The environmental protection was the link.
There were significant protests following Law 30, which is referred to as the “sausage law”, because they tried to jam so much into it. Protests at the time actually resulted in some significant repression.
Environmental protections in Panama are weak at best. The environmental assessment process does not allow for sufficient time, resources, or opportunity for effective community or public interest organizations to participate.
This is an issue that has emerged recently as well, with Inmet Mining's project. They submitted a 14,000-page environmental assessment in late 2010. Organizations were given 10 days to provide their comments on that massive tome. There are considerable weaknesses in it as well as in the institutions that are in place to monitor and regulate the sector. The environmental ministry also lacks its own capacity to properly assess and deal with these sorts of environmental assessments.
Once again, in the case of Inmet Mining's project, they had to pay for a consultant to work for the Panamanian environmental authority to take a look at Inmet's environmental assessment. Their choice of consultant was highly contested by civil society as a result of the person's close association with the mining and oil industry in Chile.