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.It stands as  a cautionary symbol, one journalist re-ported,  of much that could go wrong for Panama and the United Stateswhen the clock strikes midnight at the turn of the century. 15Some analysts pointed to the ports of Balboa on the Gulf of Panamaand Cristóbal on the Atlantic side as additional reasons for concern.These facilities are among the most valuable industrial resources inthe country.Cristóbal handles a large volume of cargo from the duty-free zone established at Colón, while Balboa is a refueling and servic-ing center for ships using the canal.At least until the ouster of Noriega,Panamanian officials, in the words of the same shipping agent, ne-Canal Operation 57glected the ports  completely with little new equipment, little in-vestment, corruption all over the place.It was disaster.In the lasttwo years [under Noriega] they had a carpetbag approach to every-thing. The Endara administration was reportedly studying how torehabilitate the two ports but as of this date had yet to devise acomprehensive plan.16A 1993 newspaper report suggested that even in the canal facilityproper there was a marked deterioration in maintenance.The locks,though still managed by the United States, were showing signs of dis-repair, causing needless delays in traffic and forcing ships to queue upat canal entrances for periods so long as to cancel out the economicadvantage of using the facility.Unidentified  international maritimeofficials were quoted as doubting that a country with a population andeconomy smaller than many American cities could  be expected to runone of the most complex engineering enterprises in the world.Because they are so specific, some critics should be quoted inextenso.One American pilot said,  It is not the same Canal in terms ofefficiency and safety that it was when I came here 12 years ago. Hecomplained about growing delays due to malfunctions of the water gatesand of the specially designed locomotives ( mules ) that pull shipsthrough the locks.He also cited the rotting away of rubber and woodenguards on the sides of the locks, which led to a number of minor acci-dents, including the denting of ships that cost $50,000 and more torepair.Adrian Holmes, the operating manager of C.D.Fenton, one of thelargest shipping agencies in Panama, put it this way:  Maintenance isa word the Panamanian government has never heard of.The port pil-ings are deteriorating, causing more ship accidents all the time.Theoil pipelines off the docks are leaking.The launches are all in badrepair.The railroad is useless. Holmes remarked that many of hiscustomers, which included Dole, Mobil Oil, and Star Shipping, werecontemplating phasing out the use of the canal in favor of a railroad land bridge across the continental United States.Another shippingagent was quoted as saying that because efficiency had dropped con-stantly over the previous ten years, the world shipping community sharedthe view that  service is deficient. 17Although the U.S.representatives on the canal commission tend,perhaps understandably, to be relentlessly upbeat about the quality ofcanal maintenance, many U.S.officials have proved something lessthan unequivocal when questioned on the subject by Congress.At a58 The CanalMarch 1995 hearing of the House Subcommittee on the Western Hemi-sphere, Congressman Dan Burton put it to a senior State Departmentofficial that  certainly the change [from U.S.to Panamanian] manage-ment cannot result in no difference at all in the quality of canal main-tenance.The response was that  we have a lot of work with the Pana-manians to do in the next five years&.But from the standpoint ofoperations right now, it is largely in Panamanian hands except for thetop management positions, this last assertion surely beside the point.Congressman Robert Toricelli cited reports from shippers that therewas a perceptible difference in maintenance and efficiency and askedthe same official directly whether she had  any reason to believe thatthis is not the case. The response was that  it is our understandingthat this is not the case.  And the frequency of dredging, the repair ofthe locks, the maintenance of the equipment, Congressman Toricellipressed,  you consider that it would be equal to the levels of severalyears ago? Again, the answer was somewhat evasive:  Certainly inrecent years, yes. 18Presumably, this last remark refers to the businesslike decision ofPresident Pérez Balladares to earmark for maintenance more than $100million of the roughly $419 million collected in toll revenues during1994.Unfortunately, this figure falls far short of what is needed to com-pensate for neglect during the years of military rule.A U.S.Army Corpsof Engineers report released three years later listed some 830 mainte-nance tasks that still required immediate attention.Of these, fully 389which is to say, 47 percent had not even been started.They includesuch arcane matters as replacing the existing locks machinery, reacti-vating emergency dams (the upkeep on which has been  abandonedsince 1982 ), repairing the concrete around the locks machinery tun-nel (the work done to date was found  less than desirable ), wideningthe Atlantic entrance, and refurbishing the tugboat fleet and the canalrailroad (the  mules ).19 Although the same report did identify 247projects already in progress (30 percent) and 194 that had already beencompleted (23 percent), President Pérez Balladares chose to interpretthe release of the report on the eve of transfer as a deliberate slap in theface by the United States.As he put it somewhat petulantly,  The idea,I guess, would be to hand Panama a canal that would run into problemsshortly afterward. Nonetheless, he subsequently announced a $1 bil-lion modernization program that encompasses most of the Corps ofEngineers recommendations [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]