PANAMA CITY, Oct 22: Voters were expected on Sunday to approve the largest modernization project in the 92-year-history of the Panama Canal, a $5.25 billion plan to expand the waterway to allow for larger ships while alleviating traffic problems.
President Martin Torrijos’ government has billed the referendum as a historic overhaul that will double the capacity of a canal already on pace to generate about $1.4 billion in revenue this year.
“This is probably the most important decision of this generation,” Torrijos said on Sunday while voting.
Critics claim the expansion will benefit the canal’s customers more than Panamanians, and worry that costs could balloon for this debt-ridden country.
The project would build a third set of locks on the Pacific and Atlantic ends of the canal by 2015, allowing it to handle modern container ships, cruise liners and tankers too large for its current 33-meter-wide locks.
The Panama Canal Authority, the autonomous government agency that runs the canal, says the project will be paid for by increasing tolls and will generate $6 billion in revenue by 2025.
In and around Panama City, supporters of the expansion wearing lime green shirts with the word ‘yes’ outnumbered red smocks stamped ‘No’.
Yellow public school buses and vans with ‘yes’ signs stuck to the side whisked voters from poor, crowded neighbourhoods to polling places to vote. Even most of the poll volunteers wore ‘yes’ T-shirts.
“If you’ve got a business, you’ve got to do what you can to improve it, make it more competitive,’ said Faustino Ortega, 41, a mechanic who favours the expansion, while standing in line to vote.
“The canal is big business for all of Panama. Widening it will help the economy.”
Public opinion polls showed overwhelmingly support for the canal upgrade. Green and white signs plastered across the country read. “Yes for our children,” while tens of thousands of billboards and bumper stickers trumpeted new jobs.
“It will mean more boats and that means more jobs,” said Damasco Polanco, 50, who was herding cows on horseback in Nuevo Provedencia, on the banks of Lake Gatun, a 260-square-kilometer man-made reservoir that supplies water to the canal.
The canal employs 8,000 workers and the expansion is expected to generate as many as 40,000 new jobs. Unemployment in Panama is 9.5 per cent, and 40 per cent of the country lives in poverty.—AP
