Panama’s Chief Proves Nimble on High Wire

Not many leaders have the political dexterity to bear-hug Fidel Castro and male-bond with former President H.W. Bush soon after. But it’s a balancing act that Panamanian President Martin Torrijos seems to be carrying off with aplomb.

Torrijos, the 42-year-old son of the late strongman Omar Torrijos, knows a thing or two about the high wire: He has distanced himself from his father’s authoritarianism without rejecting his legacy of winning control of the Panama Canal and reaching out to the country’s poor. And he says that accommodating leaders on the left and the right in the region, as well as within Panama’s fragmented political scene, is less a matter of personal predilection than of dealing with “geographical and economic reality.”

“We respect the different views in the region, the different stands of the countries, and we try to get along,” Torrijos said, sitting in his ornate Spanish Colonial office in this capital’s historic Old City.

Asked whether he was under pressure from the United States to take sides in the region’s increasingly polarized politics, he said, “I think it’s a mistake to try to divide the hemisphere in ideological terms.”

Torrijos’ politics are eclectic. His advocacy of free trade and fiscal responsibility has earned plaudits on Wall Street; at the same time, just a hint of his father’s populism makes him look perfectly at ease in the company of Castro and the Cuban leader’s anti-U.S. ally, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

The Panamanian leader was warmly received by Castro in December during a visit to Cuba to reestablish diplomatic relations between their countries, broken amid rancor in 2004 after Torrijos’ predecessor, Mireya Moscoso, released four men suspected of plotting to kill the Cuban president. Torrijos has criticized the pardon.

In February, Torrijos went fishing for tuna with President Bush’s father off the Panamanian coast. The two men get along famously. In May, the senior Bush threw a dinner for Torrijos at his presidential library at Texas A&M; University, where Torrijos graduated with bachelor’s degrees in political science and economics and had returned two decades later to give the commencement address.

There seems to be an ambivalent but ultimately approving attitude toward Torrijos within the U.S. government. Some officials who asked not to be identified said they sympathized with Torrijos’ need, as one of them put it, to “take care of old-line leftist groups [within his party] that lately are flexing their muscles.”

Others are less than thrilled with what is described as the young president’s “flirtation” with Castro, and with Chavez, whom Torrijos nominated recently for a UNESCO humanitarian award.

“Every country has a right to decide their policy. The only thing we ask for is respect for our own policy,” Torrijos said.

“I don’t feel pressure from anyone. Just manage your business.”

But diplomats note that Panama recently loosened its visa policy for Cuban visitors and that the Torrijos government has been an eager participant in aid programs offering eye surgery to Panama’s poor.

The operations, similar to those being offered to the poor in Mexico, are public relations coups for Cuba, whose doctors are performing the surgeries, and for Chavez, whose government is financing them.

The “pilgrimages” that Torrijos and several of his Cabinet members have made recently to Havana have also been duly noted, particularly in the U.S. Congress, where they may come back to haunt Torrijos if the U.S.-Panama free trade agreement comes to a vote as expected this year, one insider said.

“Anytime a Latin American leader warms to Castro and Chavez, it creates concern in Washington that he might be joining the anti-U.S. alliance that Chavez is trying to build in South America and which could undermine broader U.S. influence in the region,” said Pamela Starr of the Eurasia Group, a risk analysis consulting firm in Washington.

Keeping all elements of the political spectrum involved, if not completely sympathetic, will be crucial if Torrijos is to win voter approval for a $5.2-billion expansion of the Panama Canal, a proposal he unveiled to much fanfare in April.

“We have the chance of our lives, and the Panamanian people are going to take it,” Torrijos said.

“For the first time, Panama is able to make a decision for itself on the canal, and it’s taken 100 years to get to this moment.”

Panama took control of the U.S.-built canal at the end of 1999, a deal that was negotiated in 1977 by Torrijos’ father, who ruled Panama for 13 years until his 1981 death in an airplane crash.

Now the strongman’s son is proposing the first major renovation to the storied canal since it opened in 1914, a plan to add a third lane and set of locks to accommodate modern container ships.

“It’s a decision about whether Panama will play a larger role in world trade, or stay with a small business,” Torrijos said.

But the vote to take place this year is anything but a sure thing. To win, Torrijos needs to convince his diverse constituencies that there is something in it for them, and that the awarding of the contracts will be fair and free of corruption.

Recent polls show that although Torrijos’ approval rating remains high at 64%, support for canal expansion has dipped seven percentage points, to 57%, since the first of the year.

A sizable and prestigious group of critics, including former canal administrator Fernando Manfredo, has rallied around the position that the expansion would be too risky, pointing out that any significant cost overruns would be borne by the public. They also complain that the costs are underestimated and the economic benefits exaggerated, and they insist that the government accept the canal as it is, a money machine generating nearly half a billion dollars a year for the national coffers.

“I think the president wants to leave a mark with his administration, and that’s admirable. But I think he and his advisors have become too enamored of this as a mega-project and are seeing it through a rose-colored glass,” said Manfredo, who was the canal’s deputy chief executive from 1979 to 1989 and its acting chief for a period in 1990.

Torrijos’ campaign is just getting cranked up, and the betting around here is that he will make the sale. In his 21 months in office, Torrijos has earned applause locally and on Wall Street for his inclusive approach, his consensus building. He has pushed through big reforms in social security and the tax system, while bringing Panama to the verge of signing the free trade agreement with the United States -- all divisive issues.

In pushing through reforms, he has shown an ability to include the right and left, among opposing parties and from within his own Democratic Revolutionary Party, which is anything but homogeneous.

A somewhat controversial example of that accommodation was Torrijos’ naming of Benjamin Colamarco as public works minister. Under deposed Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, Colamarco headed the Dignity Battalions, the leader’s personal paramilitary shock troops.

Colamarco “has rehabilitated himself,” said a Torrijos administration official who asked not to be named.

Torrijos is familiar with tricky pasts. His father had six children, three of whom, including the current president, were born out of wedlock. After graduating from college and serving as manager of a number of Chicago-area McDonald’s franchises owned by a friend of his father, Torrijos returned to Panama in the early 1990s to enter politics. He ran unsuccessfully for president in 1999 before winning in 2004 by a comfortable margin.

Charismatic, affable and yet somewhat reticent, Torrijos is praised for his frequent town-hall meetings with citizens, but criticized for a certain inability to project his ideas forcefully to the public.

For Torrijos, his father’s legacy is the inspiration to reach out to the poor and disadvantaged. Added revenue from an expanded canal and the economic growth it would ignite, he says, could enable the country to narrow the gap between rich and poor, the second widest in the hemisphere after Brazil’s.

The canal expansion is a way out of the country’s poverty, which despite several years of solid growth, still afflicts two-fifths of the population, he said.

“The expansion has to do with a government that could have enough money to tackle the issues that concern people,” Torrijos said. “A country without hope, and with 40% poverty, in the end turns out to be ungovernable.”