This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, May 11th, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

Panama is bucking the leftward trend in Latin America electing

businessmen and relative free marketeer Ricardo Martinelli as president.

Juan Carlos Hidalgo project coordinator for Latin America, the Cato Institute, comments.

The election of Ricardo Martin only shows that Panama is kind of like an outlier in Central America and in that America as a whole.

It's kind of surprising that a country which economy has been growing at a rate of almost 7% per capita income in the last five years,

the fastest growth rate in the region, that now even under the current economic conditions is going to grow 4% in 2009 when the rest of

Latin America is going to contract.

It's picking as a president an opposition candidate from the center right when all Latin American

and especially Central America is also tilting left.

But there are reasons for that.

Martinelli run a very successful campaign of change

in the light of Barack Obama in the United States.

He made concrete proposals on very specific issues

that concern most Panamanians, especially the one on crime,

but also public transportation.

And what was perceived as a corrupt environment surrounding

the governing party of President Martinto Rijus.

So I think that in that sense it was an expected win for Ricardo

Martinelli and we will see if his promises come true. He has very decent

economic proposals in many areas but he also ran a very

populist campaign in in social issues regarding pensions regarding subsidies.

...