Word: canals
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Panamanian officials point out that the canal is so important to world commerce and to Panama's future that they have taken strong measures to keep it above politics, including a constitutional amendment that makes the canal an autonomous corporation. "I think we and the U.S. have a common desire to accomplish the transition in a seamless way so that the users don't even notice it," Perez Balladares said in an interview with TIME. "Basically, we are in good shape...
...beefy, combative millionaire businessman known as Toro, or Bull, say his actions are out of step with his words. Heir to the helm of the Revolutionary Democratic Party, once in the grip of Noriega, Perez Balladares has appointed Noriega's former Foreign Minister, Jorge Ritter, as his Minister for Canal Affairs and chairman of the new 11-member Panama Canal Authority, the agency that will run the facility after 2000. In addition, the President has invited a storm of criticism by naming a passel of relatives and political cronies to the Canal Authority board. They include his former...
Perez Balladares denies he was influenced by family ties and points out that all but one of his appointees--the son of the Minister of Justice--are either members of the current Panama Canal Commission or have worked on canal-related projects. "I really tried to balance those choices," the President says. "But of course the common denominator is that they are not my enemies...
...Perez Balladares appointment is more controversial than Ritter, who has thrived in politics despite his close association with the corrupt Noriega regime. Robert MacMillan, a New York lawyer who was a member of the Panama Canal Commission from 1989 to 1994 and its chairman for a year, says with Ritter as canal czar, "anybody who thinks that politics will be kept out of the Panama Canal is smoking pot and inhaling...
Falcoff points out that "there are troubling rumors concerning Ritter's ties to drug traffickers"--a reference to testimony at Noriega's trial in 1991 alleging that Ritter had purchased a car for a Colombian cocaine dealer. Robert Pastor, who helped negotiate the Panama Canal treaties and who now teaches at Emory University in Atlanta, agreed that Ritter was a "surprising" choice for a job "where you want a person who stands for integrity...