Patriotism Is the Pitch for $5 Billion Upgrade of National Icon
By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 21, 2006
PANAMA CITY -- Squeezing the hulking container ships known as "Panamaxes" into the Panama Canal's Miraflores Locks requires a marvel of precision steering and patience.
The ships top out at 965 feet long and 106 feet across, leaving only two feet of wiggle room on each side. As many as four pilots employed by the canal must jump on board to help ship captains get through without shredding their vessels' hulls or crushing the 92-year-old locks.
Built to comfortably accommodate the biggest ships of their day, the locks are feeling awfully snug these days. The waistlines of the world's shipping fleet have swelled so much that the biggest new ships simply can't wedge through Miraflores anymore; instead, they have to find another route.
All that lost business -- and the prospect of more -- has made Panama jumpy enough that it wants to spend at least $5 billion to dig three parallel shipping channels and build two sets of enormous new locks, which lift and lower ships to overcome the differences in elevation on the route between Panama's Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
But there's a catch. By law, Panamanian voters will get the final say on the project in an election Sunday, the first test of the public's confidence in canal administrators since the United States turned over control in 1999. After months of campaigning, the referendum is highlighting the role the canal plays in shaping this small country's future and its identity.
"Americans have the Statue of Liberty, the French have the Eiffel Tower, Panamanians have the canal," Leopoldo Neira, a Panama City pollster, said in an interview. "The country's identity is wrapped up in the canal."
The Panama Canal Authority, a quasi-governmental agency that runs the canal, has framed the vote as a question of national pride and has gotten enthusiastic backing from the administration of President Martin Torrijos. Throughout Panama City, glossy billboards equate a yes vote with patriotism.
"They've made it so that anyone who is not for this is a traitor," said Fernando Manfredo, a former canal administrator, who opposes the project because he questions the cost estimate and believes the proposal gives the canal authority too much unchecked power. "That leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It offends me."
The authority's strategy, though, seems to be working, easily overcoming a fractured and poorly funded opposition that has tried to convince voters that Panama's endemic corruption would eat up any profits generated by the expansion. Neira's latest poll for La Prensa newspaper shows 68 percent of Panamanians support the expansion proposal.
The campaign for expansion hasn't gone entirely smoothly. In its early planning stages, the proposal called for flooding several villages and displacing 12,000 people. The uproar threatened to doom the project, but the canal's administrators reacted nimbly, redrawing their plans so that no villages would be destroyed. Torrijos also pledged that villagers would not have to move.
The proposal now calls for new 180-foot-wide, 1,400-foot-long locks on the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the canal that would dwarf the current 110-foot-wide, 1,000-foot-long locks. Crews would also dig nearly seven miles of shipping channels to connect the locks with the 50-mile canal, as well as deepen Gatun Lake, which serves as a reservoir.
The work, which is also intended to lessen bottlenecks that keep some ships waiting offshore for four days before they can enter the canal, would be paid for by a 3.5 percent increase in tolls. Some ships pay extra to get to the head of the line -- in August, a ship owned by Maersk paid a record $249,165 toll. The average toll is $67,000.
The expansion's most fervent backers see the proposal as an irresistible business venture timed to take advantage of large increases in worldwide shipping, especially between Asia and the United States. The canal accounts for about 6 percent of Panama's economy, but its administrators say related maritime businesses account for a whopping 60 percent. The canal contributed nearly $500 million to Panama's treasury in 2005; if the expansion is approved, it is expected to provide triple that amount by 2015 and eight times that much by 2025.
Opponents, such as Manfredo, call those projections wildly inflated. But those concerns have been mostly drowned out by boasts from the Torrijos administration.
The United States "ran a nonprofit organization here," Samuel Lewis Navarro, Panama's first vice president and foreign minister, said in an interview at his waterfront office in Panama City. "What Panama got from the U.S. was very limited. We, the Panamanian people, have proven to the world that we not only could manage the canal effectively, but manage it better."
Lewis Navarro said money generated by the expansion would be used to improve education and alleviate poverty in Panama, a country of 3.2 million people where more than a third of the population lives below the poverty line. But opponents say there are not enough guarantees.
Canal money goes into Panama's general fund, where opponents worry it could be easily diverted to wasteful projects and siphoned to political cronies. Lewis Navarro said some of the money would be dedicated to schools and projects chosen by the community, but he said he "would not want to put a percentage" on the amount that would be earmarked.
Panamanian voters will decide the fate of the expansion project at a time when Nicaragua has announced plans to build a rival canal. While some cast the Nicaraguan proposal as further impetus for Panamanians to vote for expansion of their canal, Lewis Navarro and a host of shipping experts see little threat.
"They've been at it for 100 years," Lewis Navarro said, referring to unrealized plans to build a canal in Nicaragua that were discussed before the turn of the last century.
When the subject of Nicaragua's proposal came up in an interview, Christopher L. Koch, an expansion proponent and president of the Washington-based World Shipping Council, merely laughed.
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