(Source: Panama america) Like never before, most of the important news agencies of the world reported on the referendum on the expansion of the Panama Canal. Reporters from CNN, BBC, and ACAN-EFE reported detailed information of the election. Major newspapers like the New York Times Washington Post, Der Spiegel, El Mundo of Spain all reported on the expansion, the voting, and the results. The Chinese have shown great interest in the expansion of the canal, and the vote was covered extensively by the Chinese News Agency Xinhua. Cnn correspondent Harris Whitbech the first to announce the victory of the “Yes” vote. Also Claudia Palacios, a reporter for CNN in Spanish also covered the election.
Canal en la mira del mundo
Como nunca antes, la mayoría de las más importantes agencias de noticias del mundo mantuvieron una constante vigilancia de los eventos previos y posteriores al referéndum de la ampliación del Canal de Panamá.
Desde enviados especiales de CNN En Español, BBC Mundo y ACAN-EFE dando informes detallados de la jornada electoral, de reportes en profundidad en diarios reconocidos como New York Times, Washington Post, Der Spiegel, El Mundo de España, y hasta reportes completos sobre lo que significa el desarrollo futuro del Tercer Juego de Esclusas en la Agencia de Noticias china Xinhua, han evidenciado el enorme interés de la comunidad internacional en cuanto a la decisión que tomaron el domingo 22 de octubre los panameños.
El corresponsal Harris Whitbech de CNN fue el primero ayer en dar el anuncio de la victoria del voto afirmativo en Panamá.
También Claudia Palacios, informadora especial de CNN En Español, indicó a primeras horas de la noche del domingo que el voto “SI” había ganado de forma abrumadora (con un 79%), frente al “NO”, pero advirtió que hubo un elevado abstencionismo del 60%.
Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed
Canal Expansion (Source)By Manuel Roig-Franzia Washington Post 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 2 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 $5 billion or more to dig three parallel shipping channels and build two sets of enormous new locks, which lift and lower ships to overcome the sea level difference on 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.
