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."
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion