A former dictator's son was expected to sweep to victory on the strength of his family name and a pro-US trade agenda yesterday as Panamanians voted for a new president.
Polls a week before the election showed Martin Torrijos with a steady lead of nearly 20 percentage points over his closest rival. Voting started at 7am.
One of six children that 1970s-era dictator Omar Torrijos fathered with four different women, Martin Torrijos worked at McDonald's while studying in the US and seeks to portray himself as a self-made man.
He has leaned heavily during the campaign on the popularity of his late father, who negotiated a 1977 treaty in which the US government promised to hand over control of the Panama Canal in December, 1999.
"The Torrijos have always stood up for Panama," said Josue Martinez, a hotel bellhop. "Voting for Martin is like voting for all the good his family has done in the past."
Torrijos, 40, is expected to preside over another important chapter in the canal's history -- an expansion that could cost US$5 billion or more if it gets the anticipated go-ahead later this year from an independent panel.
Many hope the expansion, which would allow more ships through the waterway, will help ease unemployment, running at over 13 percent in a country with one of the world's most skewed distributions of wealth.
"That's going to be the real engine for the Panamanian economy for the next decade," Samuel Lewis Navarro, a vice presidential candidate and head of Torrijos' economic team, said in an interview this week. "It will help not just the canal but everything around it."
The next president is also expected to have the final say on a bilateral free trade deal with the US, for which negotiations started last week.
The most recent major poll, published on April 22 by Cid/Gallup, showed Torrijos with 45 percent of the vote. Former president Guillermo Endara had 27 percent, and two other candidates had 10 percent or less.
Preliminary results and exit polls were expected around 7pm.
Endara, whose platform is slightly more populist than that of Torrijos, has frequently reminded voters how he rebuilt Panama during his 1989 to 1994 term in the wake of an invasion by US troops to remove former strongman Manuel Noriega.
Noriega is now in jail in Florida serving a 30-year sentence on drug-trafficking charges.
Wall Street brokers say they favor Torrijos over the 67-year-old Endara because of his youth and his pro-business stance.
"Torrijos is the more market-friendly candidate," Credit Suisse First Boston said in a recent report. "His platform ... suggests a mainstream government without radical ideas."
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