transportation

Entrenched bus owners, unions resist reforms

DAVID MESA/LA PRENSA

heavyweights: The country’s powerful transportation providers refuse to be daunted by plans to modernize the system.1097953

Over the years, transportation providers in Panama have transformed themselves into a formidable political force in the country, a tightly knit group of quasi-mafia who reap enviable profits from a business with few regulations, standards and even less transparency.

No administration has been able to affect the power bus owners and unions wield over the operation of the transportation system, to the degree that both the public and the government seem to have resigned themselves to the dubious public service that claims more and more victims every day.

Enjoying $18 million worth of fuel and auto parts subsidies and largely free from penalties for emissions and fickle or non-existent service on certain routes, bus owners can’t be expected to readily yield to the government’s latest plan to modernize the system.

Moreover, the majority of those owners hide within equally powerful trade associations and unions like the Cámara Nacional del Transporte (Canatra), where most leaders aren’t forced to meet a specified quota or present a business license to receive the benefits of the union’s protection.

In fact, as President Martín Torrijos’s time in office runs thin, groups such as the Movimiento de Bases Transportistas have begun to discount the ambitious Transmóvil plan he proposed earlier this year as nothing more than another unfulfilled promise. And each administration’s failure to take the “diablos rojos” off the streets seems only to ensure the bus owners’ continued grip on the system.

“They’re not going to mess with us on the eve of a presidential election,” boasted Mariano González, deputy secretary of the Sindicato de Conductores del Transporte Colectivo (Sicotrac). “They know they need us to win."

Facing such firm opposition, any changes to the country’s transportation system will have to break the ties that exist between the bus owners and certain government officials, with those relationships most obvious within the ruling Partido Revolucionario Democrático (PRD).

As it stands, there are nearly 1,500 licenses for operation of public transportation in the capital city, with the Autoridad del Transito y Transporte Terrestre (ATT) admittedly exercising very little control over the network of piqueras, or privately owned bus routes, that has done much to distort what should be a decent and effective public service at a fair price.