Personality looms large in Panama election
Andres OppenheimerPANAMA CITY _ If the polls are right and business tycoon Ricardo Martinelli wins the May 3 presidential election, the Obama administration would win an important ally in a region that has moved increasingly closer to Venezuela's radical leftist President Hugo Chavez.
That, at least, is what Martinelli, 56, told me in a long interview at his campaign headquarters on the second floor of one of the 35 stores of his Super99 supermarket chain, the largest in Panama. He portrayed ruling party candidate Balbina Herrera as a dangerous ally of Chavez who would allegedly tilt the Central American nation further to the left _ a charge that Herrera vehemently denies.
"There would be an abysmal difference," Martinelli said, referring to what would change if either candidate wins the election. "We would be a much more pro-American government."
Martinelli, who is known to have a short fuse _ his political adversaries have branded him "el loco" (the crazy one) _ is way ahead in the polls: most surveys give him 49 percent of the vote, against 37 percent for Herrera.
If he wins, "It would be the first time that two business people who are not populists, who have a free market economic vision, would take the presidency in a continent that is full of people like Chavez, (Ecuadoran President Rafael) Correa and others," he said.
In Central America, there is an even chance that El Salvador's leftist Farabundo Marti National Libertation Party will win the March 15 election. Nicaragua is already run by a hard-line leftist government, and Honduras recently joined the Chavez-led Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) bloc, he noted. But elections in Panama are more about personalities than about ideology, I reminded him. While Herrera comes from the left, Panama's economy is so tied to the United States that she would be unlikely to make a sharp turn to radical populism, I added.
"She says that she has reinvented herself, but I don't know of any tiger that has turned vegetarian," Martinelli replied. Herrera has publicly denied being close to Chavez, adding that the current government of President Martin Torrijos, who keeps close ties with Cuba and Venezuela, has not carried out anti-business policies.
Asked for specific foreign policy changes that his government would bring about, Martinelli cited more vigorous efforts to get the U.S.-Panama free trade agreement passed by the U.S. Congress, more votes in line with U.S. foreign policy in the United Nations on issues such as Israel's stand in the Middle Eastern conflict or human rights in Cuba, and closer relations with Colombia.
On Venezuela and Cuba, he said he would "maintain a relationship of mutual respect and friendship" but "not an ideological relation that could generate commitments that go against the interests of our country."
Martinelli's campaign ads claim that the Torrijos' government is the most corrupt in the country's history, and that Panama needs a businessman who understands economic issues to steer the country during the world recession. Panama's skyline is filled with dozens of unfinished or abandoned luxury skyscrapers, suggesting an imminent Miami-style collapse of real estate prices.
Herrera, in turn, is running on the outgoing government's record of economic growth rates in recent years, reducing poverty from 32.5 percent of the population to 28.5 percent over the past four years. Martinelli says this was mostly thanks to a world economy awash with money, which fueled Panama's recent real estate boom.
Why do they call you el loco?, I asked Martinelli. He said his adversaries have come up with that because they couldn't accuse him of anything else, but added, "Perhaps you have to be a little bit crazy to want to change this country. For me, the easiest thing would be to do nothing."
My opinion: I'm not sure U.S. Panama relations would change dramatically if Martinelli wins. His temperamental style and lack of a strong party machine may put him at odds with Panama's Congress, which could restrain his foreign policy. And no matter who wins, Panama's relations with Washington may sour if, as expected, the U.S. government steps up efforts to crack down on other countries' bank secrecy laws.
Either way, this country has pretty much run on automatic pilot in recent years. It may shift a little bit right or left, or may become somewhat more or somewhat less corrupt, but it will most likely continue being what it is today: a politically noisy, but economically pragmatic democracy.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Andres Oppenheimer is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla. 33132; e-mail: aoppenheimer@miamiherald.com.
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