The 2009 election, Cambio Democrático, and the Super 99 machine
The 2009 election was the first presidential election in Panamanian history in which the leading candidates on both sides came from the private sector. Martinelli, the founder and chairman of Super 99 (Panama’s largest supermarket chain, with operations across Central America and the Caribbean), had built his political machine from scratch: he founded the Cambio Democrático party in 1998, lost the 2004 election with just 5.3% of the vote, and used the inter-election period to expand the party’s organisation and donor base. By 2009, Cambio Democrático had developed a Panamanian network of campaign coordinators and a fundraising operation tied to Panama’s business community. Martinelli’s personal wealth, estimated by Forbes and similar trackers at $1.1 billion or more at the time of the election, financed both the 2009 campaign and the parallel Super 99 promotions that ran during the campaign period [1].
The 2009 election was won by the candidate who could combine the most prominent anti-corruption rhetoric with the most credible pro-business economic programme. Martinelli’s principal opponent, Balbina Herrera of the PRD, was closely identified with the Torrijos-era national-security and social-policy machinery; her campaign emphasised continuity with the 2004-2009 Torrijos-Martinelli transition. Martinelli’s campaign ran on an anti-corruption, business-friendly, and pro-canal-expansion platform, and won with over 60% of the vote, the largest presidential-election margin in Panamanian democratic history. The 2009 result gave Cambio Democrático a working majority in the National Assembly and an unusually broad electoral mandate [1].
The 2009-2014 administration was structured around a small circle of personal associates from the Super 99 era, several of whom held key cabinet positions. The Martinelli cabinet included his running mate Juan Carlos Varela as foreign minister, his brother-in-law Federico Suárez as minister of the presidency, and other Super 99 alumni in the treasury and interior portfolios. The concentration of authority around the Super 99 network, and the corresponding absence of independent technocrats from the higher civil service, set the political style of the administration. It also shaped the corruption allegations that emerged during the second half of the presidency and after 2014 [1].
The $20 billion infrastructure programme and the Panama Canal expansion
The cornerstone of Martinelli’s economic programme was the $20 billion over four years commitment on infrastructure, financed in part by a sovereign debt issuance that took public debt “to 45% of GDP” by the end of his term. The infrastructure programme included: a new metro line in Panama City (the Panama Metro Line 1, opened in 2014); road expansion projects; the redevelopment of the Cinta Costera; and the rebuilding of the social security system’s hospital network. The Panama Metro Line 1 was the most visible single project (a 13.7-kilometre north-south line from Albrook to Los Andes, opened on 5 April 2014 in the final months of the administration). The Metro became the central political asset of the Martinelli era; Martinelli’s son (and the 2009-2014 Super 99 president) Luis Enrique Martinelli used the Metro’s inauguration as the visual centrepiece of the administration’s closing events [1].
The Panama Canal expansion, the $5.3 billion programme of new locks begun under Martinelli’s predecessor Martín Torrijos (president 2004-2009), was completed under Martinelli’s presidency and was opened on 26 June 2016, two years after the end of his term. The expansion added a third lane of locks (the new Agua Clara locks on the Atlantic side and the new Cocolí locks on the Pacific side) capable of handling Neopanamax vessels, more than doubling the canal’s capacity. The expansion’s opening was a moment of national political consensus that crossed party lines; Martinelli was not invited to the ceremony (the Cortizo administration had already announced its legal cases), but the canal expansion was, and remains, the single most consequential infrastructure project in modern Panamanian history. The expansion’s financing model (financed through canal tolls and bond issues, not through direct government spending) distinguished it from the rest of the infrastructure programme and made it the most economically defensible of the era’s projects [1].
The rest of the $20 billion infrastructure programme was less defensible. Several major road and social-security projects were awarded to single-bidder contracts that were later criticised by the Comptroller General’s office; the Cinta Costera extension was the subject of litigation that ran into the Cortizo administration; and several hospital-network projects were abandoned or scaled back when the Cortizo administration took office in 2019 and the new government commissioned audits of the procurement. The Martinelli administration’s defence of the procurement process, that it had moved quickly and that the criticism was political, did not survive the audits, and the procurement record is now one of the central pieces of evidence in the corruption cases that have followed Martinelli since 2014 [1].
The Odebrecht scandal and the 2014–2019 interregnum
The Odebrecht scandal, the Latin American corruption investigation that began in 2016 with Brazil’s Operação Lava Jato and expanded across the region, revealed that the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht had paid bribes to politicians across Latin America, including Panama. In Panama, the legal cases against Martinelli and his family centred on two streams of evidence: (1) the documented $22 million in Odebrecht payments that “had then been hidden on bank accounts in Switzerland” allegedly received by Ricardo and Luis Enrique Martinelli, and (2) a series of Panama-specific government contracts that had been inflated and the proceeds laundered. The legal cases took years to develop; the key courtroom moments were 2019 (not guilty verdict on wiretapping charges), 2023 (10+ year conviction in the New Business case), and 2024 (Supreme Court affirmation of that conviction) [1].
The 2014-2019 interregnum was the period in which Martinelli lost and then partially recovered political power. The 2014 election, won by Juan Carlos Varela of the Panameñista party with 39% of the vote against the Cambio Democrático candidate José Domingo Arias, reflected the political damage from the corruption allegations that had already surfaced by 2014. Martinelli left office on 30 June 2014, returned to Panama briefly, and then left for Miami in early 2015 amid the early stages of the Odebrecht investigation. He was arrested in Coral Gables on 12 June 2017 by U.S. federal marshals acting on a Panamanian extradition request; he was held in U.S. federal custody until he was extradited to Panama on 11 June 2018 [1].
The 2019 trial was the first courtroom test of the corruption allegations. A three-judge panel in Panama City acquitted Martinelli on 9 August 2019 of the wiretapping charges that had been the basis of his initial extradition. The verdict was controversial: the wiretapping case had been the most procedural of the cases against him, and the acquittal did not foreclose the larger corruption cases. The 2019 acquittal allowed Martinelli to return briefly to active political life (he publicly considered a 2024 presidential run), but the subsequent New Business case conviction in 2023 foreclosed that possibility [1].
The New Business case and the Supreme Court affirmation (2023–2024)
The New Business case (in Spanish, Caso New Business) was the most consequential of the corruption cases against Martinelli. The case concerned the 2010 purchase of a Panamanian national media company by a corporate vehicle that, the prosecution argued, was used to launder public funds through a series of shell companies and Swiss bank accounts. The case was tried in a criminal court in Panama City over several months in 2023; on 18 July 2023, the criminal court sentenced Martinelli to “more than 10 years in prison for money laundering”, a verdict that the prosecution had sought and the defence had contested vigorously. The case was appealed to the Panamanian Supreme Court; on 2 February 2024, the Supreme Court “upheld [Martinelli’s] conviction” in a decision that closed the appellate process and made the conviction final under Panamanian law [1].
The Supreme Court’s affirmation of the conviction is the controlling legal record of the Martinelli era. The conviction establishes, in Panamanian criminal law, that the 2010 purchase was funded through money laundering (a finding that, combined with the ongoing Swiss bank-account investigations and the documented Odebrecht payments, is the basis for the public assessment of Martinelli’s presidency). The 10-year prison sentence is the longest criminal sentence imposed on a former Panamanian president; it is comparable to the Noriega sentence (which was an accumulation of three 20-year sentences, totalling 60 years, for the Spadafora, Giroldi, and Albrook killings) and is the second-largest criminal sentence imposed on a former Latin American head of state in the post-2015 corruption wave [1].
The political consequences of the conviction are still unfolding. Martinelli’s political heir, José Raúl Mulino, the Minister of Government and Justice (2009-2010) and then Minister of Public Security (2010-2014) under Martinelli, won the 2024 presidential election as the Realizing Goals candidate, with the support of the Cambio Democrático network that Martinelli built but could no longer personally lead. Mulino’s 34.2% win in a fragmented five-candidate field was Martinelli’s last political victory by proxy; the conviction itself made Martinelli ineligible to be a candidate. The Mulino administration’s relationship to the Martinelli conviction is a continuing political question, and the broader question of whether the political coalition Martinelli built will survive the conviction is one of the open questions of recent Panamanian political history [2].
Where to take this next
The Martinelli era ended with the 2014 election, but the legal and political consequences are still being worked through. For the post-2019 period that the corruption cases shaped, see Recent Political History (2019–2026). For the canal expansion that was the era’s most consequential infrastructure project, see The Canal Transfer Era (1990–1999) (the expansion’s financing structure is documented there). For the broader 1968-1989 period that produced the National Guard and the PRD, see The Torrijos Era (1968–1981).
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