Sources: Telemetro and Panama public holidays. Regular readers of this blog will recall that the reestablishment of "días puentes" (long weekend public holidays) has been in the Panamanian news often in recent weeks (see our posts of August 8, August 25 and September 17).Matters finally came to a head, late this week, with the approval by Parliament's Working Comission (Comisión de Trabajo de la Asamblea Nacional de Diputados) of a draft law proposed by member of Parliament, Arturo Araúz.
This law would move to the nearest Monday, public holidays that occur on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. The exact mechanism used to determine to which Monday the move would be, remains uncertain, as the mechanism described in Telemetro differs from the one reported on by La Estrella.
In addition, it should be noted, as the law's author points out, that the move only applies to the compulsory day off work, and that civil and religious ceremonies, that are related to any of the moved holidays, would still occur on the original date.
Also, to avoid the backlash from the conservative electorate that caused the system of días puentes to be dropped in 2000, the list of movable public holidays is very limited. Indeed, once all the unmovable public holidays mentioned in the law's current text are removed from the list of Panama public holidays, it would seem that the only 2 public holidays affected by the proposed legislation are Martyrs' Day (January 9) and Independence Day (November 28), although the law's author has said that he has not ruled out adding to the list of movable holidays November 5 and 10, and possibly January 1.
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