• 2 min de lectura
• 2 min de lectura
Behind every great infrastructure project there is something less visible than concrete or steel: a leadership structure capable of governing decisions, risks, contracts, and resources for years. In the Panama Canal, this capacity has become one of the assets that support a new stage of transformation to expand the country's role in international trade, no longer just as an interoceanic waterway, but as a logistics platform.
This was one of the ideas shared by Ilya Espino de Marotta, Deputy Administrator and Sustainability Officer of the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), during the PMI LATAM Conference 2026 organized by the Project Management Institute (PMI) in this South American capital, where she explained how the accumulated experience in the expansion now serves to govern a portfolio that includes the Río Indio Lake, two port terminals, an energy corridor, and a logistics corridor.
The Canal's recent history offers a point of reference. The expansion, approved by referendum and built with an investment of 5.25 billion dollars, has already completed a decade of operation. Although the project registered about a year and a half of delay, it remained within budget, and today the Neopanamax locks generate more than half of the Canal's revenue with approximately a quarter of its transits.
The result connects with a central discussion of the PMI meeting: a project does not end when the work is delivered. Its value appears when the infrastructure demonstrates capacity, productivity, revenue, or resilience.
In the Panamanian case, achieving this result required a specific governance structure. For the expansion, the ACP concentrated critical functions related to engineering, finance, environment, dredging, and execution within a single vice presidency, preventing the project from depending on multiple corporate areas for each decision. Espino de Marotta described it as the creation of "a mini Panama Canal within the Panama Canal."
