Word: canale
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Panamanians take justifiable pride in their operation of the Panama Canal. Since the U.S. handed the famous waterway over to Panama nine years ago, the independent Panama Canal Authority (ACP) has run it more efficiently, more safely and more profitably than the Americans did. Too bad, most Panamanians say, that their government is still best known for the kind of corruption and waste that has marred the small Central American country's reputation ever since pirates haunted the Caribbean. If they could just run the nation the way they run the canal, Panamanians believe, they could become a world-class...
...Ricardo Martinelli upset Panama's powerful ruling party on Sunday to win the presidency in a landslide. Martinelli, 57, is a U.S.-educated free-marketeer, a millionaire whose business empire includes supermarkets, banks and agricultural firms. Just as important, earlier in this decade Martinelli was chairman of the Panama Canal's board of directors and Minister of Canal Affairs when the ACP decided on a $5.25 billion expansion of the canal, approved by voters in 2006, which has already created 2,000 new jobs and promises to engender thousands more before the project is finished in 2014. "We will change...
Current President Martin Torrijos - the son of the late Panamanian strongman Brigadier General Omar Torrijos, who got the U.S. in 1977 to sign the treaty that eventually gave the canal to Panama - has pushed through some anticorruption reforms. But scandals have persisted. Herrera's campaign had to fight allegations that it received financing from a Colombian national now in prison in Bogotá on charges of alleged extortion, money laundering and drug trafficking in exchange for political favors. (It didn't help Herrera when it was disclosed that while he was staying in Panama, the Colombian, David Murcia, had employed...
...chief of Panama, but only the nominal boss of the canal authority, Martinelli will have little technical control over what will be the nation's most important order of business during his five-year presidency (he is constitutionally limited to one term). That's the Panama Canal expansion, a massive dig that will add a third set of locks able to handle the supersize, "post-Panamax" ships. Those vessels can hold up to 12,000 20-ft.-long containers and are considered the future of commercial-cargo shipping...
...just another of the squat and unpretentious capitals that dot Central America - almost all serviced by aging Bluebird buses, handed-down to the countries by U.S. school districts looking to dump their old fleets for newer models of transport. See pictures from Panama's historic 2006 vote on the canal...