In 1594 the town council of Panama wrote to that of Guatemala. Panama was short of the most essential goods: wheat, flour, barley, tallow, dried meat, other meats, sugar, preserves, fruits, and vegetables. All of that was in surplus on this side, and it would have sold well over there. There was something to sell. There was someone to sell it to. And the sea lay in between: the cheapest route there is, because a single ship carries what a hundred mules cannot.
There was nothing to sail it with. Guatemala had no ship to make that voyage. Nor did it have anything left to build one with. So the ship came from outside: a pilot named Martín de Salas fitted out a vessel in Panama, sailed it across to this coast, and loaded here what was in surplus here. A man had to build, elsewhere, the ship that could no longer be built here.
Six decades earlier, that would have been unthinkable. In April 1530 Pedro de Alvarado sent men to search the southern coast for a sheltered spot to anchor and build ships, and found it at Iztapa. There he began building the fleet that years later would sail toward Peru: eight vessels, among them the galleon San Cristóbal, of 300 tons. Aboard them went some 500 Spaniards, 227 horses, and thousands of indigenous people.
A few years later he built another fleet. Bernal Díaz del Castillo recounts that at Acajutla thirteen ships of good size were built. The iron for the nails, anchors, and casks had to be brought from Veracruz, more than 200 leagues away. Everything else came from the coast itself: timber, pitch, and rope for the ships, made from local maguey and pita fiber. Twenty-one ships sailed out of this coastline, which today builds none.
Alvarado died in 1541 and his fleet was left abandoned until it vanished. Milla tells it without embellishment: some ships “ended up eaten by shipworm,” a mollusk that eats away at wood, and the rest “scattered to different ports where they were lost.” Half a century later nothing remained, neither the ships nor the shipyards. Milla devoted an entire section to that loss, titled “Complete Disappearance of the Country’s Merchant Marine,” and dated it to 1594: the year of Martín de Salas’s voyage.
Here begins what I consider our real history. The valley’s natural outlet to the Pacific was the sandbar at the mouth of the Michatoya River, where the port of Iztapa stood. That sandbar had once been open, and small vessels used to travel upriver through it, which greatly eased trade. Then sand closed the bar. The plan to reopen it was simple: divert the Guacalate River into the Michatoya so that the combined force of both rivers would clear the sandbar.
In January 1565 the town council of Santiago asked the king for money to do it. Nothing was done. In 1576 the king requested a report on whether the project was feasible. The report arrived in 1580 and was favorable: the president of the Audiencia had gone in person, along with a magistrate, to see the rivers, and they found the work easy to carry out. They also noted that nearby there were groves of trees, plenty of pitch, and abundant maguey and pita fiber for making rope for ships. In other words: in that estuary, ships could be built again. Nothing was resolved.
Around 1590 the king finally approved how to pay for it: he authorized the town council to sell two of its council seats, two alderman’s posts, and to put that money into the project. Still nothing was done. By then the cart road that Antonio de Salazar had opened at his own expense between the port and the city had already been allowed to fall into disrepair.
That’s our problem, and it isn’t the coast or the cargo. We got the permit. We got the report. We got the financing. What we never got was the work done. From that January of 1565 to this September of 2026, more than 168,000 days have passed, and the Michatoya sandbar has never been opened. The instrument gets obtained and filed away, because obtaining it is what makes the headline; using it is what makes the work.
Colombia had an even worse port problem in 1990. A state-owned company, Colpuertos, ran its ports, and a ship waited on average 10 days to be served. The docks worked 16 hours and then shut down. It was a national port system operating barely two-thirds of the day.
Law 1 of 1991 dissolved Colpuertos and handed the ports over under concession. The State kept ownership and became the referee; private operators came in to run things under contract. The Banco de la República measured the result eight years later. The wait dropped to practically zero, a ship’s time in port fell from 10 days to a day and a half, the docks began operating 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and rates fell 52%.
Colombia didn’t move its coastline. It didn’t dredge a new ocean or gain a better bay. It changed the law and then did what the law said. The difference wasn’t having the law. It was using it.
Our ports, meanwhile, move plenty of cargo. In 2025 they handled 35 million metric tons, 13.3% more than the previous year. Put onto 30-ton trucks, that’s a loaded truck leaving port every 27 seconds, day and night, all year round. And that cargo pays taxes: maritime customs collected Q20,294 million, more than the State budgeted that year for the entire Ministry of Health. That figure matters because nearly a fifth of what this country collects in taxes comes in by sea.
But look at what that traffic actually consists of. Of every 100 containers that passed through our ports in 2025, barely 6 were transshipment. That business of receiving cargo from one ship, transferring it to another, and dispatching it to a third country is called transshipment, and it’s worth looking at closely because it’s one of the great businesses of ports that function as hubs. In Panama, transshipment accounts for 89 of every 100 containers. In Cartagena, 79. We sit between two oceans and carry nothing on to anyone.
Rotterdam shows how far that business can go. The Netherlands has 18.1 million inhabitants and we have 18.3: practically the same. Rotterdam handled 428 million tons in 2025, twelve times what we moved. A large part of the cargo it receives goes right back out toward other markets. That’s the business: not consuming the cargo, moving it.
And the merchant marine that Milla declared dead in 1594 has not returned. Guatemala today has 10 ships flying the Guatemalan flag, according to UNCTAD’s merchant fleet registry. Panama has 8,342. Four centuries later, the Guatemalan flag barely sails at all.
On August 5 of this year, Congress approved Decree 20-2026, the General Law of the National Port System. It passed 123 votes, at 2:43 in the morning, after more than twelve hours of session. The president signed it into law on September 2, and it takes effect on October 2. The law creates the National Port Authority, which plans, oversees, and sanctions, and orders it to draw up a national port-development plan within the year following the appointment of its first technical manager.
The tool already exists. So did the permit of 1565, the report of 1580, and the authorization of 1590. Our port history isn’t that of a country lacking instruments: it’s that of a country that obtained them and put them away in a drawer. The useful question isn’t whether the law is good, but how we’re going to measure whether, this time, we actually use it.
I propose three tests, each with a deadline. The first is that plan, published within the year the law requires. And published with what actually decides where a port should go: measured depth, how much silt each river deposits per year, and how much it would cost to dredge that site for thirty years. El Salvador inaugurated La Unión with a channel 14 meters deep and today has 7. It spent US$180 million building it and another US$50 million dredging it. Within two years, the channel had silted up again.
The second is the simplest to verify: the first contract awarded through open competition, with the bidding terms published before the award, not after. The third measures whether our port role has truly changed: if in five years we’re still moving 6 transshipment containers out of every 100, the National Port Authority will have been just a new payroll. That figure is published every year by the Port Commission and doesn’t depend on anyone’s goodwill.
Martín de Salas had to build, in Panama, the ship that didn’t exist here. That was 432 years ago. The law is now signed. The ship is still missing.
Ramiro Bolaños, PhD. / President of the Centro de Pensamiento y Acción Factoría Libertatis
References
- Autoridad Marítima de Panamá, “Puertos de Panamá registran un crecimiento del 1.65% en tráfico de TEUs durante el primer semestre de 2025” (Panama City: AMP, July 18, 2025).
- Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, Regionale in- en uitvoer van goederen and Bevolkingsontwikkeling (The Hague: CBS, 2026).
- Colombia, Ley 1ª de 1991: Estatuto de Puertos Marítimos, Diario Oficial 39.626 (January 11, 1991).
- Comisión Portuaria Nacional, Informe Estadístico Portuario 2025 (Guatemala: CPN, 2026).
- United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Merchant Fleet by Flag of Registration, UNCTADstat (Geneva: UNCTAD, 2024).
- Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, cited in José Milla, Historia de la América Central, I, p. 305.
- “¿Qué falló en el puerto de La Unión? Estudian corriente marina tras pérdida de millonario dragado,” Diario El Mundo (San Salvador, 2024).
- Grupo Puerto de Cartagena, Algunos hechos relevantes 2025 (Cartagena: GPC, 2026).
- Guatemala, Decreto 20-2026 del Congreso de la República, Ley General del Sistema Portuario Nacional, Diario de Centro América (September 2, 2026).
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- Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Proyección poblacional 2026 (Guatemala: INE, 2026).
- Milla, José, Historia de la América Central, 2 vols (Guatemala: Establecimiento Tipográfico de El Progreso, 1879–1882), I, pp. 238, 241, 243–44, 305, 339; II, pp. 152, 178–79, 199–200, 203.
- Port of Rotterdam Authority, Jaarverslag 2025 (Rotterdam: Havenbedrijf Rotterdam, 2026).
- “Carga marítima crece 13.3 % en el 2025 y alcanza 35 millones 254 mil toneladas,” Prensa Libre (Guatemala, April 18, 2026).
- “Congreso aprueba la Ley General del Sistema Portuario en Guatemala tras más de 12 horas de sesión,” Prensa Libre (Guatemala, August 5, 2026).
- Superintendencia de Administración Tributaria, Recaudación tributaria 2025 (Guatemala: SAT, 2026).
- Viloria De La Hoz, Joaquín, De Colpuertos a las Sociedades Portuarias: los puertos del Caribe colombiano, 1990–1999, Documentos de Trabajo sobre Economía Regional, 16 (Cartagena: Banco de la República, 2000).
