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PANAMA WANTS FREE TRADE, BUT NOT CAFTA.

Article Excerpt
Students at the Universidad de Panama marked the second round of US-Panama free-trade talks by hurling Molotov cocktails at police. Student members of two campus groups, the Bloque Popular Universitario (BPU) and Pensamiento de Accion Transformadora (PAT), staged the day-long protest as a way, said reports, of asking why the deal was being negotiated in Los Angeles, "behind the backs of the people."

After some hours of road-blocking tire-and-garbage burning, a brief exchange of ideas between the protestors and the university vice rector Nelson Navarro resulted in the closure of the university. After police began exchanging tear-gas for the cocktails, the protests came to a conclusion.

They need not have bothered. Little was accomplished at this, the second round of a planned four rounds. The sides are halfway through the process, with no closure on any of the scheduled texts.

What did emerge, however, was a strong indication that this is not going to be a matter of backing the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) train up to Panama, then trucking on down the line with a Panama caboose. If anything comes of these negotiations, it will be, say analysts, PAFTA.

Panama's negotiating prowess has yet to be tested (see NotiCen, 2003-10-09), but it has strengths, even powers, that its neighbors did not have, and it has something the US cannot walk away from, the Panama Canal (see NotiCen, 2004-04-15).

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