Jose Raul Mulino’s election victory in Panama confirms a shift in Latin America economic policies. Disenchanted with years of state intervention in the economy, voters now hope free markets will improve their lives.
Following the recent election victories of pro-business candidates in Argentina and Ecuador, voters in Panama also chose a staunch free-market advocate as their next president in a poll held earlier this month. Jose Raul Mulino, a 64-year-old former security minister in the government, stormed to victory on the campaign slogan “La Promesa de Chen Chen,” meaning “A promise of money in your pocket.”
In November last year, far-right libertarian Javier Milei won the presidency in Argentina, vowing to “exterminate” rampant inflation and “put a chainsaw to the state.” A month earlier, banana fortune heir Daniel Noboa became Ecuador’s youngest president at 35. The Harvard Kennedy School graduate focused his campaign on job creation, recommending tax exemptions and incentives for new businesses and pledging to attract more foreign investment.
What unites all three of these newly elected presidents is the conviction that free enterprise is key to spurring growth in their economically depressed countries. Previous experiments with more socialism-oriented economic policy, modeled on the authoritarian state interventionism of Cuba and Venezuela, only intensified years of economic crisis and led to a mass exodus to the United States.
You could, maybe, try to make the argument that the use of the term “pro-business” is not meant in a laudatory sense. However, I find even this to be a stretch and, especially, if the article is written for an international audience.
They could have well framed the article around the the multiple controversies surrounding these characters. Heck, Mulino (who is standing in for Panama’s criminally condemned former President), is said to visit Cuba with certain frequency or, at the very least, uses a private jet that does.