port of Corozal bidding
The proposed new seaport at Diablo and Corozal has run into fierce opposition from several quarters. The ACP evicted the Diablo boat shed owners, calling them “squatters” and accusing them of various illegal activities. Litigation over whether the ousted people will be compensated and how much is pending and will surely continue for years to come. The canal pilots say that a port in that particular spot is a traffic hazard for ships going into and out of the Miraflores Locks. The legislature has been divided into factions backing various contenders — who came and went — for that private port concession. (At one point the big hue and cry was against the Motta family, which had allegedly rigged the process in their favor. But then the company in which they hold a stake was eliminated from the bidding process by a change in the prerequisites for bidders.) It came down to four remaining contenders who ere allowed to bid for the concession, the day to submit bids came — and nobody put in a bid.
The ACP won’t say whether they will continue with the Corozal port project. There are rumors of price reductions so that Panama gains nothing in taxes or shared revenues, but the project goes. The international consensus is that world shipping is in a bad way and that although it may be picking up in some segments it’s a risky investment at this point.
But from ACP circles there now comes “an alternative truth.” The Corozal ports project was set back not because the economics are bad for it at this time, but because a former PanCanal vice president for planning, Rodolfo Sabonge, leaked a confidential ACP feasibility study to Carlos Urrutia, an executive for one of the companies looking at bidding on the port concession. This version has burst upon the public thanks to the effort of ACP board member Lourdes Castillo, who has clashed with Sabonge before.
PanCanal’s inspector general and top officials beg off from comment, saying that it’s a metter under investigation, or that will be investigated.
But there is a big problem here. Sabonge retired from the ACP in 2013. The alleged leak took place no later than three and a half years ago. If one possible bidder was warned off by confidential information from within the ACP, all of the other potential bidders figured out the same stuff on their own anyway, and declined to bid.
There appears to be an even bigger implicit problem. Did someone see an internal document that indicated that something that the ACP was selling really wasn’t such a profitable deal? As in, Sabonge’s alleged offense was spilling the beans on a business deception? As in, the prevailing business model at the Panama Canal Authority is a culture of fraud, of the concealment of material information from potential business partners?
Why Corozal? The imperfectly concealed explanation
One issue that PanCanal unions have brought up is more serious, and what they point out contains the seeds of understanding why the ACP persisted, and it may still persist, in pumping a Corozal project that almost all independent, informed and astute observers think to be a turkey. It comes from a 2015 article in the Mexican edition of the business publication Forbes, in a feature about one of the wealthiest men in Panama, ACP board member Alberto Vallarino. It’s good business journalism, even if Vallarino gives some self-serving accounts of Panamanian business and political history in the article. Of immediate importance here is one paragraph:
Logistics is another of the sectors where his business is betting. There he wants to enter into activities related to transportation. To do this, he acquired a 60-hectare lot southwest of the city, in the reverted areas near what will be the new Panamanian Pacific port of Corozal.
There are other possible explanations, which could be shrouded in ACP secrecy like perhaps a recusal in a process that has never been publicized. But at first glance we are looking at a major league conflict of interest. Depending on the circumstances of when, how and why Vallarino acquired that property, we may be looking at insider trading.
Tugboat privatization
The Pänama Canal unions, the tugboat skippers and pilots in particular, alleged that the Panama Canal Authority was planning to privatize canal tugboat services. The allegation is long-standing. In the middle of March, the canal unions again made the charge, this time by pointing out that the ACP had not made the orders to purchase sufficient tugs to do the work and to a proposal that they had seen which suggested a change in work rules to allow the use of contracted private tugs. The ACP immediately denied it, issuing a vitriolic response that questioned the labor activists’ honesty. Two days later, at a business gathering, a private tug company announced its order of new tugs to provide services to the Panama Canal Authority. The company said that the ACP had awarded it the private tug contract in 2016. The ACP management issued no clarification or apology.
Preparing to cede the west bank of the Panama Canal to China
Article 3 of the Panamanian Constitution provides that:
The national territory can never be ceded, transferred or alienated, temporarily or partially, to other states.
That was one of the very first things that came up in a 1972 convention of the representantes chosen in the 1968 elections, assembled by General Omar Torrijos and his colleagues to give a fig leaf of constitutionality to their military dictatorship. The treaties that ultimately gave the canal and the Canal Zone to Panama were some years in the future but that constitutional provision, like those treaties, was a fundamental political requirement. It was neither some drafter’s intellectual whim nor some strongman’s demagogic promise. It was a national aspiration that burned in the hearts of Panamanians, something for which people had died. Without that section Torrijos could not have had his contsitution ratified.
That military constitution, with a few amendments, is still in effect in Panama.
But much has changed. The former American enclave reverted to Panama, which had only briefly held formal title for a few days between independence from Colombia and the Hay-Buneau-Varilla Treaty that established the Canal Zone. The Cold War ended. Globalization on corporate terms, including the widespread privatization of public assets, swept around most of the planet. The public property of the Soviet Union became the private property of Russian oligarchs, who under the leadership of Vladimir Putin blurred the distinction between the Kremlin’s public sphere and the activities of privatized — that is, stolen — fortunes. The people whom Chairman Mao reviled as “capitalist roaders” gained control of the Chinese Communist Party and the Peoples Republic of China after Mao died, and they also blurred the distinctions between public and private property and their respective functions.
And now the Panama Canal Authority, stung by the business world’s rejection of their Corozal project and still looking for new sources of revenue in light of their failed financial projections for the canal expansion, are looking to another plan.
They didn’t lay this out directly to any Panamanian news medium. To do that would risk questions from a reporter about the plan’s propriety under the Panamanian Constitution. No, the ACP went back to an old page in the playbook and released this one through Reuters journalists in Shanghai on the occasion of ACP administrator Jorge Quijano’s visit there. So on March 28 those of us who pay attention read of exploratory talks to concede parts of the former Empire and Balboa firing ranges on the western bank of the Panama Canal, a parcel of some 1,200 hectares, to three state-controlled and partially state-owned Chinese corporations, the China Communications Construction Corporation, its subsidiary the China Harbour Engineering Company and a separate firm, the China Railway Group.
There will be quibbling about what it means to cede or alientate, or transfer. Lawyers will make their stands about what’s a “state.” “Temporarily” and “partially” will no doubt be parsed into a meaningless twilight zone. But Quijano didn’t try to pull this on any worthy Panamanian reporter.
~ ~ ~
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information.
Old song, electricity outages that are still with us.
Our power supply: worse than just exploding transformers
by Eric Jackson
Two major electrical outages resulting from transformer explosions at the Condado del Rey power routing station on March 17 and again on March 21 have had some far-reaching consequences and prompted some discomforting questions. The first outage left the Panama City – San Miguelito – Colon metro are without electricity for about 16 hours, and also turned out the lights in large parts of Nicaragua and most of Honduras. The second outage was not so severe but also blacked ou the whole metro area. Since then parts of the Interior that were not affected by the two explosions have been hit by a serious of shorter power outages, here in rural Cocle where most production on The Panama News happens sometimes several per day.
The problem is at ETESA, the state-owned power grid company that’s the one public remnant from the 1998 privatization of the old IRHE public electric company. ETESA buys power from private generators, distributes it across the country and via a Central American power grid connection to other countries, while the retail distribution and billing for electricity happens through another set of private power companies. The natural questions of how, why and who is responsible have arisen. The career of ETESA director Iván Barría Mock is the first and most noteworthy casualty. After a series of sometimes alarming public statements and admissions, he submitted his resignation. As of April 1 Óscar Rendoll, who has worked in the electrical industry for 41 years, including in the management of IRHE way back when, will take over as interim director.
In the wake of the first and biggest power outage, ETESA announced that things were not entirely back to normal but they were working on it. People were advised to conserve electricity, particularly by not running air conditioners during peak hours, in the meantime. Then after the second outage the power grid company first put out a Twitter message that everything was back to normal, followed by a statement by Barría warning of possible new outages. In statements that followed Barría warned of electricity cutoffs in areas that use a lot more energy than most other places. That latter bit was a big political problem, as so many of Panama City’s downtown office towers are designed around air conditioning to the point that opening windows to allow natural ventilation is not a viable option, and as the neighborhoods where the country’s richest residents live are also the places where residential electricity consumption is the highest.
At the grassroots, and particularly in the social media, allegations began to be made by activists. With a little time lag, many of these began to appear in the mainstream media. These were tales of political intrigue, conflicts of interest and flat-out incompetence. The explanations from Barría made things worse and the silence of the ETESA board — Minister of Economy and Finance Dulcidio De La Guardia, Minister of the Presidency Francisco Sierra and National Energy Secretary Víctor Urrutia — did nothing to reassure anybody.
ETESA and its board, like so much of the Panamanian government, has been on a political patronage rotation. Every five years the top people and many in the lower ranks are fired. Some of the people who are let go will be among those few who know how to run more than a small part of the system. Most of the replacements will be political activists or relatives of politically important people, but some will be professionals in the field, and some will be old hands who lost their jobs in previous political patronage shuffles. But the returning old pros will come back to a different team, with a system that has been physically changed and that relies on a different set of business relationships.
Typically contracts are also rescinded, renegotiated or reassigned in every transition. Because of the extreme abuses of the Martinelli years, the transition at ETESA was all the more severe.
So who is Iván Barría? A competent engineer by looking at his resume. But also the brother of Aurelio Barría Mock, the executive vice president of Grupo Motta, the family-owned combine that’s the nation’s biggest private economic power. The Motta family sponsored the Independent Movement (MOVIN), the support of which was a key factor in Juan Carlos Varela’s election to the presidency. But lately MOVIN and President Varela have had a falling out over a number of issues and it has resulted in something of a government shuffle not caused by Varela reviewing situations and deciding to make changes but by people who are not Panameñista Party loyalists leaving posts in the current administration.
Among the contracts quickly rescinded once Barría took the helm of ETESA was the maintenance contract for the Condado del Rey power station. That was in 2014. However, no new maintenance contractor was employed and critics say that there were no proper adjustments to do that work in-house.
One of the Martinelli-era contracts that was revised, in 2015, was a provision of the deal with Odebrecht that allowed the company to negotiate and settle eminent domain claims for the long-planned ETESA Line 3. The corrupt Brazilian company stood to receive a percentage of all such settlements after an aggregate of $7 million was passed. The contract was modified to require ETESA approval of any settlement. It is said by critics that had Line 3 been in place the load on the transformers that exploded would not have been so great and the outages caused by their failure would not have been so extensive. But this power line has been tangled up in litigation, with lawyers taking their bites. (Have real estate speculators bought land along the route, based on inside information?) It’s a mess, with fingers being pointed in various directions for the slow progress.
Meanwhile almost all of the transformers and other equipment at the Condado del Rey facility are by ordinary ratings old, at 75 percent or more of their ordinary useful life expectancy. People can argue about whether that’s Panamanian maintenance culture or the habit of enterprises everywhere that live hand-to-mouth.
In any case, important organizations like the Panamanian Society of Engineers and Architects (SPIA) and the Chamber of Commerce have demanded that ETESA be put back in order, with various recommendations about how that should be done. Changes in the ETESA contracting system are suggested in most of the offered remedies.
One of the complaints that Barría had lodged, echoed by some of the business critics, is that ETESA has to go through government contracting procedures and these are too slow. But in 2015, a decision to move away from primary reliance on hydroelectric power in the direction of gas-fueled electricity generation was jammed through in just a few days. That contract, set to go into effect next year, was made without any real opportunity for environmentalists or others to object to its carbon emission and thus climate change implications. Competing bidders also complained about the almost nil evaluation process — three days to evaluate 27 offers. The winner there? Gas Natural del Atlantico (GNA) got a 10-year contract to generate 350 megawatts of power to be distributed through ETESA. And who is GSA? It’s a partnership between the US-based AES and Grupo Motta. At the time Iván Barría denied that there was any conflict of interest involved in his brother being VP of Grupo Motta.
Panama has no general conflict of interest law. National and international anti-corruption groups have been advocating one for many years.
President Varela has announced an audit of ETESA management decisions. Apart from that the National Public Services Authority (ASEP) says that it will hire an independent investigator to assign blame and recommend solutions in the wake of the power outages. And the president urges the public to conserve energy and show some patience in the several weeks that he expects it to take for the damages from the two blackouts to be repaired.
~ ~ ~
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information.
Janis Joplin: come and gone like a meteor.
